1876-1948
Pakistani politician

1. Introduction
2. Stories
3. Biographical summary
4. See also
5. Further reading
6. References

1. Introduction

Jinnah was the first governor-general of Pakistan after its creation as an independent state in 1947, partitioned from former British India. He trained as a barrister in London and practised in Bombay, also becoming involved in politics as leader of the All-India Muslim League. He initially adhered to the notion of Hindu-Muslim unity within a single state but by 1940 had adopted a two-country approach, advocating a majority-Muslim Pakistan and a majority-Hindu India. Churchill resisted independence which was eventually gained under Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Jinnah died a year after independence, aged 71. He is known in Pakistan as ‘Great Leader’ and ‘Father of the Nation’.

2. Stories

• Jinnah is still widely revered in Pakistan for his leading role in its foundation.
• Jinnah adopted a very British image but tempered this in later life.
• Despite some shared backgrounds and objectives, independence leaders Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru also had some significant differences.
• Churchill warned against a hurried exit from India but his successor Attlee and Governor-General Mountbatten decided that a rapid transfer of power was necessary.
• The partition was associated with mass migration and the deaths of perhaps well over a million people.
• Churchill is sometimes accused of favouring Jinnah over Gandhi and Nehru, and Muslims over Hindus.
• Jinnah’s difficult home life was made easier by his close relationship with his nationalist sister Fatima, the ‘Mother of the Nation’.

Jinnah is still widely revered in Pakistan for his leading role in its foundation.

Jinnah’s biographer Stanley Wolpert said of him, ‘Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.’¹ He was referring to Jinnah’s contribution to Indian independence, the partition of former British India and the creation of Pakistan.

Pak means ‘pure’ in Urdu and Persian; stan means ‘place of’ in Persian. The name has also been used as an acronym derived from the first letters of its former British India regions of Punjab, Afghan (Northwest Frontier), Kashmir and Sindh, and the last syllable of Baluchistan.

Jinnah belonged to the Khoja branch of Ismaili Shia Muslims led by Aga Khan III, after some of his ancestors converted from Hinduism. Although he became the pre-eminent leader of the Muslim community in India, his biographers indicate that he was not particularly observant himself, enjoying alcohol, pork, Craven A cigarettes and Havana cigars. Smoking is permitted within some Muslim traditions but was discouraged by Aga Khan III. During legal arguments over his will, there were some claims that he had become a Sunni Muslim, but this was not proven.

Jinnah believed in pluralism and religious freedom but his views on the official role of Islam in the new Pakistan are unclear and his death the year after the country’s creation prevented elucidation. The majority green background on the national flag, adopted three days before independence, symbolises the predominantly Muslim identity of the population, with a white stripe for the non-Muslim minority. The white crescent and star are widely used Islamic symbols and in Pakistan’s case the crescent is also said to represent progress and the star to represent knowledge and light. Pakistan became an Islamic republic in 1956, with no change to the flag.

Aga Khan III was a strong advocate of Muslim interests in India and came to admire Jinnah after earlier disagreements on strategy. In his memoirs in 1954, the Aga Khan wrote, ‘Of all the statesmen that I have known in my life – Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Churchill, Curzon, Mussolini, Mahatma Gandhi – Jinnah is the most remarkable’.²

Jinnah adopted a very British image but tempered this in later life.

His first language was English which he spoke in a refined manner, with Gujarati as his second language. He owned over 200 suits, many from London’s Savile Row, which he wore with starched shirts, detachable collars, silk ties (never the same tie twice) and two-tone shoes. He had a monocle and used a pocket watch. Many of his clothes and accessories were personalised with his initials ‘M.A.J.’.

He had a Bentley with a chauffeur in England and a Rolls Royce and a Cadillac in India. He enjoyed roast beef, fish and chips, and apple tart, prepared by two cooks, Irish and Indian. He was a man of few hobbies but would sometimes play cards or billiards at his Bombay club. His two dogs were a West Highland terrier and a Dobermann. He was offered a knighthood by the viceroy in India in 1925 but replied, perhaps surprisingly, ‘I prefer to be plain Mr. Jinnah’.³

Wealthy from his successful legal practice and investments, he bought a house in Hampstead in London with eight acres (three hectares) and commissioned British architect Claude Batley to design a hugely expensive European-style house in Malabar Hill, Bombay, called South Court. He bought a large house in New Delhi designed in the 1930s by British architect Edwin Lutyens. In 1944, he purchased colonial-style Flagstaff House in Karachi, designed by British architect Moses Somake in the late 1800s; it is now the Museum of Jinnah.

