Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  To be fair to the Petits, they were not the only parents who believed in outsourcing parenting to the hired help—it was the fashionable thing to do at that time among those who could afford it. Besides, the Petits also belonged to a Malabar Hill set of rich Parsis where women led unbelievably liberated lives for their time, thanks to the liberal Parsi law of inheritance where women enjoyed a considerable share of the family wealth and property. Ruttie’s aunt, Hamabai, was a living example of the single Parsi woman of independent means. Ten years younger than Sir Dinshaw and his only sibling, Hamabai was only twelve years old when their father passed away, and her brother became her legal guardian. But richly endowed by her grandparents on either side, her wealth was not controlled by him but by a trust in her own name, with special staff to run it. She could, therefore, insist on going abroad to a French college in Nice for her baccalaureate, a privilege that Sir Dinshaw either denied or was unable to provide his own daughter two decades later, possibly because of the War. And when their mother died, leaving Hamabai an orphan at the age of twenty-four, there was nothing to stop the adventurous young woman from following her inclinations. She travelled widely—‘toured the world and visited its remotest parts’, as a Parsi who’s who put it. She went skiing on the Swiss Alps, owned a collection of pedigreed dogs that she adored, owned race horses which regularly won prizes and was one of the first ladies in India to own and drive a motor car.

  In her letters home, Sarojini described her as ‘Ruttie’s Amazon aunt’, but it’s not clear whether by this she meant that Hamabai was a strong, strapping woman or because of her stamina for horse riding—‘Her Amazon aunt rides seven horses a day and sometimes eleven—just think of it!’ In the photographs that survive of her, Hamabai has the broad-jawed, plump-faced look of her brother, with the same finely shaped eyes and eyebrows, but there the resemblance between the two siblings ends. Unlike Sir Dinshaw, who preferred to dress in the conventional attire of an English gentleman with his stiff white collar, vest and tie, Hamabai went in for a more unconventional style—teaming up Benarasi silk waistcoats and long, flowing sleeves with her saris made of clinging silk or chiffon, giving her the appearance of an exotic oriental, her curled hair and strands of pearls emphasizing her Hollywoodesque transformation of the ordinary Gujarati sari-clad lady.

  But she was by no means an idle heiress who liked to live it up. When her mother died, being already richly endowed, she sold the jewellery she inherited from her and used the proceeds to set up a Parsi girls’ orphanage, earning for herself a reputation as one of the great philanthropists in a community known for its charitable work. Since then, her ‘charities, both communal and cosmopolitan, reached a very high figure . . . and by her numerous acts of charity she has added glory to the name of the Parsi community’. She was not zealously Zoroastrian, like her grandfather, but took an interest in the spiritual sciences, and it was undoubtedly she who introduced the theosophist and nationalist Annie Besant to Petit Hall. However, Hamabai’s spiritual interests seem to have found little resonance in her brother’s family except for Ruttie, as indicated by the book she gifted her brother which eventually found its way to Ruttie’s bookshelves. The book, Clairvoyance by C.W. Leadbeater, is inscribed: ‘presented to D.P. from H.P’. There is one more book Ruttie took away from Petit Hall that originally belonged to her aunt—Many Thoughts of Many Minds Being a Treasury of Reference, signed ‘Hamabai Framjee Petit, 6 February’.

  It was Hamabai’s involvement with Annie Besant’s Home Rule League that drew her to the public meetings being held in different parts of Bombay ‘and at every such meeting came and sat in the first row the little girl Ruttie accompanied by her aunt, Miss Hamabai Petit, the multimillionaire philanthropist’, as Kanji Dwarkadas recalls in his memoir of Ruttie. To amuse herself through the hours-long speeches, Ruttie watched ‘the pranks being played on the platform’. When Kanji ‘saw a speaker talking too long and irrelevantly, I poked a sharp pencil behind his knee as he was addressing the meeting and he lost his chain of thoughts, collapsed and resumed his seat and got wild with me. Ruttie told me later that she enjoyed my pranks.’

