The break-up of India, and a home

Built around a bundle of private letters, this is a welcome addition to the small storehouse of our knowledge of Jinnah

Mr and Mrs Jinnah; Sheela Reddy, Penguin/Viking, ₹699

‘I will tell you who made Pakistan. Myself, my secretary and his typewriter,’ Jinnah is believed to have said. The boast was true. No other Muslim leader in India was strong enough to take the British policy of divide and rule to its logical conclusion: the break-up of India.

Yet this man was once a staunch nationalist, a leading member of the Indian National Congress, and ‘Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’. Why did he change so drastically?

Answers, anyone?

No book on Jinnah has given an entirely satisfactory answer to this question. One reason for this is the great shortage of credible information on his personal life. An intensely private person, he never wrote any memoir, never kept a diary, and when he wrote a letter—he was a most reluctant letter-writer—kept it dry and impersonal. Worse, much of the little that we do know of the inner man is based on uncorroborated reminiscences written years after his death by people who clearly adored him. No serious biographer of Jinnah (including the author of

Mr and Mrs Jinnah ) can therefore avoid using qualifiers (‘perhaps’, ‘undoubtedly’, ‘quite possibly’, ‘would most likely have’, ‘would have surely’...) before saying anything significant about Jinnah’s personal life.

That’s why Mr and Mrs Jinnah is such a welcome addition to the small storehouse of our knowledge of the man. For the book is built round a bundle of private letters preserved by Padmaja and Leilamani Naidu, daughters of that most remarkable woman and indefatigable letter-writer, Sarojini Naidu, and stumbled upon by the author in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

The bundle contains not only letters on the Jinnah couple written by the members of the Naidu family to each other, but also several letters written by Jinnah’s beautiful, precocious, highly romantic but finally doomed Parsi wife, Ruttie herself. She was close to the Naidu family. Sarojini Naidu also knew and greatly admired Jinnah.

The letters are absorbing enough to have been published as a booklet. Happily, the author, Sheela Reddy, journalist and writer, has made a whole book out of them by blending them with two excellent ingredients: one, vignettes of those times, political as well as social, which, though known to history buffs, should nevertheless be of interest to the general reader; and two, the author’s interpretations of what the letters say—as well as some general observations and conclusions. The final product, even if some of it is old wine, is a heady cocktail that is difficult to put down till after the last drop of it is drunk.

Of course in essence, as the title of the book suggests, Mr and Mrs Jinnah is a tragic love story. It has the right ingredients for one: a high-spirited, wealthy, young girl falling in love with a public hero (old enough to be her father); her break with everyone and everything from her past to marry the man; her hopes; her crushing disappointments; her increasingly desperate efforts to make a go of the marriage; her descent into darkness; her walking out of the marriage, leaving behind a deeply moving farewell letter; her lonely death at a young age (on her 29th birthday) perhaps from a deliberate overdose of morphine... And it is a deftly told story.

Incomplete tale

However, it is an incomplete story; for the Naidu bundles contain no letters from Jinnah himself. The author has tried bravely, using every straw in the wind, her own remarkable ability to put herself in her characters’ shoes, and, of course, her skill as a writer, to reconstruct Jinnah’s feelings at various stages of the disintegration of the marriage, but the fact remains: we have only Ruttie’s (mostly, only Sarojini Naidu’s) version of what went wrong in the marriage. That and the author’s interpretations.

Do these solve the great riddle of why Jinnah, once ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, ripped apart that unity and created a country which—step by inevitable step—has become ‘the hub of (Islamic) terrorism’ and ‘the most dangerous place on earth?’ Perhaps they do, provided you link the revelations in the Naidu letters with the conclusion of Kanji Dwarkadas, as the author has done on the last page of the book: ‘It was Jinnah’s bitterness, born out of his personal loss and disappointment, which travelled into his political life.’ Interestingly, the author also mentions (albeit, without quite endorsing it) Chagla’s view that Jinnah’s unmarried sister Fatima (who re-entered Jinnah’s life the day Ruttie died, never to leave his side again) was also at least partly responsible for Jinnah’s transformation.

This should do, at least till the day someone finds a bundle of personal letters written by Jinnah himself. They must exist somewhere.

Mr and Mrs Jinnah ; Sheela Reddy, Penguin/Viking, ₹699