Jinnah: An apology for the Qaid-e-Azam

Investors in Jinnah include former prime minister Moeen Qureshi but, as actor Richard Ashby, who portrays former Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in the film, notes, “They’re just amateurs … if they’re going to find a distributor, now is the time to do it.”

More problematic is that Jinnah — which has beensubjected to months of controversy within Pakistan over its portrayal of the westernised intellectual who pushed Pakistan’s creation — is, in many ways, a defensive work which actually suffers in comparison to Gandhi. Gandhi drew scorn in Pakistan because its brief portrayal of Jinnah conformed to the Western stereotype of the leader: A humourless, ambitious aristocrat who sips wine while working to carve a Muslim state out of British India.

Dehlavi’s central character is a different man entirely: frequently witty, compassionate, loving to his wife and sister, worried about potential Hindu-Muslim violence. Portrayed by British actor Christopher Lee — who is known mainly for playing Dracula — this Jinnah is recognisably human, while still being a shrewd and even ruthless politician.

Lee’s Jinnah — in the occasionally simplistic script written by Dehlavi and noted Jinnah scholar Akbar Ahmed — clearly is a product of British and Western training. He is seen twice reprimanding Muslimzealots about the need for women’s rights, even though he also insists that his Parsi wife Ruttie convert to Islam before their marriage.

Yet Jinnah is neither here nor there — and is likely to win objections from Islamists, liberals and Indians over how history is represented.

When Lee’s Jinnah stages debates on the rights of minority Muslims in a free India with Ashby’s Nehru and Sam Dastor’s Gandhi, the movie comes briefly alive with a look at the vexing questions the three leaders faced: What would be the shape of a new India? And could Muslims fit in a democracy heavily weighted to the Hindu majority? Those questions are sidestepped. Instead, the film’s makers stress on the ridiculous idea that the sorry fate of partition was heavily influenced by an affair between Nehru and Lady Mountbatten.

Rather than simply explaining Jinnah, Dehlavi and Ahmed show a radically different world in which Gandhi is conniving, and in which Nehru’s ambitions for power — not Jinnah’s — push forward the splitof the subcontinent.

Perhaps the strongest sign of the film’s defensiveness is a literal trial, conducted in a mock-afterworld, where Jinnah once again dons a lawyer’s robe to try Lord Mountbatten (effectively portrayed as an amiable dolt by James Fox) as guilty for the problems that lagued Pakistan’s birth. The loss of Kashmir, the brutality in which one million people died crossing the Indo-Pakistani border — all of that, the film suggests, is owed to the Mountbattens.

In short, Jinnah seems to be targeted at Pakistani nationalists. Ironically, however, that community demanded dozens of changes in Dehlavi’s original film, including scenes suggesting that Pakistan’s founder regretted the state he had helped create once he saw the violence of its birth.

Jinnah lacks a centre — and Pakistan’s founder, and his creation, remain as enigmatic at the film’s end as they have ever been.