  But it was not only Besant’s Home Rule movement that attracted the two Miss Petits to politics. Hamabai, like her brother, had known and enjoyed Jinnah’s company long before her niece was out of the schoolroom. The two were probably introduced to each other when Hamabai was studying in Nice. Sir Dinshaw had written to his sister asking her to go to the railway station to meet Jinnah, who was passing through. Later, they became friends, having at least two interests in common—motor cars and horse riding. In fact, they were good enough friends for Jinnah to agree to take up a land acquisition case on her behalf, one of the rare instances when Jinnah took up a civil suit after he became a ‘Rolls Royce lawyer’, as he liked to call himself.

  Hamabai was far too independent-minded to let her brother dictate her relationship with Jinnah, and even after they became sworn enemies, Hamabai continued to attend Jinnah’s public meetings, taking Ruttie along. In fact, at the height of the hostilities between her brother and Jinnah following Sir Dinshaw’s angry rejection of Jinnah’s marriage proposal, Hamabai refused to take sides and even volunteered her services to work under Jinnah as an honorary vice president of the Bombay branch of the Home Rule League of which Jinnah was then the president. The brother and sister were close but went their own way, particularly when Hamabai decided to marry. Her brother did not approve of her choice because although he was a Parsi from an eminent family, being the nephew of the late eminent barrister and national leader Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, he had little to recommend him other than being as well travelled and as consummate a rider as Hamabai. With Sir Dinshaw’s inflated ideas of his own family’s status among the Parsis, the match was not to his taste, but his sister was by then already in her thirties and in a position to marry whom she pleased. In the circumstances, Hamabai was possibly the most sympathetic chaperone that Ruttie could hope to find.

  Their choice of an escort was equally fortuitous for Ruttie. D.N. Bahadurji was not only a family friend, but as a Parsi who had married a Hindu woman from a Brahmin family, as Kanji noted elsewhere, was likely to have been sympathetic to her cause. Besides, he was a useful person to know in Lucknow where he had a grand mansion. Delegates and guests who poured in for the Congress session that year stayed where they could, crammed into small rooms and tents with no conveniences. Bahadurji was also a good friend of Jinnah’s, both being successful barristers, and although Bahadurji was more senior, the two had been in the habit of taking holidays together from as far back as 1906, when Ruttie was only six. Jinnah spent the October vacation in Panchgani with Bahadurji that year, as we learn from a criminal case he filed in Bombay’s police court the following month. Apparently, while the two barristers were holidaying in Panchgani, Jinnah’s coachman was rude to his friend, and when Jinnah rebuked him, was insolent to him as well, causing Jinnah to dismiss the ‘purdesi’ (to use the Bombay Chronicle’s word for a non-local) coachman and send him back to Bombay by the next train. When the two friends returned to Bombay, the sacked coachman tried to frighten Jinnah into coughing up his wages by seizing the reins of his horse as he was driving from his bungalow to the courthouse, along the ‘cooperage’, as the football ground was then called in Bombay. But Jinnah, as the coachman discovered, was not be intimidated by such crude tactics. After waiting it out for twenty minutes on the road, Jinnah eventually handed him over to the police and he was sentenced to three weeks of rigorous imprisonment for wrongfully detaining a barrister.

  At any rate, Ruttie was spotted in the train on her way to Lucknow with her aunt and their escort. Travelling in the next compartment was Kanji, still a student then, with another eminent barrister, Bhulabhai Desai, and his wife and son. They too were on their way to the Congress session—that was one of the nicer things about going to it during the Christmas holidays: you could bump into people you knew or wanted to know. But Kanji did not dare to go up to Ruttie and talk to her b
ecause he had not yet been introduced to her. Instead, he watched her from a distance as she walked along the platform with Bahadurji at every junction. Travelling by train, even in a first-class compartment, could be a bone-rattling experience—‘all my bones and teeth seem rather looser than they were!’ as Sarojini once described it—but few women stepped out of the train at stations to stretch their legs, possibly because of the crowds outside. It could be overwhelming—‘coolies moving about . . . a chorus of voices shouting . . . “Hindu chai, Mussulman chai, Hindu pani, Mussulman pani!”. . . rich men . . . followed by servants, their ladies lifting their saris so that they shall not touch the crowd . . . turbans of all colours, caps and a few fezes . . . poor men sitting on their bundles together with their families.’ For Ruttie, eager to break out of her sheltered life and experience the world, every station would have been an opportunity she did not want to lose, and old, kind Bahadurji no doubt rose courteously to his role as escort at every junction—it wouldn’t have done to let his friend’s young and beautiful daughter walk by herself on a crowded platform, stared at by scores of strangers.

