MR AND MRS  JINNAH

                                                       

“Mr and Mrs Jinnah: The Marriage that Shook India”;by Sheela

 Reddy ;Published by  Penguin/Viking ; Pages 411 ; Price Rs.699/-

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We read recently that  Dina Wadia ,the daughter of M.A.Jinnah died in New York on November 2 She was the daughter and only child of  Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his wife Rattanbai Petit. She had married Neville Wadia. 

 This lends poignancy to the book under review of  the Love Affair of her parents and of the “Marriage that Shook India”. The author Sheela Reddy has written on  subjects as diverse as  politics, history, culture, literature and biographical sketches. She was the former Books Editor of  “Outlook”.

 Jinnah was forty years old, a successful barrister and a rising star in the nationalist movement when he fell in love with pretty, vivacious Ruttie Petit, the daughter of his good friend, the fabulously rich baronet, Sir Dinshaw Petit, a prominent Parsi mill owner. But Ruttie was only sixteen and Dinshaw refused to allow  the match. As Ruttie became  eighteen, they married and Bombay society  was thoroughly scandalised. All were on the side of  the Petits and Ruttie and Jinnah were treated as outcasts. No one believed that the marriage  would last.

 Jinnah  was totally  devoted to his beautiful, wayward child-bride as proud of her fashionable dressing as he was of her intelligence, her wide reading and her fierce commitment to the nationalist struggle. Ruttie, on her part, worshipped him and could tease and cajole the intimidating Jinnah. But as Jinnah was consumed by  politics Ruttie became left out and was severely  cut off from her family, friends and community. Jinnah’s frequent coldness and engagement  with politics    took its toll. Ruttie died at twenty-nine, leaving her daughter, Dina and her inconsolable husband, who did not think of another  marriage.

Reddy  refers to  pages of history  found in the labyrinths of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Hundred pages of  letters written by Ruttie Jinnah to  Padmaja Naidu and her sister. The letters date back to when she was 15 and end abruptly a year before her death in 1929.

According to Reddy Jinnah is  “ a complex character, bundle of contradictions, but a man of great integrity, incorruptible, impervious to flattery, brutally honest and one who would not make any pretense, could not lie even to save his life or career.” She attributes the failure of their marriage, despite genuine love for each other, to “the politics of those times that created enormous pressure and the fact that they had diametrically different temperaments.”

 Reddy offers  vivid descriptions of early 20th century Bombay. The British Empire is firmly in place and Bombay is awash with Parsi enterprise and Parsi millionaires --- of whom Sir Dinshaw Petit is one.   In his luxurious home, Petit Hall, with its French furniture and Persian carpets, all is well. His children are brought up by English governesses, and his cosmopolitan lifestyle takes him and his family on vacations to Europe. At home, hospitality is never-ending. An army of servants serves lavish meals to an unending flow of visitors. Sarojini Naidu is a close friend and frequent guest.  Jinnah is a frequent visitor—a  successful barrister and member of the Viceroy's Imperial Legislative Council, a rising star in politics whom  Dinshaw greatly admires. He has been a familiar figure in Ruttie Petit's home since her childhood. She is still in her teens and Jinnah, aged 43, is just three years younger than her father when they marry in secret and she converts to Islam, creating a scandal that engulfs both their communities. This unlikely love story plays out against the social and political scene of the time. There are personality problems. Unable to cope, Ruttie runs away from her marriage and later comes back, but there is no repairing the mismatched relationship. Disowned by her father and her community, cut off from her family and all contact with her convivial home and carefree past, she turns to Sarojini Naidu for understanding and companionship and to Padmaja Naidu, her closest friend, for unfailing support. Ruttie tries to make a life for herself in a variety of ways-from unbridled shopping to theosophy and seances - but slides into a state of despair, into drug-induced illnesses and death at the age of 29.

"She was a child and I should never have married her," confessed Jinnah years later. "The fault was mine." Sarojini Naidu wrote an epitaph: "What a tragedy of unfulfilment Ruttie's life has been - she was so young and so lovely and she loved life with such passionate eagerness, and always life passed her by leaving her with empty hands and heart."

 "She yearned to break through the veils of his many self-repressions and discover for herself the real man  but the real J kept eluding her, hidden behind his cool and rational mind, never giving himself up to even a single display of deep emotion." Nothing could have been more disillusioning for the adoring 16-year-old whose beauty, sparkling vivacity and hero worship of him had captivated Jinnah. Ruttie had associated marriage to this handsome, distinguished man with high romance - that he would prove a passionate lover who would sweep her off her feet…. He comes across as a man set and fixed in his habits - reading several newspapers from beginning to end (including the advertisements) first thing in the morning and disliking interruptions of any kind. I found myself wishing he had occasionally put down a newspaper and spared a moment for a quick cuddle before going to work. It might have made all the difference to his marriage.

Ruttie adapted to her role as a leading politician's wife, but had an absorbing interest in the field herself and was proud of his eminence. She believed in his political mission of eventually freeing India from British rule and took part in the public events that claimed him-sitting on the platform with him and listening to hour-long political speeches with fortitude. But their personal life had no such glue to bind them. Ruttie was widely read, wrote poetry and had a poetic way with words. In an era of letter-writing, her exuberant and highly literate letters to her friends reveal her as a young woman of intellectual capacity and rare sensitivity.

Jinnah was an intensely private person and  never wrote his memoir, never kept a diary, and when he wrote a letter kept it dry and impersonal.According to Kanji Dwarkadas: ‘It was Jinnah’s bitterness, born out of his personal loss and disappointment, which travelled into his political life.’ 

Ruttie Petit  was left all alone. It was an emotional vacuum for her, as the book narrates, leading her from a fun-loving girl to a morphine addict, absorbed in depression. According to the author, one of the last messages that Ruttie sent to Jinnah read: "Try and remember me beloved as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread on."

 Ruttie Petit was a bohemian and a liberated woman, who proposed to Jinnah (“It sounds like a good proposition,” Jinnah was claimed to have replied). She  left home armed with an umbrella and her little dog, her fiancé forgot to bring a ring to the wedding ceremony, her father fainted when he read the wedding announcement in the paper—there is no shortage of drama to the story. For her valiant defence, Ruttie Petit was excommunicated by the  Parsi Panchayat and disowned and disinherited by her father.

A must-read for all those interested in politics and  history and the power of an unforgettable love story.

P.P.Ramachandran.

19/11/2017

Tit--Bits

Sir Dinshaw Petit, Ruttie's father  slapped a charge on Jinnah for kidnapping his daughter—he had filed an injunction to keep the barrister away from his daughter earlier—prompting his teenage daughter to stand up in court and tell the judge that “Mr. Jinnah has not abducted me: in fact I have abducted him”.

It is impossible not to adore a woman who refused to stand to greet the Viceroy during summer assembly sessions in Shimla. She refused to curtsy to another Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, instead greeting him with a namaste. TheViceroy snapped at Petit that if she didn’t want to “spoil” her husband’s political future, she should do as the Romans do in Rome. “That’s exactly what I did,” Petit replied. “In India I greeted you in the Indian way.” She was not invited back to meet Lord Chelmsford a second time.

PPR 19/ 11 / 2017