As a young man in London, he made a brief attempt at being a Shakespearean actor. He became fascinated by British politics, regularly attending the visitors’ gallery in the House of Commons and campaigning in 1892 for Dadabhai Naoroji, the second Indian to become a British MP⁴ and subsequently three-time president of the Indian National Congress party (‘Congress’). In the 1930s Jinnah tried twice to become a British MP himself, first Labour and then Conservative, unsuccessfully.

Later, back in India, he started to wear a sherwani, a long coat with aristocratic connotations, together with baggy shalwar or tight churidar traditional trousers. He also took to wearing an Asian triangular hat made from Karakul sheep wool, now known in Pakistan as a ‘Jinnah cap’, which in some cultures has had associations with education and leadership.

* The first was Anglo-Indian David Dyce Sombre in 1841, but he was removed after nine months for bribery during the election.

Despite some shared backgrounds and objectives, independence leaders Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru also had some significant differences.

Jinnah’s and Gandhi’s families were from Gujarat in the west of the country; Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, came from a family from Kashmir in the north-west. They all had some European-style schooling: Jinnah at a mission school in Karachi; Gandhi at one of the oldest English-speaking schools in India; and Nehru at Harrow (Churchill’s old school) and Trinity College, Cambridge. All three trained as barristers in London.

They all belonged to Congress, one of the earliest nationalist movements within the British Empire. However, Jinnah left it over concerns about Hindu dominance and its acceptance of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, which he viewed as being anarchic and unconstitutional.

Gandhi pushed for prompt independence even while World War II was raging. Jinnah and Nehru wanted to wait until after the war but Nehru, under the influence of his mentor Gandhi, reluctantly agreed to side with the Quit India campaign. This resulted in the arrest of Gandhi, Nehru and nearly all of Congress’s leadership, while Jinnah remained free to advance his interests.

Gandhi and Nehru were against the partition of Pakistan but Gandhi acknowledged Indian Muslims’ right to self-determination. Gandhi wanted India to become independent first, followed by votes on partition, but Jinnah insisted that partition had to be agreed upon before independence. Jinnah prevailed, and partition and independence occurred simultaneously. Gandhi acknowledged Jinnah as the main Indian Muslim leader, overriding Nehru’s preference for Abul Kalam Azad, a theologian.

All three spoke excellent English, Jinnah’s and Nehru’s first language and Gandhi’s second, after Gujarati. Jinnah and Nehru were largely secular while Gandhi was more religiously inclined. Jinnah and Nehru were somewhat short-tempered whereas Gandhi was more composed. Jinnah and Gandhi were very slender; Nehru was of average build.

Their dress codes indicated some differences. Potential elitism associated with Jinnah’s jacket and cap was avoided by Gandhi’s self-spun cotton loincloth and shawl. The ‘Gandhi cap’, also worn by Nehru, is said to have been derived from South African prisoner uniform.* Like Jinnah, Nehru wore a long sherwani jacket, not the shorter version of what is now called a ‘Nehru jacket’ which was sometimes worn by the Indian-influenced Beatles in the 1960s.

* Although Gandhi only wore a ‘Gandhi cap’ for around two years in 1920 and 1921, it became de rigueur in some nationalist circles for many years later.

Churchill warned against a hurried exit from India but his successor Attlee and Governor-General Mountbatten decided that a rapid transfer of power was necessary.

At the end of Churchill’s wartime term as prime minister, no agreement had been reached about Indian independence. Labour ousted the Conservative-led coalition and Clement Attlee became prime minister. Under financial pressure after the war, he decided to transfer power in India as soon as possible. In February 1947, he replaced Viceroy Archibald Wavell with Louis Mountbatten, a senior naval officer, setting June 1948 as the deadline for independence. Mountbatten was instructed to avoid partition if possible.

