Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  In South Africa, Gandhi had established a pair of ashrams in which to conduct what he called his “experiments with truth”—everything from fad diets and “nature cures” to attempts to break down Hinduism’s caste barriers. He and his acolytes lived lives of utopian simplicity: they swore off drink and sex, prayed regularly, grew and cooked their own vegetarian food, cleaned their own toilets. Outside the ashram, Gandhi’s efforts to organize South Africa’s Indian immigrant community made him a celebrity. Instead of meekly submitting to laws that were unjust, or challenging the more powerful government by force of arms, he taught local Indians to resist peacefully—to court jail willingly for the sake of their principles.

  Gandhi dubbed his strategy satyagraha—literally, “insistence on truth”—and it proved devastatingly effective. South African officials had no idea how to handle the “wild and disconcerting commotion” caused by thousands of Indians marching in protest and offering themselves up for arrest. The prisons swelled with Indian inmates, and journalists from around the world flocked to interview the charismatic Gandhi. It was all “very trying,” admitted future South African premier Gen. Jan Christiaan Smuts.16

  When Gandhi now proposed replicating his methods in India, Jinnah balked. The Muslim did not challenge the principle behind satyagraha—the idea that Indians should peacefully refuse to cooperate with their British masters. “I say I am fully convinced of non-cooperation,” he declared at a contentious Congress meeting in September 1920. But Jinnah did not believe that the Indian masses were educated or disciplined enough to ensure their protests remained nonviolent. He thought the Congress leaders needed to prepare their followers first. “Will you not give me time for this?” he asked the crowd at the meeting, plaintively.17

  Not all of Jinnah’s motivations were so high-minded, of course. He was unquestionably a snob: later, when tens of thousands of Muslims turned out at rallies to see him, he would recoil from shaking hands with his own supporters.18 He also found Gandhi’s appeal to the largely Hindu masses dangerously sectarian. At his evening prayer meetings, the Mahatma would frame his political arguments using parables from Hindu fables; he described his vision for an independent India as a “Ram Rajya”—a mythical state of ideal government under the god Ram. All the chanting and praying that accompanied Gandhi’s sermons seemed to Jinnah like theatrics.19

  What historians rarely acknowledge, though, is that Jinnah worried less about Hindus than about the danger of inflaming religious passions among Muslims. At the time, mullahs across the subcontinent were threatening to launch a jihad if the British, who had defeated the Ottomans in World War I, deposed the Turkish Sultan—the caliph, or leader, of the world’s Sunni Muslims. Led by a pair of fiery brothers, Mohammad and Shaukat Ali, this “Khilafat” movement had attracted an unsavory mob of supporters. The acerbic Bengali writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri remembers Khilafat volunteers as “recruited from the lowest Muslim riffraff . . . brandishing their whips at people.”20

  Jinnah had no sympathy for these rough-edged Muslims nor for their fanatic cause. He feared that their rage would inevitably turn from the British to Hindus. Gandhi, on the other hand, threw his support behind the Khilafat movement; in turn, Muslim votes gave him the slight majority he needed to launch his satyagraha movement.21 Years later, Gandhi recalled Jinnah telling him that he had “ruined politics in India by dragging up a lot of unwholesome elements in Indian life and giving them political prominence, that it was a crime to mix up politics and religion the way he had done.”22

  Nowadays most Indian accounts put Jinnah’s opposition to Gandhi down to jealousy. At a follow-up Congress meeting in December 1920, Jinnah drew jeers by referring to “Mister” Gandhi in his speech, rather than the more respectful “Mahatma.” In fact, although he slipped once or twice more, Jinnah did switch to using “Mahatma.” What he absolutely refused to do was refer to Khilafat leader Mohammad Ali as “Maulana,” a term reserved for distinguished Islamic scholars. Jinnah was not about to encourage what he saw as religious demagoguery. “If you will not allow me the liberty to . . . speak of a man in the language which I think is right, I say you are denying me the liberty which you are asking for,” he vainly protested.23 The crowd’s howls chased him off the stage.

