Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  In his plea for the court injunction—the records are now lost but contemporaries like Kanji Dwarkadas insist it happened—Sir Dinshaw claimed that since Jinnah was planning to marry Ruttie against her father’s wishes with an eye on her fortune, he should be kept away from either meeting or corresponding with her. For Sir Dinshaw, litigation was something of a bad habit—he would resort to the courts even to solve his minor domestic and business problems. There was no one, from top-ranking British officials to his former housekeeper, that he had not taken to court at one time or other. But to go to court against one of the country’s top lawyers who had a well-deserved reputation for getting his clients out of the most slippery situations was a foolishness of such mind-boggling dimensions that Bombay could hardly stop itself from talking about it, even if the newspapers kept a discreet silence on the subject. And when this top lawyer also happened to be the country’s leading political figure of the moment, tongues wagged even more fiercely.

  For a respectable father to seek judicial intervention to prevent his daughter from meeting an unsuitable man was bad enough—more or less publicly admitting that he had lost all control over her—but to ask for a court injunction against Mohammed Ali Jinnah! Following his triumph in Lucknow, Jinnah was now equally sought after by the British government, the Congress party and the Muslim League—not to speak of the two Home Rule Leagues started almost simultaneously by Tilak and Annie Besant. He did not join Besant’s Home Rule League until her arrest in Madras in mid-June 1917, but the six months after he returned to Bombay from Lucknow were his most glorious—and busiest—period so far. From the working lunch he had with the United Provinces lieutenant governor at the end of the two political sessions in Lucknow on 1 January 1917 to the day six months later when he received the court injunction forbidding him to go anywhere near Ruttie Petit, he seems to have had hardly a moment to himself, chairing assorted meetings, including one of the Indian Economic Society, and a Bombay Presidency students’ convention, besides almost all meetings of the Home Rule League even before he accepted the presidentship. Twenty days after meeting Lord Meston at his residence in Lucknow to give him the low-down on Indian politics, he was in Agra, urging Lionel Curtis, the government official recruited to arrange a round table conference between the British government and Indian leaders in Agra. Following Jinnah’s advice, Curtis summoned some seventy members of the caucus, including Tilak, B.G. Horniman and Jinnah, of course. Almost the entire months of February and March went into attending the winter session in Delhi of the Imperial Legislative Council, where Jinnah made his presence felt almost from the first day by joining in the discussion on the rules of conduct, and taking an active role in supporting a bill for recruiting Indians into military service, a subject that touched the public pulse so deeply that the visitors’ gallery was overflowing, with Jinnah being the fourth member to speak. In March, Jinnah was busy again, this time discussing the budget that had just been presented in the council. By mid-April, he was the natural choice of both the Congress and the Muslim League to be a member of a small political delegation that the Congress wanted to send to England that summer to do the preliminary spadework on its demand for self-government. In the beginning of June, he was in Calcutta to attend a meeting of the Muslim League Council where he was feted by the members of the Bengal Muslim League at a garden party they hosted for him. June was equally busy, with the court reopening after its summer vacation, and Jinnah deciding to take over the presidentship of the Bombay Home Rule League, a decision hailed by all its members as a ‘standing example . . . of a man who had done his duty and would always do it’ and who added ‘distinction and weight to it [the Home Rule League] by his presence’.

  That ‘distinction’ and ‘weight’ he brought to public life was not marred even slightly by the court injunction against him. Instead, it only added to his glamour as a public figure, especially among young people. To most educated people, Jinnah was, in fact, putting into practice what Annie Besant was preaching through her political work—to promote inter-dining between men of different castes and communities and to encourage inter-communal marriages. He had enough on his hands—what with his new political mission of bringing the British to the table to negotiate Home Rule, and to use these political negotiations to rouse public consciousness by holding innumerable public meetings and issuing press statements—to react to the court injunction with anything other than sheer disdain. And while Jinnah went about his busy life as stubbornly as he had always done, making no attempt to either meet or avoid Ruttie, it was Sir Dinshaw who succeeded in turning himself into a laughing stock.

