jinnah house

Published in the 1-15 Sep 2004 print edition of MG; send me the print edition

HERITAGE

The House Jinnah built

By Rizvi Syed Haider Abbas The life of Muhammad Alibhai Jinnahbhai Khojani, as referred to by his contemporary Dr. Sachidanand Sinha in London Bar in 1890’s, in a small booklet Jinnah As I Know Him remained a bounded mystery until between 1970 and 1982 twelve- volumes of British documents relating to transfer of power were published and 80,000 pages of Qaid-e-Azam papers which were the property of National Archives of Pakistan and the archives of All India Muslim League were slowly taken out of the closets.

‘He seemed on the way to leading India; he founded Pakistan instead,’ are the opening lines of an essay Muhammad Ali Jinnah by Raj Mohan Gandhi, grandson of MK Gandhi, in his book Understanding The Muslim Mind . The essay which covers sixty-three odd pages, enumerates, with no holds barred, the life span covering all the shades of the life of founder of Pakistan. MA Jinnah was born in Karachi on Christmas Day 1876 and breathed his last on Sep 11, 1948 at government House, Karachi.

Francis Robinson, a living giant historian on sub-continental politics and writer of his magnum opus Separatism Among Indian Muslims, writes a very engrossing chapter — The Jinnah Story in his other book, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia. He too in the very opening lines acknowledges; ‘The life of no man, not of Mahatma Gandhi, not that of Jawaharlal Nehru, is so entangled with the nationalist politics of British India as that of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.’ The chapter is a gist of conclusions drawn from Stanley Wolpert’s Jinnah of Pakistan and Ayesha Jalal’s Jinnah-The Sole Spokesman. Robinson has offered snapshots on Wolpert for using all kinds of salt and pepper in scripting Jinnah’s life while hailing Jalal for her unbiased and concrete analysis of the life and times of MA Jinnah.

"Gentlemen, you are the citizens of Bombay. You have today scored a great victory for democracy. Today, December 11, is a red-letter day in the history of Bombay. Go and Rejoice," said Jinnah, writes Bolitho in his book Jinnah. The occasion was when Lord Wellingdon was relinquishing the Governorship and a meeting of the citizens of Bombay was convened to appreciate his services which, Jinnah did not approve and therefore, had decided to oppose the appreciation. He along with his wife, Ratanbai or Ruttie Petit, and a large number of protestors were later to be removed by police resorting to force.

The episode understandably made Jinnah the hero and, within no time his admirers contributed thirty-thousand Indian rupees in his honour, a hefty amount those days (1918) and Jinnah Hall came into existence. A wall-plaque with ‘the historic triumph’ emblazoned on it refers to the victory of Bombay citizens ‘under the brave and brilliant leadership of MA Jinnah,’ writes Bolitho.

Bombay owes a lot to Jinnah and vice-versa and Jinnah too, in a perfect ode to