Mountbatten was concerned about civil unrest and, according to Jinnah’s biographer Stanley Wolpert, wanted to return quickly to the navy. In June 1947 he brought the independence date forward to August 1947, only two months away, perhaps partly as a shock tactic during negotiations. Nehru had been insisting on a strong central government in a single country; Jinnah on partition. Nehru finally agreed, later saying that ‘we were tired men and we were getting on in years […] The plan for partition offered a way out and we took it.’⁵

Pakistan was initially composed of two separate territories: West (today’s Pakistan) and East (today’s Bangladesh, independent from 1971). The borders between India and Pakistan were hurriedly devised in five weeks, dividing the Punjab province in the west and the Bengal province in the east. They were determined by Cyril Radcliffe, a British barrister, overseeing a commission to determine each border. He made use of an approximate demarcation by Wavell and took various other factors into account.*

The locations of the borders (the ‘Radcliffe Line’) were confirmed only two days before independence and were not notified until two days after independence, withheld by Mountbatten to avoid controversy before official handover of power at midnight on 14/15 August 1947. Pakistan celebrates independence on 14 August; India on 15 August.

In a blistering speech in March 1947, Churchill said, ‘Everyone knows that the 14 months’ time limit is fatal to any orderly transference of power’, calling the sudden withdrawal ‘Operation Scuttle’ and ‘a shameful flight’.⁶ In fact, there were only five months left for transition because of the subsequent timetable amendment.

* He looked mainly at the religious majority for each district and made adjustments for infrastructure such as railways and canals. He did not use a map that had been pre-agreed by Wavell and Churchill, contrary to the portrayal in the film The Viceroy’s House (2017): see Ian Jack, ‘The Viceroy’s House Version of India’s Partition Brings Fake History to Screen’, Guardian, 2017.

The partition was associated with mass migration and the deaths of perhaps well over a million people.

In the same March 1947 speech, Churchill asked how Britain could ‘allow one fifth of the population of the globe, occupying a region nearly as large as Europe, to fall into chaos and into carnage? Would it not be a world crime […]?’⁷

Around seven million Muslims (over two thirds of India’s Muslim population) moved from India into Pakistan within four years of partition, mostly within a few months after the event. About the same number of Hindus and Sikhs made the opposite journey. The public transport system was overwhelmed and huge queues formed on roads crossing the borders. Mass violence broke out in numerous areas, including along migration routes. Riots, massacres, evictions, abductions, looting and rapes occurred on a huge scale. The death toll is disputed but is perhaps in the range of one to two million.

Serious violence had already begun in 1946 during riots in Calcutta (now Kolkata), and migration began ahead of partition, even though the locations of the borders were not yet known. Jinnah and Gandhi gave independence day speeches but Gandhi avoided the official celebrations, spending the occasion trying to ease tensions in Calcutta.

Gandhi described independence with partition as a ‘wooden loaf’.⁸ For Jinnah, the division of Punjab and Bengal resulted in ‘a shadow and a husk, a maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan’.⁹ He warned that it would sow the seeds of future trouble.

Apart from the areas ruled directly by the British Raj that became India and Pakistan, there were also 562 princely states with varying arrangements with the British Crown as well as some French and Portuguese enclaves such as Goa. Nearly all of these became assimilated into India, although there were strong secessionist movements in some, particularly in Kashmir and Manipur, where troubles continue.

India and Pakistan have fought four wars against each other since independence, three of which have been related to Kashmir. The other was regarding East Pakistan after massacres there in 1971 by West Pakistan, drawing in India and resulting in the creation of Bangladesh the same year.

Churchill is sometimes accused of favouring Jinnah over Gandhi and Nehru, and Muslims over Hindus.

The accusations are usually based on Jinnah’s apparent success in eventually agitating for partition, and on Churchill’s high-profile disdain for his political opponent Gandhi. These tend to overlook the fact that decisions about partition were taken by Attlee and Mountbatten, and that Churchill saw Gandhi as being part of a ruling class of privileged higher-caste Hindus seeking to exploit others, including lower-caste Hindus, minority Muslims and Sikhs. On the other hand, Churchill’s belief that Muslims had more militaristic tendencies sometimes gave him concern that they would end up dominating Hindus in certain circumstances.