  Did she perhaps also drag Bahadurji out the next morning to join the crowds at the Lucknow station? It was a hero’s welcome that awaited Jinnah when he arrived that morning. Lined up in and outside the railway station were Hindus, Christians and Muslims—both Shia and Sunni—with hundreds more joining the triumphal procession through the streets of Lucknow to Kaiserbagh, the Raja of Mahmudabad’s residence where Jinnah was to stay as his guest. ‘Only about four hundred were allowed on the platform, while there was a seating crowd outside,’ as the Bombay Chronicle reported, the ‘seating crowd’ probably referring to seating space outside in contrast to only standing room for the crowd on the platform. When Jinnah arrived by a special train, he was garlanded by the prominent Muslim leader and nationalist—the Raja of Mahmudabad—and the head of the Congress reception committee, Pandit Jagat Narayan, then he ‘was taken in procession in a carriage, splendidly decorated with flowers and buntings, to Kaiserbagh’. Was Ruttie amused at the posters of him in a fez cap, describing him as ‘Maulana Mohammed Ali Jinnah’? And was she surprised, like the rest of his friends, to see him discarding his usual sola topi and appearing in public only in his new fez cap? She would have surely heard the story of the fez cap straight from Jinnah’s mouth? Told with his characteristic dry wit, of how the Muslim League leaders approached him while he was still in his compartment to explain how the posters had mistakenly described him as a ‘maulana’, their dismay at finding ‘that he looked the reverse of what the posters described him’. It was Jinnah who took control of the situation, as usual, calming down the panic-stricken organizers, asking in his pragmatic way what should then be done, and when one of them suggested he wear a fez, the Turkish cap in vogue among the Muslims in those days, he readily agreed, sending one of the organizers rushing to the market to buy one while he stayed out of sight of the crowds inside his compartment until his cap arrived. Was it perhaps on his instructions that the man returned not with one fez cap but a dozen for him to choose from, or was the Muslim League leader commissioned to shop for him already aware of Jinnah’s fastidious tastes? Did Ruttie tease him perhaps about this new maulana look, but let him keep it on for the four days the conference lasted? But at least he stuck to his usual European suits, setting him apart from most of the Muslim delegates, dressed in the long, flowing ‘chogas’, or robes embroidered with silver, gold and silk thread that added such unusual colour to the Congress session that year.

  That she did tease him, this enchanting, beautiful chit of a girl with her impish sense of fun, as no one had ever dared to do, was apparent to all their friends. And that he responded to her teasing with a tender amusement and a meekness he had never shown before, touched the hearts of all who knew and loved either of them or, like Sarojini, both. ‘He loves her,’ concluded Sarojini, who made it to Lucknow despite her recent illness, appearing on the platform at both the Muslim League and Congress sessions as one of the speakers, after seeing Jinnah and Ruttie together. She shared this with her friend Syed Mahmud only fifteen months later, noting it was ‘the one really human and genuine emotion of his reserved and self-centred nature’.

  But first, Ruttie had to put her plan to work to get him back to her. She did manage to meet Jinnah according to her plan, despite his pressing schedule. He became immersed the very evening of his arrival in thrashing out the details of the famous Hindu–Muslim Lucknow Pact and since neither the Muslim League nor the Congress leaders could agree on the percentage of seats to be reserved for Muslims, the talks extended for two days until late into the night. But sometime after the contract had been signed, and the Congress session was under way, Jinnah made the time to meet Ruttie for the interview she must have sought with him. He was seen climbing into the Petits’ car with her, accompanied by her aunt.