  That humiliating scene marked the beginning of a long slide into irrelevance for Jinnah as a national political figure. Sadly, his concerns appeared to be borne out less than a year later, when Khilafat protesters in the southern Malabar region turned on their Hindu neighbors and massacred hundreds of them. Yet by that time, Gandhi, now the undisputed leader of the Congress, had irreversibly transformed the nationalist movement. A new crowd now dominated party meetings—middle-class and lower-middle-class men and women, clad in saris and kurtas and sitting on the ground cross-legged rather than in chairs. Jinnah still got upset when his bearer laid out the wrong cufflinks for him.24 He no longer fit in.

  Jinnah did not disappear from the political scene, but as Gandhi’s Congress grew larger and larger, the League leader was pushed further and further to the margins. He became what he had never wanted to be—a purely Muslim politician, reduced to petitioning for concessions for his community. By the end of the 1920s, the League had begun to break up into factions, and Jinnah’s influence had become negligible.25 Now his former Congress comrades dismissed him as not even the most important among several Muslim leaders. They suspected that Jinnah could not “deliver the goods”—the widespread support of Indian Muslims.26

  This was not the illustrious nationalist hero with whom the impressionable Ruttie had fallen in love. After giving birth to a daughter, Dina, in August 1919, Jinnah’s young wife had plunged into a half-baked mysticism, taking up crystals and séances. She may have begun using drugs like opium to combat a painful intestinal ailment.27 The differences in the couple’s ages and temperaments became too obvious to ignore. “She drove me mad,” Jinnah told one friend. “She was a child and I should never have married her.”28 In early 1928, Ruttie moved into a suite at Bombay’s Taj Mahal Hotel, leaving Jinnah home with eight-year-old Dina.29 That spring, visiting Paris with her mother, Ruttie fell into an unexplained coma and almost died.

  Jinnah, traveling in Ireland with a friend, immediately rushed to the French capital and arranged for a new doctor for her. While she recovered, their relationship did not. Jinnah returned to India at the end of the year alone, now abandoned not just by his followers but by his wife. Two months later, on 19 February 1929, Ruttie fell unconscious in her room at the Taj Mahal Hotel. She died the next day, on her twenty-ninth birthday.

  Most accounts say only that the circumstances of Ruttie’s demise were “mysterious.” But her daughter, Dina, put it more bluntly: “My mother committed suicide,” she told Jinnah’s first biographer.30 The embarrassed author left that nugget out of his hagiography, and it’s never been acknowledged elsewhere. Still, even at the time, rumors about the death were rife. One of Nehru’s sisters wrote that she had “reason to believe that [Ruttie had] planned” her own demise.31

  On the night of Ruttie’s funeral, Jinnah sat with a mutual friend, Kanji Dwarkadas, who had seen her just before she died. “Never have I found a man so sad and bitter. He screamed his heart out,” Dwarkadas recalled. “Something I saw had snapped in him. The death of his wife was not just a sad event, nor just something to be grieved over, but he took it, this act of God, as a failure and a personal defeat in his life.” Jinnah never wanted to be reminded of his private tragedy, which had become so humiliatingly public. He packed away Ruttie’s jades and silks and volumes of Oscar Wilde in boxes and rarely mentioned her again.32

  There was nothing left for Jinnah in India. In its two decades of existence, the Muslim League had accumulated fewer than two thousand members, most of whom did not pay their dues.33 Creditors tried to seize what little furniture remained at League headquarters to sell at auction. Parts of the factionalized party did not even recognize Jinnah’s leadership.

  In 1931, Jinnah moved to London with Dina
and his sister, Fatima. He took up cases before the Privy Council and bought a rambling Victorian mansion overlooking Hampstead Heath. He refused to answer questions about when—or if—he would return to India. “I seem,” he told an Indian journalist over lunch at Simpson’s, with startling candor, “to have reached a dead end.”34

  The crowds were beyond belief. When Jawaharlal looked out from the rickety stages he climbed day after day, he saw a seething, sweaty, excited mass of humanity. Tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people stretched to the horizon. As he crisscrossed India—by train, car, bul­lock cart, horse, camel, elephant, bicycle, paddleboat, canoe—thousands more Indians lined the roadsides, their hands clasped in respectful greeting, hoping for a glimpse of the forty-seven-year-old Congress president.35

  Nehru shouted himself hoarse over static-filled loudspeakers. At times the crowds’ “madness entered my veins,” he wrote to a friend, and he would leap into the heaving mass to get closer to his admirers.36 Over the course of three months of electioneering at the end of 1936 and beginning of 1937, Nehru estimated that more than 10 million Indians turned out to see him at rallies and along the roadsides. He shook so many hands that his palms swelled.

