Book review: Jinnah, pursuing love with equal precision

It was not an enviable situation for any suitor to be in. Jinnah was not only 24 years older than Ruttie but had known her almost from birth and not shown more than an avuncular interest in his host’s lively young daughter until then. To break the news to the unsuspecting Sir Dinshaw was not easy, but Jinnah was not a man to be easily daunted. Realising that the best way would be to take Sir Dinshaw by surprise, he used his courtroom skills in cross-examining witnesses to try and put his host at a disadvantage. He began by asking Sir Dinshaw innocently what his views were on intercommunity marriages. The unwary Sir Dinshaw walked right into the trap by giving the stock answer that all modern Indians felt was expected of them: intercommunity marriages would, he said glibly, “considerably help national integration and might ultimately prove to be the final solution to inter-communal antagonism”. Thereupon, we are informed, Jinnah calmly told him that he wanted to marry his daughter. And in what seems like a classic case of understatement, a contemporary described Sir Dinshaw as being “taken aback”…

But to those few who knew him closely — and Jaisoorya’s mother, Sarojini, was one of those whose admiration for Jinnah was so great that some even misconstrued it as an infatuation on her part — it was easier to understand why a romantic, impressionable young woman could fall in love with Jinnah. And no one thrilled to this hidden side of the real Jinnah more than Ruttie, who had not only known Jinnah well since she was a child but had nursed a calf love for him at least since she was 12 or 13. He was only three years younger than her father and, like Sir Dinshaw, belonged wholly to the Victorian era both in his dress and manners — but there the resemblance ended. Unlike the stocky and very middle-aged baronet, it would have occurred to no one to describe Jinnah as an old man. With his slim, graceful five-foot-eleven figure, neatly combed black hair, silvering at the temples, his quick, sharp movements and a classically handsome face with sharply etched features and Grecian profile, he too was a head-turner, like Ruttie.

It’s harder to tell what spell Ruttie cast on him. She was enchanting, of course, and delightfully informal, lively, high-spirited and full of jokes, and the toast of high society for her beauty and breeding, but she was hardly Jinnah’s type.

Sensing perhaps her adoration for him, Jinnah had always let down his guard with his friend’s young daughter. No one else in his life could draw Jinnah out as effectively as Ruttie, using her entrancing mix of “coaxing and teasing” to make him talk, and even laugh at himself.
***

The romance had, in fact, blossomed in Poona in the Christmas holidays of 1914 when Jinnah spent the winter with his great friend, the Parsi nationalist and lawyer Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, who owned a second home in Poona. And where Jinnah had plenty of time and opportunity to fall for Ruttie. She was then nearly 15, just coming out of her schoolgirl phase and already a celebrated beauty in the exclusive circles her parents moved in.

Jinnah had always been attracted to young persons who stood up to him, and in Ruttie he found a fierce sense of independence matching his own and a charming irreverence all her own, able to take on princes and viceroys as her equals…

And if Ruttie had indeed succeeded in shaking him out of his emotional stupor, as she seems to have done, there was no force on earth, certainly none among mankind, who could persuade Jinnah to give her up. Everyone knew that about him. Having thrown down the gauntlet in the form of the court injunction, there was little else for Sir Dinshaw to do other than wait and watch. But what he seems to have not realised was that by publicly challenging Jinnah in this way, he had ensured that things could now go only one way. Because, even more than his love for Ruttie, Jinnah’s pride would not allow him to retreat.
***

And yet, whatever Ruttie may have concluded from his anglicised appearance and habits, her conversion to Islam was more important to him than merely a quick way of getting around the law. He did not have to look too far. Maulana Nazir Ahmad Khujandi was not only a renowned religious scholar of the majority Sunni sect and a presiding imam of Bombay’s Jama Masjid but also a member of the Muslim League. The date for the conversion, Thursday, April 18, was carefully chosen, not because it was the anniversary of the Ajmeri Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti and was considered one of the holiest days on the Muslim calendar, as his Pakistani biographers conjecture, but because it was the most sensible way of holding his tightly plotted wedding plan together. It gave just enough time not to crowd up the wedding day but not enough time for the secret to leak out before they got away…

But what was not lost on Jinnah was the opportunity that the three public holidays in a row-Wednesday and Thursday for the two Parsi festivals, followed by the Hindu Ram Navami on Friday-provided him, especially as these were followed by the weekend. He was far too smart a strategist to miss such a rare advantage he suddenly held over Sir Dinshaw. The high court was already closed for the summer, but Sir Dinshaw had not relaxed his vigil, putting off his summer plans to keep guard over his daughter. But now, even were he to discover their plans and go after them, he would find his hands tied till the following Monday, when the police courts reopened. By then they would have safely escaped to an undisclosed destination that Jinnah arranged for them, but confided to no one.

The wedding ceremony itself couldn’t have been more primly respectable. If refreshments were served after the ceremony, the newspapers, usually fond of dwelling on such details, did not mention it. The newly-weds, at any rate, would have been in a rush to get out of Bombay before the storm broke. Not that the prospect of it ruffled Jinnah’s usual calm — he stopped long enough in his office at the bungalow to sign a letter requisitioning a public meeting three days later to be addressed by Gandhi. Jinnah, of course, would not be there to address the meeting according to the original programme, but he was too meticulous to leave without attending to this last detail. Apparently, even with Ruttie finally by his side, it was politics that continued to be topmost in his mind.