Churchill does indeed seem to have had more of an affinity for Muslim rather than Hindu ways of life, as seen through his lenses of Victorian and Edwardian culture. He did not study the teachings of the varying strands of Islam or Hinduism but instead gained superficial cultural impressions as a young man in British India and Sudan, followed later by exposure to the Middle East and interpretations of it by T.E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’). His close friends included a westernised Muslim, Aga Khan III, but no Hindu. Jinnah’s western lifestyle no doubt provided some reassurance for Churchill in contrast to Gandhi’s anti-western agitation.

Churchill had a romanticised regard for the fighting spirit of many of the Muslims he had come across, not least the Mahdists in Sudan (see Gamal Abdel Nasser). Like many of his era, he also had a romanticised view of the ‘Orient’, to the extent that when Churchill was in India in 1907, his future sister-in-law Gwendoline Bertie wrote to him to plead that he did not convert to Islam.

Churchill’s view of Gandhi in the 1940s was influenced by Gandhi’s limited support for the war effort and his Quit India campaign, in contrast to Jinnah’s less confrontational approach. As the leader of a minority group, Jinnah represented less of a threat than Gandhi. Another factor was that the Indian National Congress identified itself with socialism, strongly disliked by Churchill, whereas Jinnah stated that the Muslim League did ‘not want any ‘ism’: Socialism, Communism or National Socialism’.¹⁰

Jinnah’s difficult home life was made easier by his close relationship with his nationalist sister Fatima, the ‘Mother of the Nation’.

Shortly before Jinnah’s first trip to the UK, his mother insisted on an arranged marriage for him to ensure his links with home. He was 16 years old and his bride Emibai, his cousin, was 14. Shortly afterwards, while he was in England, both Emibai and his mother died.

He did not marry again until 25 years later. He often visited his friend Sir Dinshaw Petit, a wealthy Parsi businessman, who was shocked when Jinnah said he would like to marry Petit’s daughter Rattanbai (‘Ruttie’), aged 15. Petit prevented the marriage until Ruttie announced to all at her eighteenth birthday party that she was marrying Jinnah. She converted to Islam and was disowned by her Zoroastrian family.

Jinnah and Ruttie were initially happy but grew increasingly apart after the birth of their daughter, Dina. Ruttie moved into the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay where she lived as a recluse, suffering from depression and illness, probably cancer. She died on her twenty-ninth birthday.

Jinnah was not close to his daughter and objected to her marrying a non-Muslim, a wealthy Parsi industrialist. The marriage only lasted five years before they separated and she moved to the USA.

On the other hand, Jinnah and his younger sister Fatima had a close relationship, facilitated by her involvement in nationalist activism. After attending the University of Calcutta, she ran a dental practice in Bombay until Ruttie’s death, when she moved in with Jinnah to manage his household and bring up Dina. She assisted with the settlement of refugees in Pakistan after the partition. She became well known through her appearances with her brother and stood for president in the 1965 election, gaining considerable popularity and being given the nickname ‘Mother of the Nation’. She lost narrowly to Ayub Khan, an army general who had previously been president after a coup in 1958. Jinnah died in 1948 of tuberculosis and lung cancer, aged 71. Fatima died of heart failure in 1967, aged 73. Around a million people attended Jinnah’s funeral and half a million that of Fatima. They are both buried in the National Mausoleum, Karachi.