  At home, of course, Sir Dinshaw had hell to pay. As soon as she heard of it, Ruttie locked herself up in her room and refused to let anyone near her. Unable to bear her daughter’s plight—‘lying on her face, refusing to see her father or mother’—Lady Petit also collapsed, working herself into a ‘dreadful condition’, as Sarojini, who was at Petit Hall then, described in a letter home. Whatever he was hoping to achieve by going to court against Jinnah, this was certainly not the outcome he expected of it, and Sir Dinshaw too came near to collapse. All said and done, he was an extremely fond father and the fear that his daughter’s brain or her body would give way under so much grief, broke him down. Lady Petit too, usually calm and elegantly unruffled, was now in no condition to console him; in his desperation, he turned to the only woman who seemed to have any influence with his daughter and wife.

  Sarojini Naidu was in Bombay for the third or fourth time that year, the first time on official work as head of a women’s delegation to see the visiting secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu, and subsequently to admit Padmaja in a college and to make arrangements for her stay in Bombay. Padmaja’s health was always frail, even before she contracted tuberculosis ten years later, and Sarojini was undergoing her own share of maternal anxieties—about her daughter’s health, the friends she was to stay with and whether or not she should be sent to college so far from home. After settling her daughter in college, and seeing her younger son off to his school in Poona, Sarojini shifted to Petit Hall for a few days’ break before heading home to Hyderabad. This was on 23 May 1917 when all was still presumably well at Petit Hall—at least on the surface. But a month later, on 29 June 1917 when Sarojini returned to Bombay to find new accommodation for Padmaja who had just been forced to vacate the house where she had been staying because of an influx of the landlady’s relatives, things had turned critical at Petit Hall. As Sarojini elaborates in a letter to her younger daughter, Leilamani, trying to explain why she’s been delayed for so long without giving away the Petits’ secrets to her thirteen-year-old:

  My darling Papi, I wonder where you are now, at home with father or still at Sardar Saheb’s. I was hoping to get home this week but I greatly fear I shall not be able to—the poor Petits are in very grave trouble and both Lady Petit and Ruttie are in a dreadful condition and Sir Dinshaw is begging of me to stay and help him through the next week as his wife clings to me so much and Ruttie will not let anyone else near her. I have not left the place except to go see Biban [Padmaja’s pet name] who is now staying with the Lateefs for a few days. She did not like the settlement and Mrs Joshi who would like to have kept her suddenly had a flood of relations to sweep Biban out of her house. I am hoping to settle her comfortably in two or three days but I wish she would make up her mind to come home instead. I don’t think she ought to be doing any work though she insists on going to college. I am going to have her thoroughly examined by a good doctor in a couple of days. Meanwhile the sea air will do her good. She is right on the sea at Chowpatty.

  Mina [pet name of Sarojini’s younger son, Ranadheera] is not very well at Poona. He is not eating at all I hear. So I have written to him to see a doctor at once. I hope poor little Bebe [another pet name for Padmaja] is alright. I am devoured by all kinds of anxieties but just now I am most afraid of Ruttie’s brain giving way or her body, I don’t know which. Write her a funny, cheering letter and don�
��t mention anything about her trouble. She will be very pleased. It is so pitiful to see her lying on her face, refusing to let her mother or father come near her—poor child. But she clings to me.