  It is difficult to guess what happened between them during that brief, snatched time they could have had by themselves without being discovered. Did Ruttie propose, as the gossip had it, in the spirit of the times—the liberated woman of the new century asserting her freedom of choice regardless of her parents’ wishes? And did Jinnah really respond with his usual economy of words, in that dry way she loved: ‘It sounds like a good proposition.’ If she did, she never once said as much to anyone, claiming the reverse, in fact—that she had laid down the terms for accepting him when he proposed. ‘You will perhaps agree how that is possible when it was one of the terms on which I accepted him,’ she wrote to Padmaja several years later, complaining to her friend of how Jinnah was now breaking one of the conditions she had set down before accepting his proposal, ‘that is, that he couldn’t touch his hair without my previous sanction’. But that could just be her girlish pride, not wanting to admit how she had to work on him, instead of being chased by him. But whoever it was who did the initial proposing, Jinnah was a changed man now that he knew she was with him against her father, daring not just to hope, but suddenly supremely confident of his ability to pull off what no one had done so far.

  It could have also been the effect of the electric atmosphere in Lucknow. During that historic ‘National Week’, everything seemed suddenly possible. It was the coming together of a new class of people amongst whom the idea of being an Indian had already taken root, erasing the old ideas of community and caste. ‘Lucknow was crowded and cosmopolitan beyond all knowledge,’ as the lieutenant governor of the United Provinces, Lord Meston, wrote to the viceroy, giving his impressions of the Congress session. ‘I never saw so crowded a concourse of educated middle class Indians, so thoroughly enjoying themselves. The Congress has become a great national anniversary, full of excitement and intellectual amusement.’ And this session was especially so, with everyone certain that a breakthrough in forging unity between the Hindus and Muslims had at last been achieved. For the first time since the Congress had been founded, there were Muslims attending the sessions in visibly large numbers. For the first time, Hindus and Muslims spoke in the same voice, they rubbed shoulders in the pandals, dined together and heard their leaders speaking from the same platform. It was two years since the greatest war on earth had begun and no one could as yet foresee when it would end, but change was palpably in the air. No one listening to those rousing speeches, feeling the enthusiasm of those crowds, could doubt for a moment that the end of British rule in the country was imminently close and an era of new possibilities about to dawn. It was not Ruttie alone who felt her doubts and fears being swept away, but Jinnah too allowed himself to dream once again of marrying the woman he’d set his heart on, in spite of what the world—and her father—might say.

  Whatever may have transpired between them in Lucknow, Ruttie returned from the Congress recharged. Gone was all the melancholy and despair of the previous months. She was bursting to share her joy with someone and yet afraid of giving away her secret. There was no letter from Padmaja waiting as she had hoped. With her perhaps, she might have been tempted to say too
much, but instead, there was a letter waiting from Padmaja’s twelve-year-old sister, Leilamani, seeking Ruttie’s attention and sympathy, as always. Even Leilamani was better than not having anyone to talk to, after her momentous trip. She got down at once to write her a reply, infusing the letter with her new-found joy and sense of profound hope, and all the poetry within her for which Jinnah had so little use, now bursting out from its repression: ‘Little passion flower!’ begins the letter on Petit Hall stationery with its embossed seal, dated 3rd January 1917. ‘You who glory in dreaming! You who love the sun and moon and dancing stars! When days in dawning remind one of blossoming flowers. Why should you breathe despair?’

  Seeing her own intense emotions everywhere, she writes to her little friend: ‘I call you a passion flower not after the real flower of religious passion, but because every emotion with you has the intensity of a passion. But why this strange cry for love and sympathy? Does not your mother love you? Do not I love you? And do not we both understand you? Do not the fragrant flowers and rustling trees and warbling birds all understand you? Do not you feel your own fragrance in the rose, your freshness in the tree? Do not the stars reflect but your own limpid eyes? Do not your own sweet songs resound the “full throated ease” and the delicate strain of the birds?’