Re-assessing Jinnah, like never before
The figure of Jinnah has always fascinated me. His spare, austere frame, his vanity regarding clothes (Savile Row suits or sherwanis and karakul cap), his legendary romance with Ruttie (the beautiful daughter of Sir Dinshaw Petit, a Parsi grandee and a leading social figure in erstwhile Bombay) and their elopement — all these are stories that we had heard from our parents’ generation. Of course, for many of that time, Jinnah was the cussed person who insisted on partitioning the subcontinent. Both India and Pakistan subsequently created their own icons, so while Gandhi became the Father of our Nation, Jinnah was venerated as Qaid-e-Azam in Pakistan. Of the role of the Congress and of Gandhiji, there was hardly any mention in their story of the Independence movement.
This sanitising of history was not limited to our Independence movement alone; in a theocratic nation like Pakistan, any mention of Buddhism or Hinduism, even Sikhism, was carefully excised. The result was that generations of Pakistani children were fed a distorted version of modern history where the Mughal Empire was placed above Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Sikh kingdom, that was far greater than the Mughal Empire and stretched right up to what is now Afghanistan and Balochistan. However, while historians battled over the Partition, debating whether Nehru was responsible for bartering away such an important part of the subcontinent and weakly accepting Mountbatten’s plan of carving up Bengal and Punjab, the ties of blood and the web of memories that bound the two countries together by birth could never be resolved satisfactorily.
The violence and bloodshed that followed the Partition were buried deep into individual memories and despite the fact that this was possibly the largest migration of human beings ever seen by the world, little was done to honestly recount the events. Selective excerpts of the vast literature in the national archives of the two countries and the India Office Library were periodically mined to suit the theories that various schools of historians upheld.
Just recently, an astounding book on this subject was released by Penguin Random House. Its title is ‘Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History’ and its author, Ishtiaq Ahmed, is a Pakistani historian who now lives and teaches in Sweden’s Stockholm University. A cousin sent me a fascinating interview with the author and I was riveted by his revelations. Ahmed does not duck away from answering uncomfortable questions on how and why Jinnah pursued his dream of a separate homeland for Muslims, despite being no great believer in Islam or theocracy. His eclectic tastes in food and drink were never hidden and the fact that he married a Parsi girl young enough to be his daughter and not a Muslim woman were acts of defiance against the orthodox views held by his family and peers. His passionate espousal of federalism, his early association with the Congress (not to be confused with the sorry remnants of it today) and his role in persuading Muslims to join the freedom movement do not fit comfortably with his later emergence as a hard and inflexible votary of a ruinous two-nation theory.
Ahmed has sourced his book on a huge amount of research that includes Jinnah’s speeches, the de-classified papers of the time containing the confidential communications sent to London by Lord Wavell, Radcliffe and other dramatis personae, Mountbatten included. He also critically examines the pogrom launched against the Sikhs by the Muslim League and thinks that one of the greatest mistakes that Jinnah made was to alienate the Sikhs forever. Jinnah’s demands for sections of Gurdaspur and Pathankot to be awarded to Pakistan were refused and probably led him to declare that he had inherited a ‘moth-eaten’ country when Pakistan was formed. Ahmed examines all the successes and failures of Jinnah to critically assess his role in shaping Pakistan that is now almost universally regarded as a nation hovering on the brink of failure.
The book is bound to raise a storm, for several respected Pakistani historians, including the celebrated Ayesha Jalal, have published a very different version of the story of Partition. I cannot wait to get my hands on it and place it against another book on Jinnah that my friend Sheela Reddy wrote a few years ago, called ‘Mr and Mrs Jinnah’, where she analysed the private life of the leader who emerges as a lonely, isolated man doomed to drive away all those he loved.
It was while reading Reddy’s book that documents the romance of Jinnah and Ruttie that I discovered they had run away to Nainital for a secret honeymoon and stayed in a house that is buried in the dense forests of the town’s Ayarpata. I clearly recall that house for it belonged to my aunt, whose husband must have bought it from a departing Englishman. So, in a very convoluted way, I have a stake in knowing more about Jinnah. He and I share a karmic history, so to speak.
To turn to another book-related topic: the new shortlist for the prestigious Booker Prize has just been declared and Dubai-based Indian writer Avni Doshi’s debut novel ‘Burnt Sugar’ features there. What is also surprising is that the bookies’ favourite, Hilary Mantel’s concluding volume of her trilogy on Cromwell that was on the Longlist, has been dropped.
