08-31-2009, 09:30 PM
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Jinnah: neither angel nor demon
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Pakistan's founder was a complex figure. A controversial new book rightly challenges zealous fictions about him
In his analysis of a new book about Jinnah, Kapil Komireddi accuses the author, Jaswant Singh, of "bowdlerising zealously" to rid Pakistan's founder of the "blame of partition". Yet Kapil's account omits certain important facts relevant to any discussion of how the "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity" came to found one of the modern world's only two states carved in the name of a religion (the other being Israel).
To suggest that the story of a man as complex as Jinnah can be told without omissions in the confines of an opinion piece would be unfair to the man and to the storyteller. Kapil errs not in that he makes omissions in the story but that he attempts to tell the story at all in such a confined space. As Kapil rightly points out, Jinnah was, by all accounts, a secular constitutionalist and staunch Indian nationalist for most of his career. The story of how he became the voice of the movement that sought British India's division across religious lines is a complex early 20th century drama involving conflicting personalities and fractured identities set against the backdrop of a dying empire.
The leading characters in this drama â Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah, Patel, Iqbal â are variously worshipped and demonised in modern India and Pakistan. Yet, they are all merely human, children of India's first tryst with modernity, individuals trying to make sense of their own very different histories to conjure visions of their future, who, in doing so, happen to alter the history of the subcontinent forever.
Their stories are rich and worthy of being told and retold, and for anyone interested in how modern India and Pakistan came to be, their relationships with one another are worth examining in detail. These are stories of evolving identities in which we find the Harrow and Cambridge educated Mr Nehru becoming Pandit Nehru; barrister Gandhi becoming Mahatma Gandhi; Sir Iqbal becoming Allama Iqbal; and, the most fascinating of them all, the provincial Mahomedali Jinnahbhai transforming into the Savile Row-fitted Mr MA Jinnah, before finally settling on the Persianic Quaid-e-Azam. These are splendid, complex, brilliant men, each guided by his own sense of self and nationhood, who come together to dismantle the British Raj, yet part ways when the end is in sight.
It is thus unfortunate that these fascinating individuals must always be seen through the prism of their greatest collective failure: the sequence of wholly avoidable events leading to the bloodbath of partition. And as events of great human tragedy often do, the story of partition has become a deeply divisive and political issue in modern India and Pakistan.
The two countries have evolved competing histories of the event and the persons responsible for it: India sees the creation of Pakistan as a result of machinations by Jinnah, his band of Muslim League cronies and the conniving, departing British; Pakistan imagines its birth as a result of a hard-fought historic struggle against the twin evils of British imperialism and Hindu majoritarianism.
It is in this wide chasm between two competing falsehoods that Singh finds his space. In Singh's book a new Jinnah is born, a much more human Jinnah, neither the demon hated in India nor the hero worshipped in Pakistan: a self-made man in an era of princes and privilege, driven by ambition to the pinnacle of success, yet held back by circumstance; a person whose intransigence was fed by that of those he was up against; and one whose resolve eventually broke him and the India he had set out to free.
His argument, drawn from primary sources of the time, centres on the sense of insecurity bred in the psyche of Muslim leadership as a result of what they perceived to be gains of Hindus, as represented by the Congress, at their expense. The level to which these fears were real is, of course, open to debate among historians, but as Singh explains, this "minority syndrome" amongst Muslim leadership caused religion to become the field where battles over federalism, socialism, modernism, and Indian identity are fought between these highly complex personalities.
He is, of course, not the first to challenge the historiography of partition. As early as 1960, Ram Manohar Lohia, an active member of the nationalist movement, had published a book called Guilty Men of India's Partition, which criticized Nehru and Patel's acquiescence to partition. In her 1985 book The Sole Spokesman, Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal examined the last decade of British power in India and reached similar conclusions as Singh as to the causes of India's partition.
Kapil is wrong to dismiss Singh's work â he does an important job in straddling the important boundary between academic, polemical and popular histories and reaching a conclusion that challenges both prevailing national narratives. Needless to say, it helps that Singh is one of modern India's most prominent individuals, and has the ability to generate a greater popular effect than the most erudite of academics: the fact that his book has been banned in Gujarat, while sad and reprehensible, speaks volume for the level of discomfort his narrative is causing to that of the Indian establishment's. He may ultimately be wrong â the strength of his evidence leads me to suspect he is more right than most existing accounts â but the very existence of his work should serve to kindle a long overdue soul-searching in both countries as to how we see ourselves, our leaders and each other. When it comes to the question of Jinnah, independence, India and partition, zealotry must give way to intelligent discourse if we are to ever exorcise the ghosts of partition.