  The relationship between the two women had changed considerably in the eight months since Ruttie had snubbed the well-known poet and orator for giving her unsolicited advice. But after having given Sarojini ‘a light scolding for having made a speech’, the two were friends again. Since then, Ruttie had had a chance to get to know the older woman a lot better. It was probably in Lucknow that Ruttie really warmed to Sarojini, especially after seeing Sarojini’s genuine admiration and affection for Jinnah. It was here, in the liberating environment of the Congress session and the Muslim League session that preceded it, that Ruttie perhaps began to appreciate the bond of mutual respect and trust between Jinnah and Sarojini, and to lean on Sarojini for emotional support and advice rather than her aunt who was accompanying her. Within two months of their returning home from Lucknow, Ruttie was claiming Sarojini as her own special friend, snatching her away from her parents’ circle. As Sarojini said in a letter home, ‘She [Ruttie] would not let her mother give me a proper guest suite downstairs but a little suite next to hers, beautifully furnished and with a charming view.’ Both Ruttie and her mother vied for her company. ‘Lady Petit will not allow me to undertake any unnecessary work and she is going to make me idle and loaf about,’ Sarojini wrote home to say on yet another visit to Petit Hall three months later.

  Ruttie’s confidence in Sarojini and her conviction that no one, either from her own generation or her mother’s, could understand the problems of the young better than her, was quite justified. Despite the twenty-one years’ age gap between them, Sarojini had been through many of the moral and social dilemmas that now confronted Ruttie and her friends. She too was the daughter of very progressive parents—her father, Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya, who belonged to an East Bengali Brahmin family of Sanskrit scholars, flung his sacred thread into the Ganges at fourteen as a sign of his rebellion against caste and convention. As a young man, he joined a Robin Hood gang of social reformers who rescued girls of his Kulin caste of Brahmins from traditional marriages to old and dying men and took them to a girls’ school run by a social reformer. He married a girl of his own choice, admitting her to a Brahmo Samaj school while he went to study abroad in Edinburgh and Bonn. When he returned to India, he took a job as an educationist with the Nizam of Hyderabad, setting up English-medium schools and colleges for boys and girls.

  An early nationalist and part of the Swadeshi movement of 1905, he was twice deported from Hyderabad state for his politics. He believed in educating his daughters as well as his sons, and not only sent Sarojini to school but insisted that she learn English. In fact, so determined was he to teach English to his daughter that when she was nine and still refused to learn it, he locked her up for a whole day in her room. After that, she spoke only in English to her parents, though her mother spoke back to her in Hindi. Sarojini was among the first generation of Indian women taught deliberately to ignore their mother tongue and adopt English instead. She was also of the first generation to call itself ‘Indian’, raised in a home that was self-consciously cosmopolitan—visitors of all castes and creeds and regions were encouraged to drop in, were entertained and fed rich Bengali food; it was, as she later claimed proudly, ‘a home of Indians and not of Hindus or Brahmins’.

  And yet, when the inevitable happened, Aghorenath was as dumbstruck as any conventional father. At fourteen, being perhaps the only unmarried Indian girl out of purdah in Hyderabad—that is, if you didn’t count those who came from families that had converted to Christianity—Sarojini Naidu fell in love with a young man she probably met in her own home. Aghorenath, having campaigned almost single-handedly for the Special Marriages Act to be introduced in Hyderabad, fell into more difficulties than most parents of his time in arguing her out of it. There was really very little to argue against—Dr Govindarajulu Naidu was an eligible young man, a doctor with a medical degree from Edinburgh employed in the Nizam’s service, highly regarded both by the Nizam and his aristocrats, and the son of a military doctor, upright and honest. The only thing that Aghorenath could possibly hold against him was that he was a non-Brahmin ‘Madrasi’; but considering his well-known views and politics, Aghorenath could hardly voice his prejudice aloud, even to his own daughter. Instead of trying to rationalize his need to prevent the marriage, Aghorenath simply packed his daughter away to study in Sholapur, possibly hoping she would soon forget the attachment and put him out of his dilemma. Instead, at fifteen, she had a nervous breakdown. When she recovered, he was still torn between his principles and prejudices, and sent her away again, this time on a scholarship to England, on what she at least considered as a permanent exile from home. It was only when her health broke down three years later that Sarojini was allowed to return home and marry the man who was still waiting for her.

