Religion a political tool!

Jinnah (1998)
Screenplay, direction: Jamil Dehlavi

This must be Pakistan's reply to Richard Attenborough's narration of the Father of India, Mahatma Gandhi. It was made, not by a Pakistani, but by a London-based British of Pakistani-French descent. The controversial Jamil Dehlavi, whose 1980 film 'The Blood of Hussain' earned the ire of the Pakistani government. As the name suggests, the storyline paralleled the events surrounding the historic Battle of Karbala, which is vital in the Shia tradition, not to the predominantly Sunni Pakistanis.

Even though this film fetes the founder, the Quaid-i-Azam, the great leader of Pakistan, it was never screened in Pakistan. Most depictions of Jinnah elsewhere are often of one who is cunning, conniving, humourless, and challenging to deal with. To be fair, this film tries as much as possible to paint a picture of a well-meaning, conscientious Jinnah. It, however, glaringly gives a blank about a few particular things about his background that questions his portrayal as a soldier of Islam in his quest to establish a brand new fully Islamic country to safeguard the welfare of Muslims in the subcontinent. Jinnah and his Muslim League Party feared that an independent India would mean injustice from the British Raj would be transferred to another heathen ruler, the Hindu Raj.

In a flashback sequence, the story is told in a flip-flop manner, as Jinnah is at the fabled heaven's gate and being interviewed by St Peter. St Peter's archival system faces a glitch; hence, Jinnah has to narrate in person his life events. St Peter walks through his life, literally, as Jinnah is asked whether he regrets all the things he did in his lifetime and whether he would do it all again with the wisdom of hindsight. With a few regrets to his family life and the people who perished during Partition, Jinnah's answer is yes.

Nowhere in the film was it hinted about Jinnah's origin. The fact that he was a Gujerati, not from Punjab, where central Pakistan was carved out. It also omitted that he was of Shia denomination. I suppose where he came and at that time, it did not matter. He also did not speak Urdu, the spoken language of the majority of Muslims in India.

Jinnah's grandparents were Gujarati Hindus who were converted by a Sufi. Jinnah himself was not a traditionalist. After getting married as his mother's pre-requisite before leaving to study in England, he was initially meant to study medicine. He turned mid-way to read law and turned out quite a force to be reckoned in the courts. In 1929, he was said to have successfully defended Sardar Patel in a funds misappropriation case. He stood in Bhagat Singh's and Bal Tilak's legal team in the right to speech trial. In his famous speech, he asked the court, "You want to prosecute them or persecute them?"

Jinnah with his sister and confidante Fatima

At one time in the movie, Jinnah is seen as a maverick Anglophile lawyer arguing in the British courts. A plea by a friend, poet-philosopher-politician Muhammad Iqbal, turned his attention to the Muslim plight in India. And he plunged head-on into his Two Nation strategy. What they conveniently omit is that Jinnah was not particularly religious. He lived the life of a wealthy English gentleman, openly ate pork, consumed whiskey, wore expensive European clothing items, and married a non-Muslim, a Farsi as his second wife. He was neither a great admirer of Muslim principles nor a frequenter of mosques.

Islam was a political tool to claim a new nation using victimhood of persecution by radical Hindu elements in India. Paradoxically, this same element assassinated Gandhi, a Hindu leader. The premise of this new country, Pakistan, was to offer its citizens equal rights, privileges, and obligations, irrespective of colour, caste, creed, or community. It promised citizens that religion had nothing to do with the state's business but merely a matter of personal faith. Obviously, this piped dream came crashing down only a year after the birth of this nation.

Richard Lintern as young Jinnah

When Jinnah succumbed to the illness (TB, disease of consumption as it was called then; it consumes your body), which was a tightly-guarded secret between Jinnah and his physician of the Zoroastrian faith, Dr Jal Patel, he left behind a trail of dictators who had set aside democracy principles and let religious zealots dictate how a country should be run. Jinnah led as a Governor-General, and his word was law. Liaqat Ali, who became his successor, decided to accept Islam as the official religion. This caused a frenzy. Many, including its law minister, Jogendra Nath Mandal, a Dalit Hindu, who was impressed with Jinnah's vision, fled for their lives, taking refuge in India. Pakistan went on to become an Islamic Republic in 1956 after a military coup.

Jinnah's second marriage to Rattanbhai (Ruttie) Petit needs mention. Jinnah was Ruttie's father's guest in his mansion for two years when he asked a 16-year-old Ruttie hand in marriage. The 24 years of age difference and the differing religion were hurdles, but it happened two years later when Ruttie was a major. Probably because of the age difference and the different priorities in life, she had clinical depression. It is said that she later succumbed to morphine overdose. Ironically, Jinnah's only daughter, Dina, married an Indian-born Farsi, against Jinnah's approval and was disowned by him.

A nation's fate is decided under a tree.

Even though this movie is supposed to give a human touch to the founder of a country often portrayed negatively, and as a villain, it never got approval for screening in cinemas. The detractors complain that it is wrong to cast an actor who is synonymous with playing horror and vampire films to represent an esteemed leader of a nation. It is not that he is of European descent. Christopher Lee, who assumed the role, actually did a fantastic portrayal of Jinnah and was the spitting image of Jinnah himself, as we see in pictures. Lee also regards his performance here as the best in his career.

