Mr and Mrs Jinnah by Sheela Reddy: book review

Mr and Mrs Jinnah: The Marriage that Shook India by Sheela Reddy (2022) is an account of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and his wife Ruttie Jinnah, set in Delhi, Bombay (Mumbai) and Karachi from 1918.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948) knew Rattanbai “Ruttie” Petit (1900-1929) from birth. When she was sixteen, 24 years his junior, she became his second wife in 1918, despite their age, background and religious differences: “The marriage seemed an impossibility. Viewed from any angle, the hurdles, whether personal, social or legal, were insurmountable.”

While much has been written about Jinnah, little has been written about his wife, who died on her 29^th birthday, except by Jinnah’s sister Fatima in her autobiography, My Brother – and she did not like Ruttie. Sheela Reddy’s book is well-researched from archived material in the Nehru Museum and Memorial Library. Much of the information is derived from letters exchanged between Ruttie and Sarojini Naidu, the Indian poet and political activist, and her teenage daughters Padmaja and Leilamani.

Set amid his legal and political career and his pursuit of a separate state for Muslims, aristocratic Ruttie’s passion was for fashion and romantic poetry. They were as different as extreme ends of politics and whimsy. But there was at least one common threat to each of them: Mahatma Gandhi. People “envied her, especially in an era when Gandhi was conspiring, as Sarojini once complained, to impose ugliness and drabness on the whole world, with only Ruttie standing out, defiantly stunning.”

Giving equal consideration in this book, this book details the strain of the relationship of Mr and Mrs Jinnah, destined but doomed, and ends long before the 1947 partition of India.

From openthemagazine.com March 2017

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Martina Nicolls is an Australian author and international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, and foreign aid audits and evaluations. She lives in Paris.

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