  Much was at stake in the February 1937 elections. For the first time, Indians would take control of the legislatures and ministries that governed the eleven provinces of British India. But that hardly explained the outpouring of affection that greeted Nehru wherever he went; most people in the crowds did not meet the qualifications to vote. “Why does this happen? I can’t make out and all my vanity does not help me to understand,” he wrote, genuinely amazed.37

  Jawaharlal’s rise had been as vertiginous as Jinnah’s fall. Twenty years before, when the League leader was negotiating his triumphant Luck­now Pact with Nehru’s father, the son had been little more, in his own words, than a conceited “prig.”38 He had returned from England in 1912, overeducated and aimless, disdainful of the “immoderately moderate” nationalist politics of the time yet with no alternative to propose.39 He worked dully in his father’s law offices and took the cases sent his way. Motilal found him a shy, pretty Kashmiri girl named Kamala to marry. They wed when she turned sixteen (he was twenty-five) and moved into a wing of Nehru’s childhood home. A year later they, too, had a daughter: Indira.

  When he met Gandhi on the sidelines of the 1916 Lucknow conference, Nehru found the ascetic older man to be “very distant and different and unpolitical.” Much of the Mahatma’s philosophizing looked to the resolutely secular Cambridge man—as it had to Jinnah—like cant. Yet as a child, Nehru had fallen in love with Lafcadio Hearn’s tales of adventure and imagined himself, sword in hand, leading his countrymen to freedom against the British.40 Gandhi’s satyagraha offered him exactly what he had been craving—action. It was a way to fight the British, albeit without weapons or bloodshed.

  Nehru had thrown himself into the cause. For Gandhi the independence struggle was at least as much moral as political: he wanted Indians to make themselves worthy of freedom, to develop self-reliance before assuming self-government. Nehru became a true believer. He gave up his lawyer’s suits for kurtas made of homespun cotton. He replaced the rich roasts and claret at Anand Bhavan with plain flatbread and lentils. He even got himself a charkha, a wooden spinning wheel, and heeded Gandhi’s call for every Indian to spin yarn at least an hour each day to break the dependence on British-made cloth.

  A shy speaker at first, Nehru found his voice organizing peasants in the countryside around Allahabad, tromping from village to muddy village trailed by policemen, agents from the Criminal Investigation Department, and, on one occasion, a most unhappy deputy collector from Lucknow wearing patent leather pumps. The young rebel was arrested for organizing picketing, for seditious statements, and for defying official orders. He went to jail frequently and willingly: at times he seemed to enjoy himself in confinement more than outside prison walls. “Jail has indeed become a heaven for us,” he declared at one early trial, in a statement that became a call to arms for many young activists. “To serve India in the battle of freedom is honour enough. . . . But to suffer for the dear country! What greater good fortune could befall an Indian?”41 In his jail diaries, he would record how many feet of yarn he had spun each day; in 1922, he sent home 10,576 yards of fine homespun cloth.42 “[We] lived in a kind of intoxication,” Nehru later wrote.43 He was convinced he and his comrades were not only breaking India’s shackles but changing the world.

  As Jinnah’s profile shrank during the 1920s, Nehru’s grew, both inside and outside of India. Kamala was a sickly bride, suffering from tuberculosis, and he spent months with her in Europe going from sanatorium to sanatorium. On those trips he developed ties to leftists and revolutionaries from other parts of the world, and integrated India’s struggle into the broader wave of nationalist movements then sweeping parts of Asia and the Middle East. His international profile added to his glamour at home. By the end of the decade, Nehru had already served as Congress president once, at age forty. Newspapers showered him with flowery honorifics. When he came down to breakfast, Kamala and his youngest sister, Krishna (nicknamed “Betty” as a child by her English governess), would bow deeply and ask “how the Jewel of India had slept, or if the Embodiment of Sacrifice would like some bacon and eggs.”44

