Jinnah: Love, hate and books

written much on Jinnah either. They are like that only, I said.

When I Googled it later, I didn’t find a single book on Gandhiji published in Pakistan or by a Pakistani author. So we have no idea what they think of him other than telling their people that he opposed Pakistan and Jinnah. But they do give him credit for khilafat and blame him for stopping it.

China did better on this count, at least till the Communists captured it in 1949. Until 1947, 26 books had been written on Gandhiji there. Since then there seem to be none.

If I am wrong about this imbalance please correct me because I would love to read Pakistani and Chinese books on Gandhiji. What would they make of non-violence as a political strategy, for example, or vegetarianism, or no sex?

In contrast, Indians have written at least a dozen books each, if not more, on Jinnah and Mao Zedong. They have all been published in India. Indeed, as beacons go, Indians acknowledge Mao very generously even going so far as to have political movements based on his thoughts.

But it is different with Jinnah. Indians think he broke up India by putting forth the absurd and eventually self-destructive notion that religion should be the basis for nationhood.

Seventy years after he, Jinnah, got them a Muslim country, many Pakistanis, to the utter chagrin of their sensible countrymen, are being very silly and claiming to be Arab! Religion was necessary, it seems, but insufficient. Jinnah books Thanks to Arun Shourie who kindled my interest in the freedom movement, I have read several books on Jinnah which tend to be very fair. They can even be quite admiring of the man and his pre-1937 politics, which was not based on shouting that Islam was in danger.

The four I like most are the ones by Stanley Wolpert published in 1984 and by Jaswant Singh in 2009. But since Mr Wolpert is an American, we can leave him out.

Mr Singh, of course, is as Indian as they come. He said the Congress was as responsible for partition as Jinnah was. The Congress, in power in 2009, ignored it. But for his pains, he was expelled by his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, for writing it! How dare you, it asked him.

Then in 2016 came another book on Jinnah. This time it was a fabulous novel by Kiran Doshi, written around Jinnah. I can’t see a Pakistani writing novel around Gandhiji, can you? Or a Chinese, for that matter.

The latest Jinnah book is by Sheela Reddy. It is about his unhappy marriage and the two-year courtship that preceded it. His bride, Ruttie Petit, was just 16 when they fell in love and 18 when they married, much to the fury of her father. Jinnah was 40 but his age was not the only thing that made Sir Dinshaw angry.

Sadly, Mrs Jinnah died 11 years later in 1929, a very disconsolate woman. There was much love between husband and wife but no companionship. Most uncharacteristically for him Jinnah was seen crying at her funeral.

He never got over that tragedy. One Pakistani writer has written that he cried again when he visited her grave before leaving for Karachi in August 1947.

I wonder how things would have turned out politically had Mrs Jinnah not died when she did. Would she have allowed her husband to break India up? We will never know. But only Jinnah books The Pakistanis don’t seem to have written any books on Jawaharlal Nehru, either. If they have, someone please tell me.

But then, how many books have Indians written about Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, D S Senanayake or the Bandaranaikes? In Bengali, on Mujib, quite a few; in English none that I could find. The same is true for Senanayake and the Bandaranaikes as well.

Although their stature is just as great in their countries as of Gandhiji and Nehru in India, modern Indian departments of history ignore them equally. So do Indian writers.

Since this cannot be because of a paucity of material, one must assume we don’t regard them as being very important although, as neighbours, they obviously are.

Scholarly folly in South Asia, it would seem, transcends everything — religion, culture, history and, above all, geography.

Indians think he (Jinnah) broke up India by putting forth the absurd and eventually self-destructive notion that religion should be the basis for nationhood. Seventy years after he, Jinnah, got them a Muslim country, many Pakistanis... are being very silly and claiming to be Arab!