3. Biographical summary

Occupation	Barrister, activist, politician
Countries	India, Pakistan
Career	Business apprenticeship, London (1892). Called to the bar, Lincoln’s Inn, London (1895). Barrister practice, Bombay (1896 onwards). Imperial Legislative Council member (1909-19). Joined All-India Muslim League (1913). President, Home Rule League, Bombay branch (1917-20). Resigned from Indian National Congress party (1920). President, All India Postal Staff Union (1925). Legal practice in London (1931-35). President, All-India Muslim League (1919-30) (sessional president 1916, 1920, 1924, 1937-43). Governor-General of Pakistan (1947-48).
Born	c.1876 in Wazir Mansion, Kharadar, Karachi, Bombay Presidency, British India (now Sindh, Pakistan) (2 years younger than Churchill)
Father	Jinnahbhai Poonja (c.1857-c.1901), a wealthy merchant; a Gujarati Khoja Shi’a Muslim; follower of the Aga Khan
Mother	Mithibai (died c.1894)
Siblings	Eldest of seven children (four sons and three daughters): 1. Mahomedali Jinnahbhai, later Mohamed* Ali Jinnah (1876-1948) 2. Ahmad Ali 3. Bunde Ali 4. Rahmat Ali 5. Shireen Bai 6. Fatima ‘Fati’ (1893-1967), dental surgeon, politician, independence activist; ‘Mother of the Nation’ 7. Maryam Bai
Education	Islamic and Christian high schools, Karachi; Lincoln’s Inn, London
Spouses	1. Emibai (1878-1893), Jinnah’s cousin; m. 1892 aged 14 until her death a few months later 2. Rattenbai ‘Ruttie’ Petit (1900-1929), m. 1918 aged 18 (Jinnah was 42) until her death; from a noble Parsi family; converted to Islam before wedding; Islamic name Maryam; separated; died from suspected cancer on her 29th birthday
Relationships
Children	By Rattenbai: Dina (1919-2017); born in London; married Parsi industrialist Neville Wadia; two children; died in New York
Died	1948 in Karachi, Federal Capital Territory (now part of Sindh province), Pakistan (17 years before Churchill), aged 71; tuberculosis and lung cancer
Buried	Mazar-e-Quaid mausoleum, Karachi, Pakistan
Nicknames	Great Leader (Quaid-i-Azam); Father of the Nation (Baba-i-Qaum); Jin (by his sister Fatima)
Height	He wrote 5’11½ (1.82 m) in his 1946 passport but he may have been 5’10” (1.78 m)
Time magazine	Front cover: 1946

^{* The spelling is taken from his 1946 passport.}

4. See also

Asian nationalists

• Aung San (Burma)
• Bose, Subhas Chandra (India)
• Gandhi, Mohandas (Pakistan)

Churchill and Islam

• Aga Khan III

Others associated with India and Pakistan

• Mountbatten, Louis

Churchill controversies

• Imperialism
• Race
• Religion

5. Further reading

Jinnah

• Ahmed, Ishtiaq, Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History (Penguin Random House India Private Limited, 2020)
• Hamdani, Yasser Latif, Jinnah: A Life (Pan Macmillan, 2020)
• Singh, Jaswant, Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence (OUP India, 2010)
• Wolpert, Stanley, Jinnah of Pakistan (Oxford University Press, 1984)

Jinnah’s family

• Khan, Saad S., Ruttie Jinnah: The Woman Who Stood Defiant (Penguin Random House India Private Limited, 2020)
• Pirbhai, M. Reza, Fatima Jinnah (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
• Reddy, Sheela, Mr and Mrs Jinnah: The Marriage That Shook India (Random House Publishers India Pvt. Limited, 2017)

Jinnah and Gandhi

• Akbar, M.J., Gandhi’s Hinduism: The Struggle against Jinnah’s Islam (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)
• Matthews, Roderick, Jinnah vs. Gandhi (Hachette India, 2012)

Independence and partition

• Khan, Yasmin, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale University Press, 2007)
• Von Tunzelmann, Alex, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (Simon & Schuster UK, 2012)
• White-Spunner, Barney, Partition: The Story of Indian Independence and the Creation of Pakistan in 1947 (Simon & Schuster UK, 2017)
• Wolpert, Stanley, Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India (Oxford University Press, USA, 2009)

Churchill and Islam

• Dockter, Warren, Churchill and the Islamic World: Orientalism, Empire and Diplomacy in the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2015)

6. References

1. Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (Oxford University Press, 1984), Preface.

2. Aga Khan III, The Memoirs of Aga Khan: World Enough and Time (Simon and Schuster, 1954), p. 292.

3. Wolpert, p. 87.

4. Although Gandhi only wore a ‘Gandhi cap’ for around two years in 1920 and 1921, it became de rigueur in some nationalist circles for many years later.

5. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale University Press, 2007), p. 85.

6. Hansard, ‘India (Government Policy)’, 1947.

7. Hansard.

8. Pyarelal Nayyar, Mahatma Gandhi – The Last Phase: Vol. 2 (Navajivan Publishing House, 1956), p. 211.

9. V.P. Menon, The Transfer of Power in India (Orient BlackSwan, 1998), p. 163.

10. Mohamed Ali Jinnah, Indian Annual Register, Volume I (Annual Register Office, 1944), p. 212.