Jinnah: neither angel nor demon
</b>
Pakistan's founder was a complex figure. A controversial new book rightly challenges zealous fictions about him
In his analysis of a new book about Jinnah, Kapil Komireddi accuses the author, Jaswant Singh, of "bowdlerising zealously" to rid Pakistan's founder of the "blame of partition". Yet Kapil's account omits certain important facts relevant to any discussion of how the "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity" came to found one of the modern world's only two states carved in the name of a religion (the other being Israel).
To suggest that the story of a man as complex as Jinnah can be told without omissions in the confines of an opinion piece would be unfair to the man and to the storyteller. Kapil errs not in that he makes omissions in the story but that he attempts to tell the story at all in such a confined space. As Kapil rightly points out, Jinnah was, by all accounts, a secular constitutionalist and staunch Indian nationalist for most of his career. The story of how he became the voice of the movement that sought British India's division across religious lines is a complex early 20th century drama involving conflicting personalities and fractured identities set against the backdrop of a dying empire.
The leading characters in this drama â Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah, Patel, Iqbal â are variously worshipped and demonised in modern India and Pakistan. Yet, they are all merely human, children of India's first tryst with modernity, individuals trying to make sense of their own very different histories to conjure visions of their future, who, in doing so, happen to alter the history of the subcontinent forever.
Their stories are rich and worthy of being told and retold, and for anyone interested in how modern India and Pakistan came to be, their relationships with one another are worth examining in detail. These are stories of evolving identities in which we find the Harrow and Cambridge educated Mr Nehru becoming Pandit Nehru; barrister Gandhi becoming Mahatma Gandhi; Sir Iqbal becoming Allama Iqbal; and, the most fascinating of them all, the provincial Mahomedali Jinnahbhai transforming into the Savile Row-fitted Mr MA Jinnah, before finally settling on the Persianic Quaid-e-Azam. These are splendid, complex, brilliant men, each guided by his own sense of self and nationhood, who come together to dismantle the British Raj, yet part ways when the end is in sight.
It is thus unfortunate that these fascinating individuals must always be seen through the prism of their greatest collective failure: the sequence of wholly avoidable events leading to the bloodbath of partition. And as events of great human tragedy often do, the story of partition has become a deeply divisive and political issue in modern India and Pakistan.
The two countries have evolved competing histories of the event and the persons responsible for it: India sees the creation of Pakistan as a result of machinations by Jinnah, his band of Muslim League cronies and the conniving, departing British; Pakistan imagines its birth as a result of a hard-fought historic struggle against the twin evils of British imperialism and Hindu majoritarianism.
It is in this wide chasm between two competing falsehoods that Singh finds his space. In Singh's book a new Jinnah is born, a much more human Jinnah, neither the demon hated in India nor the hero worshipped in Pakistan: a self-made man in an era of princes and privilege, driven by ambition to the pinnacle of success, yet held back by circumstance; a person whose intransigence was fed by that of those he was up against; and one whose resolve eventually broke him and the India he had set out to free.
His argument, drawn from primary sources of the time, centres on the sense of insecurity bred in the psyche of Muslim leadership as a result of what they perceived to be gains of Hindus, as represented by the Congress, at their expense. The level to which these fears were real is, of course, open to debate among historians, but as Singh explains, this "minority syndrome" amongst Muslim leadership caused religion to become the field where battles over federalism, socialism, modernism, and Indian identity are fought between these highly complex personalities.
He is, of course, not the first to challenge the historiography of partition. As early as 1960, Ram Manohar Lohia, an active member of the nationalist movement, had published a book called Guilty Men of India's Partition, which criticized Nehru and Patel's acquiescence to partition. In her 1985 book The Sole Spokesman, Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal examined the last decade of British power in India and reached similar conclusions as Singh as to the causes of India's partition.
Kapil is wrong to dismiss Singh's work â he does an important job in straddling the important boundary between academic, polemical and popular histories and reaching a conclusion that challenges both prevailing national narratives. Needless to say, it helps that Singh is one of modern India's most prominent individuals, and has the ability to generate a greater popular effect than the most erudite of academics: the fact that his book has been banned in Gujarat, while sad and reprehensible, speaks volume for the level of discomfort his narrative is causing to that of the Indian establishment's. He may ultimately be wrong â the strength of his evidence leads me to suspect he is more right than most existing accounts â but the very existence of his work should serve to kindle a long overdue soul-searching in both countries as to how we see ourselves, our leaders and each other. When it comes to the question of Jinnah, independence, India and partition, zealotry must give way to intelligent discourse if we are to ever exorcise the ghosts of partition.