Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  There were other alarming aspects to ashram life. A very pretty young woman in the ashram fell in love with a young ashramite, and when Gandhi heard they slept together, he sent for the couple and cut off the girl’s long, silky hair, ‘which was her great beauty’. He also went on fast for several days to atone for the ‘sin’ that had been committed, thrusting the whole ashram into a state of fear and strain. But Nan’s spirit was unbroken; instead of making her repent, the incident only appeared ‘bizarre and primeval’ to her.

  Part of Nan’s cultural reorientation included the one-to-one chats Gandhi had with her: ‘He told me when I was at the ashram that this event had shaken his belief in all Mussalmans!’ Nan later wrote to Padmaja. ‘How could you,’ he said to me, ‘regard Syud in any other light but that of a brother—what right had you to allow yourself, even for a minute, to look with love at a Mussalman.’ Then later; ‘Out of nearly twenty crores of Hindus couldn’t you find a single one who came up to your ideals—but you must needs pass them all over and throw yourself into the arms of a Mohammedan!!!’ The tirade from the Mahatma left her unimpressed: ‘Poor man! To him it is inconceivable for a Hindu and a Mussalman to marry and live happily.’

  The lectures did not quite have the salutary effect that her parents were expecting. In the same letter to Padmaja, Nan writes: ‘Gandhiji was telling me one day how he would have behaved had he been me. Of course it didn’t carry much weight because being Gandhiji it is absolutely impossible for him ever to enter into my thoughts or feelings. However, imagine me squatting on a little mat about six inches square opposite the great Mahatmaji, receiving the following lecture. ‘“Sarup [Nan’s given name before her marriage], had I been in your place I would never have allowed myself to have any feelings but those of friendliness towards Syud Hossain. Then, supposing Syud had ever attempted to show admiration for me or had professed love for me, I would have told him gently but very firmly—Syud, what you are saying is not right. You are a Mussalman and I am a Hindu. It is not right that there should be anything between us. You shall be my brother but as a husband I cannot ever look at you.”’

  Instead of submitting to the Mahatma’s superior wisdom, Nan’s response was: ‘Ahem! Isn’t that a nice, ladylike speech and worthy of a Hindu girl—the descendant of a thousand Rishis?!!!’ Gandhi’s other arguments were equally ineffective: ‘Another strong objection was the difference of age. He (Gandhi) said he did not consider it right that any girl should marry a man who was more than four years older than herself! But then if I started telling you the good Mahatmaji’s objections I should fill a few hundred pages. And though it would make quite amusing reading it would also be taking a great risk!’

  Syud, on the other hand, was much more susceptible: ‘Talking of sisters reminds me—Gandhiji also asked Syud how he had dared to make love to a Hindu girl whom he ought to have looked upon like a little sister. And that gentleman’s lame reply was: ‘“Well, I did look upon her as a sister in the beginning.” “And does a brother after a little start making love to his sister?” At this question, Syud looked a great many things but what he said I do not know because I was seized with a wild desire to laugh and making some excuse fled from the room.’

  But what did have more impact on her was the discovery that she had turned overnight from a petted daughter to a social outcast. Motilal had handled the affair with his usual discretion, but even he couldn’t prevent the scandal from leaking out of Anand Bhavan. The first fallout of the incident was the breaking off of her engagement to his friend Raja Narendra Nath’s son. Nath was later to become a prominent Hindu leader elected to the Punjab assembly, but even in those early days, he was an orthodox man. On hearing of what had transpired between Syud and Nan, he called off his son’s engagement and got him married elsewhere. And while he may or may not have been the source of the stories that were then spread about the clandestine affair, everyone as far as Lahore seemed to know the details, however fabricated. Writing about it years later, one of Raja Narendra Nath’s young colleagues in the Punjab assembly, K.L. Gauba, claimed that the marriage that his daughter had hastily contracted with Syud was dissolved, and that Gandhi had to step in to resolve the crisis.

