Opinion Looking for Jinnah at Azad Chowk, Moti Paneli

The photograph was removed following a report in The Indian Express on the exhibition.

In Gujarat, Jinnah’s Gujarati roots are only a footnote, although the story of his family is typically that of many Kathiawadi business families, who looked up to Karachi in pre-Partition India, with some settling in Bombay, both ports, for ease of trade. In Karachi, Jinnabhai traded in all kinds of goods, including cotton, wool, hides, and oil-seeds. Stanley Wolpert writes in Jinnah of Pakistan, a biography of the leader, “Business was so good, in fact with profits soaring so high, that he became a banker and money-lender… despite it being forbidden in Islam.”

The story goes that Poonjabhai Thakkar, Jinnahbhai’s father and Jinnah’s grandfather, who belonged to the mercantile Lohana community of Gujarat, was in the fish trading business, because of which he was ostracised by his community and decided to convert to Islam. Thus, Jinnah was born in a Shi’ite Muslim family — the followers of Aga Khan, called ‘Khojas’ in Gujarat, who keep Hindu-sounding names.

Jinnah was the first of seven children born to Jinnahbhai and Mithibai. Although Pakistan celebrates December 25, 1876, as Jinnah’s birthday, the Sind Madressa-tul- Islam of Karachi, the first such school that Jinnah attended, records October 20, 1875 as the birth date of “Mahomedali Jinnahbhai”, writes Wolpert.

Just before Jinnah would leave for London for a business apprenticeship in 1893, Mithibai got Mamad — as Jinnah was called at home — married to 14-year old Emibai, who was also a Khoja from Moti Paneli. “The matchmakers and parents decided everything for Jinnah and his bride, even as young Gandhi’s parents had done a few years before, the way countless other teenage Indian couples were married in the nineteenth century,” writes Wolpert.

Jinnah, then 16, left for London, leaving Emibai behind. He never saw her again as she died long before his return. In 1918, after returning to Bombay to practise in the high court, Jinnah married Ruttie, an 18-year-old Parsi girl who converted to Islam three days before their marriage.

Like most Gujaratis, Jinnahbhai was angry with his son’s decision to “abandon his business career” and study law. Jinnahbhai himself moved to Ratnagiri in 1904, after his business went down, as per Wolpert’s account.

He left behind the house at Azad Chowk in Tower Sheri, Moti Paneli. It is now the house of Popatbhai Becharbhai Pokiya. “Nothing has changed in that building where the Jinnahbhai lived, except some renovations here and there,” says Moti Paneli’s former sarpanch Mansukhbhai Bhalodiya, 66. He adds how the village that had 100 Khoja families back then, now has only five to six.

The house, as described by deputy sarpanch Jatin Bhalodiya, is a typical Gujarati-style village home with “two rooms on the ground floor, two rooms on the first floor and two kitchens”. The house has a courtyard like old houses.

There are at least two accounts of Jinnah having visited Ahmedabad, once in October 1916 to preside over the Bombay Provincial Conference where he had proposed transforming provincial governments like Bombay to elected autonomous administrations where, “Muslims and Hindus, wherever they are in a minority”, have “proper, adequate and effective representation” (Wolpert).

The other is recorded in former Union minister and the late BJP leader Jaswant Singh’s book Jinnah: India-Partition Independence. Jaswant Singh writes that Jinnah attended the Ahmedabad Session of the Congress in 1921 under the “de facto leadership of Gandhi”, which would be his last. “He was perhaps the only individual to be seen in foreign clothes, complete with collar, tie, and was found not spinning the charkha,” writes Singh.

Singh’s book, launched in August 2009, was banned in the state by Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat. The Gujarat government had alleged that the book defamed the image of the country’s first home minister Vallabhbhai Patel by “questioning his patriotic spirit”.

Professor Hari Desai, who specialises in modern Indian socio-political history and teaches at the Ahmedabad-based Chimanbhai Patel Institute, says Jinnah was considered an “anti-hero” in Gujarat. “School textbooks only mention him as someone who demanded Pakistan, but never say who Jinnah really was.”

According to Mansukhbhai, “there were only two famous people from our village — Jinnah and Harshad Mehta (the stockbroker investigated for the securities scam)”.