  Nehru’s wife, like Jinnah’s, died young. In February 1936, after months of fruitless treatment, Kamala passed away in a Lausanne sanatorium from tuberculosis. Theirs had been an affectionate and respectful marriage but not a passionate one. Nehru’s letters home from jail were dutiful and banal—laundry lists of queries about relatives, requests for new books, admonitions for Kamala to take care of her health. Her death seemed to elevate their relationship, at least in the eyes of others. Nehru returned from Europe to an outpouring of sympathy. Thousands of condolence letters flooded in; newspapers ran paeans to Kamala as a virtuous, selfless helpmeet to the nationalist cause. Bazaar vendors sold a diptych with photos of her and Jawaharlal side by side, captioned “The Ideal Couple.”45

  Before the end of the year, Nehru appears to have plunged into a far steamier affair with none other than Ruttie’s young friend Padmaja Naidu, Sarojini’s buxom daughter. They had known each other for years. His letters to “Bebee,” a decade his junior, had always been far more flirtatious than those to Kamala. Now Nehru openly admitted to the sultry Padmaja, “I am afraid I do not feel paternally inclined towards you.”46 From the campaign trail he sent her pining letters: “My dear, how you fill my mind! When I ought to be thinking of something else your image creeps in unawares through some window and upsets the train of my thought.”47 On a visit to Agra her image “got rather mixed up with the moonlight and the Taj,” he sighed.48 He signed one missive, “My love to you, carissima.”49

  Flush with passion, adored by millions, Nehru could barely deign to notice Jinnah, who had returned to India to lead the League’s campaign in the crucial 1937 elections. Since 1909 the British had allowed Muslims to vote only for candidates for certain reserved Muslim seats. Jinnah publicly suggested that after the elections, he would be open to throwing the League’s Muslim support behind his old comrades in the Congress. Nehru mocked the idea. “I thank Mr. Jinnah for the offer,” he told reporters in November 1936, but “so far as our fight for freedom is concerned, it is going to be carried on by the Indian National Congress and the Indian National Congress alone.”50 Indians of all faiths faced a simple choice in the elections, Nehru declared: either cast their votes for the Congress Party or resign themselves to continued servitude to the British.51

  Jinnah tried to protest. There was a third player in India, he insisted—the League. But the results supported Nehru. Congress swept the elections, taking control of eight of eleven provinces. The League polled less than 5 percent of the Muslim vote nationwide. Two or three winning League candidates did flirt with the idea of supporting Congress administrations in exchange for provincial cabinet posts. But Nehru laid down stiff terms: if any Leaguers wanted a
share of power, he said, they would have to join the Congress and obey its high command rather than Jinnah.52

  Ironically, Congress had done even worse than the League among Muslim voters, most of whom had cast their ballots for smaller, regional parties.53 Yet that did not faze Nehru. He directed party leaders to deploy Congress’s vast resources in an attempt to win over the Muslim masses. To Jinnah, his younger rival seemed intent on becoming India’s “ambassador of unity” himself.

  Jinnah was now sixty years old, graying and sickly. Unlike Nehru—whose affair with Padmaja would hardly have been a secret in certain circles—he was a lonely man. His pinched sister Fatima was his only real companion. In November 1938, his nineteen-year-old daughter Dina defied him and married a Parsi boy against his wishes.54 From this moment onward a new bitterness entered the League leader’s voice whenever Nehru’s name came up. “What can I say to the busybody President of the Congress . . . [who] must poke his nose into everything except minding his own business?” Jinnah seethed to one journalist.55 Nehru had become more than a political opponent: he had usurped all the power, glory, and romance that had once seemed Jinnah’s by right.

  Jinnah could easily give up and return to London. Or he could fight back. His genius was to link his own frustrations to those of his community. After the elections, Muslims, too, shared Jinnah’s sense of dismay and powerlessness. In the Congress provinces, a whole new breed of official began stalking the halls of government—men in rough, rumpled homespun dhotis and white caps styled like the one Gandhi wore. The vast majority of the newcomers were Hindu, and they now controlled the schools and police. British officials, once omnipotent, had to take orders from them. Ministers often favored other Hindus for jobs, licenses, and patronage. Educated, urban Muslims—the professionals and petty clerks who would become the backbone of a rejuvenated Muslim League—could see that their prospects looked bleak in any Congress-ruled India.