  Once he was able to resolve his inner crisis, Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya turned once again into the model ‘Indian’ father—he organized the wedding in Madras, where it was hailed by the newspapers as ‘marking an epoch in the history of the reform movement’. Reclaiming his position among the leading social reformers in the south, he invited the wife of Brahmo Samaj leader Raja Ram Mohan Roy to be the bridesmaid, and social reformer Veerasalingam Pantulu to preside over a unique ceremony that blended Western with traditional elements. It opened with a prayer and Hindu rituals, after which Veerasalingam officiated as a secular priest, delivering a sermon in English on the responsibilities of a married couple, and the father gave away the bride and ‘united the pair in holy wedlock in due form, the marriage being solemnized in the presence of Mr F.D. Bird, the Registrar of Marriages of Madras Town. Rao Bahadur Pandit Veerasalingam Pantulu Garu then pronounced the benediction,’ as Padmini Sengupta writes in Sarojini Naidu: A Biography.

  Unlike a similar marriage conducted eighteen years earlier, when Pandita Ramabai Saraswati, a Konkani Chitpavan Brahmin, married a Bengali Kayasth, Sarojini’s marriage to Dr Naidu did not create an uproar among either the Telugu Balija clan to which Dr Naidu belonged or among the Bengali sub-caste of Kulin Brahmins to which Sarojini’s family belonged. Instead, the guests invited to attend the wedding in the Brahmo Mandir in Madras raised ‘toasts and replies in perfect harmony without any distinction of caste’, according to Sengupta, and dispersed after ‘refreshments were served and partaken with great cheers’, the newly-weds receiving ‘the congratulations of all friends present and drove off to Capper House Hotel, where Dr Govindarajulu Naidu had been staying’. Everyone, including the newspapers, considered it a watershed mark in social reform, setting the trend for many more inter-caste and inter-communal marriages in the near future.

  Except here were Ruttie and Jinnah nearly two decades later up against the same prejudices, only more entrenched than ever. But she may have saved herself some of the agony she underwent if she had only known the depths of Jinnah’s determination to succeed in whatever he undertook. Certainly, Sir Dinshaw would have felt even sorrier for himself than he was feeling right then if he had known how Jinnah really reacted to the court order against him. Under his mask of indifference, Jinnah was hardly likely to shrug off the kind of insults Sir Dinshaw was heaping upon him—first rejecting his marriage proposal so rudely and then compounding that insult by slapping a court order on him, as if he was a common criminal or fortune hunter. If only Sir Dinshaw had had a glimmer of understanding of the man he was setting himself up against!

  Chapter Five

  Jinnah had arrived in Bombay in 1896 with a barrister’s degree from Lincoln’s Inn and an invincible faith in his future as a great leader. He was then not yet twenty years old. And neither his father’s bankruptcy nor the fact that he had no patron or connections in a city overpopulated with struggling lawyers could shake his conviction that he was meant for greatness. The idea was seeded in his head by his mother but took root only after she died. She was a devou
t, simple woman from a village in Kathiawar, devoted to her husband and six children, but especially to Jinnah, her firstborn. While Jinnah was away in England she never tired of telling her daughters of what a fakir had once predicted about her eldest son: pointing to a birthmark on the sole of his infant foot, the holy man declared that Jinnah would one day be ‘a big man’. When Jinnah returned from England, transformed into a sahib with a new name and wardrobe, his mother was already dead. But his sisters were curious to see the mark of his future destiny; they begged him to pull off his socks—he had evidently become too much of an Englishman to be caught barefoot even within his own home. And while Jinnah chided his sisters for their superstition, he did not refuse to oblige them by showing off the birthmark. Whether he took this prophecy seriously to heart or not, he relentlessly groomed himself for it, as if determined to meet his destiny more than halfway. His was a temperament far too active and forceful to leave anything to chance, even his destiny.