  Back home at Anand Bhavan after serving her term at the ashram, Nan must have realized more fully the price she would have had to pay for daring to even contemplate marrying a Muslim. There were the usual taunts, including from the editor who took over from Syud at the Independent. As she confided to Padmaja: ‘It [an article written by Gandhi in Young India giving his opinion against Hindu–Muslim marriages] was shown to me by the present editor of the “Independent”, a man I detest and despise and avoid as much as I can. He was simply gloating over it and I’m positive he only showed it to me because he wished to see what sort of an effect it was going to produce. Of course I wasn’t going to tell him what my opinions were on the subject so he might as well have spared himself the trouble of coming all the way here when he might have been better employed. He even had the impertinence to tell me he sympathized with me—as if I wanted his sympathy! And then promptly goes to my brother and tells him that he had been in Syud’s confidence and mine(!) from the very beginning!! I have never come across a more filthy, despicable type of humanity than the above mentioned specimen!’

  Even Nan’s own cousins did not hide their disapproval: ‘It shows how little you know of my cousins, my dear Padmaja, that you should even vaguely suggest their marrying Mohammedans. Good gracious! I wonder what would happen if I hinted at such a thing. I never have been popular with any of my girl cousins and that would really put the finishing touch to the whole thing! It is no concern of theirs what a madcap like myself chooses to do but they have far too much self-respect to copy me!’

  In the end it was Motilal who rescued her from her plight by arranging another, and more suitable, husband. He handled it with as much skill and sense of judgement as he had shown in breaking up her previous attachment. The hunt had started immediately after Nan’s engagement had broken off, and being well connected, Motilal soon found a suitable match. Ranjit Pandit was a bright young lawyer practising in Calcutta, and more importantly, had a high regard for the Nehru family because of their political work, and considered it a privilege to marry Jawaharlal’s sister. He was not a Kashmiri Brahmin, but a Saraswat Brahmin from Maharashtra. But for obvious reasons, Motilal was no longer as particular about marrying his children within his own community as he had been while arranging his son’s marriage almost a decade ago. Nor did it bother him that the Kashmiri community was likely to boycott the marriage—as, in fact, they did.

  Having found a suitable boy, Motilal’s problem was how to convince Nan that he was the right choice. She was a spirited young woman, and her notions of marriage too modern for her to be able to blindly accept any man her father chose. But at that time, as Nan’s contemporary, K.L. Gauba, who also defied his father and married a Muslim, put it: ‘You hardly had an opportunity of meeting young ladies and you had to depend on your sisters, or your cousins to give you a report on them. The best that you could have was a distant view of them and then you had to make up your mind whether she was good enough as your life partner, and she had to make up her mind whether you were good enough for her.’ Motilal’s master stroke was to invite the chosen one to Anand Bhavan and leave the young man alone to do his own courting.

  It worked. As Nan later recounted: ‘Breakfast was served on the verandah outside my father’s rooms and I came out to find a strange young man seated at the table. He had evidently been misinformed about the time and was embarrassed at being early. He introduced himself . . . I thought him attractive—there was a serenity in his face that seemed unusual for one of his age. Presently, the family assembled and he was tongue-tied and ill at ease in the midst of the talkative Nehrus. When the family dispersed I lingered on and the young man, who obviously did not know what to do with himself, seemed glad of my presence. “Do you like Sanskrit poetry?” was one of the first questions.

/>   ‘I admitted that my knowledge of Sanskrit was the school variety. Inwardly, I vowed I would devote myself to the study of Sanskrit immediately. My answer did not seem to disturb him and he said, “You have a lovely voice. Do you sing?”

  ‘Not only did I not sing, I belonged to a family singularly lacking in musical talent. I could have run away, but good manners and the young man’s charm kept me in my seat . . . Before I could think of an answer, he went on, “You are very beautiful, and I have come here only to meet you. I suppose you have guessed that.”

  ‘This was very pleasing and now I could relax. We spent most of the day together wandering in the garden where Ranjit recited beautiful Sanskrit verses and told me about his home and family. We went out riding. I loved to ride and was proud of my horsemanship, but I saw that my companion was a crack rider himself.

  ‘Three days passed swiftly, and the evening before he was to leave, Ranjit asked if he could speak with me alone . . . “It is only two days since we met,” he said, “but I have thought about you for a long time and feel as if I know you. It has taken some courage for me to come from far off Kathiawar to the home of the Nehrus to meet a daughter of Kashmir. But I have travelled with hope. Could you trust me enough to travel hand in hand with me through life?”’

