Dina Wadia
Only child of MA Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, who upset her father by marrying a Parsee
DINA WADIA, who has died aged 98, was the only child of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, to whom she bore a strong physical resemblance; as a child she was close to her father but, after she married a Parsee against his wishes, they were said to have become estranged, despite the fact that Jinnah himself had married in similar circumstances.
For much of her life Dina Wadia lived in India, then in New York, only visiting Pakistan on two occasions – once to attend her father’s funeral in 1948 and once again in 2004. In recent years she had fought a long, ultimately unsuccessful, battle to win back ownership of South Court (also known as “Jinnah House”), his large 1930s bungalow on Malabar Hill, Mumbai.
Much has been written about Jinnah’s legal career, politics and his role as a founder of Pakistan, but little is known about his personal life, though his marriage to Dina’s mother had clearly been a love match. He was 39 and an established lawyer and politician when he met the beautiful 16-year-old Ruttenbai “Ruttie” Petit in Darjeeling in 1916. He had been married before, in the 1890s, when he entered an arranged marriage to a 14-year-old who had died shortly after he left for London aged 16 in 1892.
Ruttie was the only daughter of Sir Dinshaw Maneckji Petit, 2nd Bt, whose father had built some of the earliest cotton mills in India. Her mother was a member of the Tata business dynasty; her great grandfather, Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata, and great-uncle, Jehangir Tata, were chairmen of the Tata Group. Both families were devout Parsees.
Jinnah’s biographer Stanley Wolpert described Ruttie as “precociously bright, gifted in every art, beautiful in every way”, and soon after their first meeting, Jinnah asked her father for her hand in marriage. He refused, however, on the grounds that not only was Jinnah a Muslim, but he was more than twice Ruttie’s age.
Sir Dinshaw forbade his daughter from meeting her suitor, but the couple continued to meet in secret, and waited for two years until February 1918 when Ruttie turned 18 and was free to marry. She left her parental home, converted to Shia Islam, and married Jinnah in April the same year in a quiet ceremony at his house on Malabar Hill, . Nobody from Ruttie’s family attended the wedding.
At first the marriage was happy, and the couple travelled across India, Europe and America together. Their only child was born in London on August 15 1919. But as Jinnah’s political activities took precedence, they began to grow apart, the distance widened by their contrasting temperaments – his dour, proud, withdrawn, hers funloving, extrovert and impulsive.
By 1927 they were living virtually separate lives, and a year later Ruttie was diagnosed with cancer. She died in Bombay on February 20 1929, her 29th birthday, and was buried two days later according to Muslim rites. When he was asked to throw earth on the grave Jinnah was said to have broken down and wept – the first time, according to friends, they had ever seen him show emotion. Sheela Reddy, in her book Mr and
Mrs Jinnah, records that “a strange flaw in Ruttie’s warm and affectionate personality was that she paid little attention to her only daughter, leaving her at home with nannies and maids.’’ In fact the little girl was not even given a proper name until after her mother’s death, when she took the name Dina, after her maternal grandmother, Dinbai Petit, who had reestablished contact after her daughter’s separation from her husband.
After Ruttie’s death, Lady Petit suggested to Jinnah that since he was mostly away in Delhi or Simla, Dina would be better off in a boarding school, and she was duly dispatched to
a convent in the hill station of Panchgani.
In the early 1930s Jinnah moved to England with his sister Fatima and set up home in Hampstead. Dina transferred to a small private school in Sussex, where she spent five happy but academically unrewarding years until the school closed due to financial problems.
Holidays were spent with her father and she described their relationship as “affectionate but undemonstrative”. She was one of the few people allowed to tease him, and as a teenager she gave him the nickname “Grey Wolf ” because of a book he had been much inspired by – Grey Wolf: An Intimate
Study of a Dictator, on the life of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
After his wife’s death, Jinnah became increasingly orthodox. So when Dina informed him at the age of 17 that she intended to marry Neville Wadia, from a Parsee family, the heir to a fortune in textile mills, he was horrified. According to one of Jinnah’s closest colleagues, MC Chagla, Jinnah scolded his daughter and observed that there were millions of Muslim boys in India, so why could she not marry one of them: “Reminding her father that his wife … had also been a non-muslim, a Parsee also coincidently, the young lady replied: ‘Father, there were millions of Muslim girls in India. Why did you not marry one of them?’ And he replied that ‘she became a Muslim.’”
For Jinnah, the marriage in 1938 was a political embarrassment and some reports claim that he disowned Dina. Certainly their relationship became extremely formal, though there is no evidence that he severed ties completely. Indeed, before leaving for the soon-to-be-formed Pakistan in 1947, he met his daughter for the last time, but by this time he was suffering from tuberculosis and lung cancer. He died on September 11 1948.
Dina Wadia remained in India after Partition and she and her husband had two children. She made her first visit to Pakistan for her father’s funeral in Karachi, but did not return for more than 50 years. Her own marriage did not last long, and while Neville Wadia moved to Switzerland, she eventually moved to New York.
In the mid-1930s Jinnah had commissioned the British architect Claude Batley to build him a palatial residence at the site of his old house on Malabar Hill, to serve as his headquarters pending the creation of Pakistan. Between 1942 and 1947 it was the scene of talks involving Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru.
Following Partition, however, the house was classified as “evacuee property” and seized by the Indian authorities. It was subsequently leased to the Office of the British Deputy High Commissioner, which occupied it until 1982, since when it has mainly remained empty. Successive Pakistan governments have asked for the mansion to be turned over to Pakistan for a consulate in Mumbai, requests which have been stonewalled by the Indian government.
In 1994 Dina Wadia filed a petition to the High Court in Bombay claiming to be Jinnah’s sole heir and thus entitled to the property, only to withdraw it when she heard that relatives of her Aunt Fatima had also staked a claim, saying Jinnah had left her the house in his will.
Dina Wadia returned to the charge in 2007, arguing that Jinnah’s will was never granted probate and therefore had no legal standing. Her petition went on to state that since Jinnah was a Khoja- Shia (a community which incorporates Islamic and Hindu traditions) he was not governed by Muslim succession law, but by Hindu customary law, under which she would be his sole legal heir.
The case remains unresolved. In March 2004, she visited Pakistan for the first time since her father’s funeral, with her son and two grandsons, to watch a cricket match between Pakistan and India and to pay her respects at her father’s mausoleum. It came as a shock to many Pakistanis to discover that Jinnah’s descendants were Parsees, many living in India, since it had been kept a closely guarded secret by the Pakistani authorities for many years.
Dina Wadia is survived by her daughter, Diana, and her son, Nusli, a successful Parsee businessman who heads the Wadia Group which owns Bombay Dyeing, Britannia Industries and Go Air.
Dina Wadia, born August 15 1919, died November 2 2017