A stellar performance by the cast but history, as they say, is muti-dimensional. The viewers have to accept the storytelling maturely. The almost unrecognisable and puffed-up Shashi Kapoor appears as the St Peter character.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

In the name of freedom

Freedom at Midnight
Authors: Larry Collins & Dominic Lapiere (1975)

Freedom, surviving the tests of time.

One look at the title, one might be forgiven to think that it might a draggy almost 600 paged slow account of the events leading to the lowering of the Union Jack and the subsequent hoisting in the full glory of the tri-coloured new flag with the emblem of Ashoka Chakra (Wheel of Righteousness). Luckily, it turns out to be one of the best accounts of the history of British India right down to the nitty-gritty account of little secrets of Indian now lost royalties. It is the result of three years of extensive research and numerous interviews.

Browsing through some of the comments online, we can see other people’s viewpoint on this book. Some lament that it is a one-sided Western view of the happenings in a helpless land of the natives. Most of the account of the event are through Louis Mountbatten’s written journals, letters and one-to-one interview with him by the authors. The authors are accused of making a saint out of whom they describe as a sex-crazed eccentric old politician. The dirty secrets of the former monarchs are laid out bare with hearsay evidence.

Be as it may, this informative book is an attention grabber. It tells about small little secrets that are quite ’new’ to me. The story, even though is supposed to be based on historical facts, is told in a narrative form rather than a descriptive one.

Every time, a colony attains independence from the British Empire, there would be bonfires, not one but two. One is started by merry making freedom fighters who cannot wait to lead the country in the direction they want and another by the Imperialist who cannot wait to erase any trace of their misdeeds and squandering of their treasures! In India, in the fire too went secrets and shreds of evidence of the power crazy and sex crazed treacherous monarchs of old India.

Mountbatten is pictured here as the last of the line of British greats trying to do something great to a nation that they should not rip apart in the first place. His job, at the time of appointment, is to give India her independence. The various dialogues with its deal seem to meet no compromise on the type of post-Independence India. The kings of Patiala, Hyderabad, Kashmir and others are scared that they might be penniless and powerless. The Muslims, under the leadership of Jinnah, insists on an Islamic state. Jinnah, even though portrays himself as the fighter for the Muslims, is pictured as a whisky-drinking, pork-eating Musalman only by name who does not grace the mosques. He has a well-kept secret; he was diagnosed with a disease that was as good as a death sentence at that time, tuberculosis. His days were numbered. Hence, the urgent push for a new nation - Pakistan (Punjab Province, Afghani frontier, Kashmir, Baluchistan, -stan).

Many arm-twisting manoeuvres led to the carving up the subcontinent. As for this tough job of breaking up families and agricultural lands, a judge, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never set foot in India, is summoned.

A significant portion of the book gives the account of the emotional and violent events of Partition. Brothers, only separated by the idea of the creator and their destiny senselessly kill each other to leave each other blind of their own absurdity. Many dreams, families and lives were shattered to prove the greatness of each other’s belief. Gandhi’s presence in Bengal, however, averted a major bloodbath that was expected there. His emotional blackmail tool was starving. Like a sulking child, he managed to get his way repeatedly by creating a hype about his abstinence from food, the last requesting for sparing of Muslim lives in India.

This gave the impression to the hardline Hindu supremacy groups that Gandhi is the cause of the division of the nation. Furthermore, he had planned for a march to Pakistan to plead for peace in Punjab, to spare for Muslim lives there.

The book gives a detailed description of the plotting, execution and subsequent investigation of Gandhi’s assassination in the garden of Birla House on the faithful Friday of 30th January 1948 by Nathuram Godse and his band of similar-minded Hindu anarchists.

I always wondered why India, the land that gave the world advances in astrology was given independence in an apparently inauspicious month of Aadi. Apparently, it was not their choosing. It turned out to be an arbitrary date plucked from thin air by Mountbatten. 15th was a lucky day for him as that was the day the Japanese surrendered in WW2. The Indian astrologers, initially unhappy with the choice of date, scrambled back to recalculate and rediscover indeed a window of subha murth (good times) around midnight of 15th August 1947. Technically, in the Indian calculation, the day breaks at dawn. So, India’s proclamation of Self Rule was made on 14th August 1947 night, by Indian standards, not 15th, like Pakistan’s.

This book was loaned to me by an 89-year-old man from Quetta, Baluchistan, which is now the hotbed of terrorist activities in Pakistan. This gentleman is an eyewitness to the actual events and lives to tell about his loss. He, being in the heat of things, during one of the man’s ugliest events, after living in harmony for generations, has unyielding opinions of the Partition. He religiously attends temple prayers on every Sunday, singing hymns of praises of the Divine Forces read from an Urdu script. The words look Arabic, but he sings in Sanskrit. Such was the blurring of cultures in India long ago.

P.S. The camaraderie among the people in the pre-Aurangzeb era can be imagined in the events happening after the passing of their first spiritual leader, Guru Nanak. He had such a following amongst the Muslims that both Muslims and Sikhs did their own ceremonies to send him off to the afterlife!