  For Nan who had known him for only three days, but open as never before to his ‘handsome and sensitive’ charm, the answer was an immediate ‘Yes’. It was the happiest of outcomes for all concerned, except perhaps for ‘poor Syud’, as Sarojini began to describe him in her letters home. Nan’s mother, who had secretly sent out both their horoscopes to an astrologer, was happy because their stars matched perfectly, and Motilal could now congratulate himself ‘for my ability to judge human beings’. And by the time she married him in May 1921, the past was well behind her and she could truthfully assert, ‘I love Ranjit,’ even vocally championing her right to lead a normal married life with him instead of the celibacy vows that Gandhi tried to force on the newly-weds.

  There were other fathers elsewhere whose progressive outlook was being put severely to the test by their children. In Lahore, it was Punjab nationalist and entrepreneur Lala Harkishan Lal, a minister in the Punjab Legislative Council, whose son—Kanhaiya Lal Gauba, better known in his family by the name his governess had given him as a child, ‘Wal’ or ‘Walter’—wanted to marry the daughter of Aziz Ahmad, the Punjab government’s advocate, a high-ranking official somewhat like an advocate general of now. Wal had been introduced to the girl, Husna, in his own home when Lala Harkishan invited the official for a dinner party along with his wife and daughter because he knew they were out of purdah. Like Motilal Nehru, Lalaji prided himself on his modernity and lack of communal prejudice. His Muslim friends stayed with him whenever they came to Lahore, and there were special arrangements to cook their food. In fact, he went a step further—when Wal’s mother died in his childhood, Lalaji married for the second time out of the community and even region. Although it was an arranged marriage, Wal’s stepmother was from Maharashtra and he had to convert to Sikhism in order to marry her, because, according to the law at that time, Hindus could not marry outside their own caste. Her father was looking for a suitable match for his educated daughter and was quite willing to settle for the Punjabi candidate a marriage broker produced because of the widower’s English education and liberal opinions. Wal, therefore, did not anticipate his father’s response to his own marriage plans. ‘I asked my father whether I could marry Miss Aziz Ahmed. He was very annoyed. He said, “No, because she is a Muslim and you are a Hindu. If you marry her, I will not be able to marry [off] any one of my other children. Therefore I refuse my consent.”’

  It was a lame argument as far as the young people of Wal’s generation were concerned. Like Nan, he had never been taught to distinguish people by their religion. Nor had he been given any formal religious training; the only place of worship he’d ever been to was as a child to the church with his governess. As he himself admitted, ‘I was really a Hindu only in name. I knew nothing about it.’ He had only heard of the Hindu–Muslim differences but never actually felt them in his own life. ‘There were newspaper articles and all that sort of thing. But socially, I think, in the upper strata, there was free mixing, even though they did not agree with each other on political views. On the whole, so far as our world was concerned, there was no distinction really between Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. Everybody was welcome and everybody was treated equally.’ Their social world was too small to allow for such differences. Not only were their parents on visiting terms, but her best friend was a Mrs Chaman Lal, whose husband was Wal’s friend and colleague. They could meet as often as they liked in the Chaman Lals’ home or at the fashionable Cosmopolitan Club that had recently started in Lahore for the families that were out of purdah.

  Unlike Motilal Nehru, Lalaji did not feel the need to resolve the issue at once. Instead, after prohibiting his son from getting married to a Muslim girl, Lalaji then set out for Simla on his official duties, leaving his son at liberty to give notice to the Registrar of Civil Marriages. The trend of love marriages among educated Indians had forced the British to pass a Special Marriages Act in 1872, but it was still a complicated business. Under the Act, Hindus and those belonging to allied faiths like Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains could intermarry provided they were not underage (the minimum age for bridegrooms was eighteen and for brides, fourteen) and the marriage also required the bride’s father’s consent. But if either party did not belong to one of these faiths, by birth or conversion, they had to disown all the leading religions.

  Luckily for Wal, although his own father refused to give his consent, Husna Ahmad’s parents were more than willing, provided it was a civil marriage. Wal attributes it to their broad-mindedness, but it was a fact that single Muslim women who were educated and out of purdah found it extremely difficult to find suitable partners from their own community. One reason was that there were simply not enough educated Muslim men to go around, and of them, quite a few returned from their studies abroad with foreign wives. It was the done thing for both Hindu and Muslim students, as Wal explains: ‘Quite a number had European wives and families. Young boys who went abroad were expected to bring back English wives.’ Quite apart from the prestige of having a European wife, even if it was only their former landlady’s daughter, opened doors for career advancement as well as to the Europeans-only clubs.

  By the time Lala Harkishan woke up to the implications of the Special Marriages Act and the freedom it offered his son to marry whom he chose, it was too late for him to use more persuasive tactics. Not that he did not try—his fellow minister and friend, Sir Fazl-i-Hussain, was requested to try and persuade the Aziz Ahmads to refuse their consent. After that failed, Lalaji then called up Wal’s best friend, Jiwan Lal Kapur, begging him to coax Wal into putting off the wedding by a day or two until his father returned from Simla. Kapur went to Wal and said, ‘I believe you are getting married this morning?’ Wal replied, ‘That is correct.’ He said, ‘Why not put it off for a day or two as your father is coming down and he will discuss the matter with you and settle it with you.’ Wal said, ‘I am afraid my bride is waiting for me and I cannot put off the marriage whatever be the consequences.’ He then added, ‘You better come along as my best friend and be my best man at the marriage.’ But, according to Wal, his friend ‘did not have the courage to do that. He came and left me at the gate and wished me well.’

  Faced with the inevitable, Lalaji did the sensible thing. After four or five months, after the noise had died down and with it his reservations, he quietly accepted his Muslim daughter-in-law. As Wal recounts: ‘We got married and sat in my two-seater car and fled to Kashmir for the honeymoon, because both the communities were very agitated at that time. There was great tension among the Hindus and Muslims as the news of this union got around and the Muslims were furious at the loss of a girl, and the Hindus distressed at the loss of a boy.’ When they returned from Kashmir, they did not go back to his f
ather’s house but took a small house on rent, where they pulled along on Wal’s scanty earnings as a start-up lawyer. But it was fun—‘two young people trying to live on chicken once a week and pudding perhaps twice a week, and she hung up her saris for curtains and so on’. And when Diwali came around, Lalaji decided it was time to forgive the couple. ‘Father called us and gave her costly jewellery and presents. So it was all settled.’

  Sir Dinshaw, on the other hand, panicked. Either because he was the first of the three celebrity fathers to be handling a crisis of this sort or because he was a Parsi at a time when the community was particularly incensed about their men and women marrying out of the community, or simply because he lacked the parental authority and tact of a Motilal Nehru and the mental strength of a Harkishan Lal. Considered from any angle, Sir Dinshaw’s next step made no sense. Six months after Ruttie returned from Lucknow, he abruptly switched his strategy to deal with his daughter’s unsuitable attachment. Suddenly one day, somewhere towards the end of June 1917, without even consulting Lady Petit, he went to court seeking an injunction against Jinnah. According to one version, the panic was triggered by Sir Dinshaw finding out one morning that Ruttie, far from obeying her father’s wishes in the docile way expected of young ladies, was still seeing Jinnah—and that too openly. According to the story, Ruttie was caught red-handed with a letter from Jinnah, and there ensued an unseemly scene in Petit Hall, with the portly Sir Dinshaw chasing his daughter around the dining table, trying to snatch the letter from her, screaming that he knew it was from Jinnah. The panic that the letter aroused in Sir Dinshaw had probably less to do with his daughter indulging in a passionate correspondence with Jinnah—whose aversion to letter writing, incidentally, was well known—but his fear that the two were plotting to get married under the Special Marriages Act. Whether there was a letter involved or not, and if Sir Dinshaw ever managed to lay his hands on it, and if it indeed contained anything incriminating, something certainly appears to have pushed Sir Dinshaw over the edge. The injunction was apparently sought on the grounds that Jinnah was intending to abduct his daughter, still a minor according to the law although she was above marriageable age.