No one around that table was blameless for Partition, but that the subject was on the table at all was down to Jinnah. Like Lear dividing his kingdom, Jinnah saw Partition as a form of inoculation—“that future strife / May be prevented now.” Scholars today still argue over why this was so. Some say he was forced into this position after failing to secure a liberal India in which Muslim rights were protected. Others believe a liberal Islam, in a separate society, was his true desire. That he didn’t get what he wanted either way—that’s obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, is the kind of leader Jinnah was trying to be.
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In social background and cultural habits, Jinnah was what the Oxford historian of India, Faisal Devji, calls “multiply marginal.” British India’s seventy million Muslims, spread as they were from the North-West Frontier Province to Assam, from Kashmir down to Kerala, were the world’s most diverse group of Muslims. They encompassed all the major theological schools and sects, from syncretic Sufis to purist Wahhabis. They ranged from the big landowners of the northern United Provinces to landless laborers in Bengal, from highly literate to uneducated. Jinnah’s family was Ismaili Khoja, a sect of Shia Islam known for its liberal and pragmatic views, and considered little better than heretics by many of the Indian subcontinent’s dominant Sunni Muslims.
It was only in Jinnah’s lifetime that India’s Muslims began to have a sense of themselves as a single community—but, ominously, one relegated to the status of a minority by the new political language of numbers. Driving this new self-conception was the juggernaut of the Raj’s knowledge project. Beginning with the first decennial census in 1871, officers of the Raj surveyed towns and villages, frequently encountering people who thought of themselves as simply belonging to local sects, or others who were comfortable worshipping at temples and shrines as well as mosques. The instrumentalities of the modern state have a low tolerance for ambiguity, though. For enumerative purposes, the census asked individuals to caption themselves more abstractly: Hindu, Christian, Sikh, or Muslim. So plural identities narrowed and became countable; and people began to have a sense of themselves as belonging to either political majorities or minorities.
Jinnah grew up far from the heart of British India’s coalescing Muslim politics, which lay with the Urdu-speaking landowners in the United Provinces. Shortly before he was born, his father, an unsophisticated but ambitious trader, moved from Paneli, in today’s Gujarat, to the port city of Karachi. Politically marginal though Karachi may have been, the place was booming after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Jinnah’s sister Fatima recalled that even on the playground, shooting marbles, Jinnah had a sense of importance and superiority. He would take it with him, aged sixteen, to London.
During his London apprenticeship, Jinnah learned of the death of his beloved mother in childbirth, and the start of the collapse of his father’s business. Around this time, he began, almost theatrically (for this was a teenager who longed not just to see Shakespeare, but to play the hero before the audience), to craft a new sense of self. Studying the lives of important English public figures, he realized that many had legal training. Though it angered his father, he began to study law. He changed his name from Jinnahbhai, a Gujarati form, to Mr. Jinnah, and in 1896 he became the youngest Indian to be called to the British Bar.
Upon returning to India, Jinnah abandoned Karachi for Bombay. In the words of his sister, “He wanted to discover himself on the highways of eminence and fame.” Wearing bespoke suits, speaking cut-glass English, smoking languidly, and even eating pork, he became a familiar sight in Bombay’s elite clubs, where he cultivated legal clients and mixed easily with the city’s Hindus, Parsis, and Christians. This distance from orthodox Muslim practice wasn’t something he viewed as illicit. This was Bombay, after all—and this was his career. Although some accounts say he was the only Muslim lawyer in the city, he wouldn’t have the fame he sought if he settled for a Muslim-only practice.
Politically, however, Jinnah would eventually come to represent Muslims alone. That he didn’t stand for any one of the major sects or regions actually served him well, permitting him to position himself as spokesman for all India’s Muslims. In 1904 he joined the Indian National Congress, which from its inception had thin Muslim support. (Of almost fourteen thousand delegates who attended the annual Congress gatherings between 1892 and 1909, fewer than a thousand were Muslims.) Jinnah promptly aligned with the moderate, constitutionalist wing of the party associated with Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Both men believed in gradual, negotiated reforms, not boycotts or radical action against the British, and in 1910 both were elected to the newly created Imperial Legislative Council, another step in the Raj’s piecemeal invitation to Indians to enter the portals of self-government. Entry to the council was by separate electorates, whereby different religious groups and some caste groups voted for candidates drawn exclusively from their own communities. Jinnah, elected as the Muslim member from Bombay, was still holding that seat in 1946.
One of around only fifty Muslims in the Congress, and already distinctive in his political style—sporting a monocle, for instance, in imitation of the Liberal British politician Joseph Chamberlain—he set himself to be a bridge builder between India’s Muslims and the Congress party. By 1916 it seemed to many that he had achieved that. Working with Annie Besant (29) and with the extremist Congress leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Jinnah secured a historic agreement between the Congress and the then-small Muslim League, which had been formed a decade earlier by a group of conservative notables and landowners from the United Provinces and Bengal. (Jinnah had joined the League in 1913, while remaining a member of the Congress.) The Lucknow Pact, as it became known, guaranteed separate electorates to Muslims and political representation slightly in excess of their population size. It embodied the kind of constitutional deal-making that Jinnah excelled in, and also gave him the approving audience he’d longed for.
With the Congress and India’s main Muslim party now pledged to work together to further self-government, Jinnah, at the age of forty, seemed set to become a major figure within Congress nationalism—the leader to fill the gap left by Gokhale, who had died the previous year. But 1915 was also the year that Gandhi returned to India, ready to protest in defiance of constitutional limits and to use religion as a way to bring Indians together.
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Gandhi built his first popular movement in 1920 by shrewdly adopting an issue peripheral to the primary agenda of Indian politics but important to many Indian Muslims. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire, and subsequent negotiations by the Allied powers over its future, gave reason to fear that the Ottoman sultan would be deposed and his overarching Muslim caliphate abolished. Indian Muslim religious leaders had launched protests against the British to demand the caliphate’s preservation, and Gandhi decided to throw the support of the Congress behind what became known as the Khilafat movement, hoping he could in return cull Muslim support for his party.
To Jinnah, this was a provocation. It undercut his own efforts to broker constitutional agreements between Muslims and Hindus and weakened his role as the “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.” To Jinnah’s lawyerly and constitutionalist way of thinking, it also changed the standing of Muslims in the political process. In the nationalist cause, he saw Hindus and Muslims as contracting parties—abstract political entities, each with equal rights, entering into an agreement almost as if they had the status of nations. And hadn’t Muslims dominated the Indian ruling classes for more than five hundred years, before the British? Yet here was the non-Muslim Gandhi appealing to Muslims in their full religious being, participating with them in a religious movement—methods that Jinnah thought diminished Muslims’ power. Defined as a political category, he believed, Muslims could claim at least an equal status; but if defined as a religious community, Muslims in India would always be numerically second—the “largest minority.”
Through his Khilafat movement, Gandhi established control over the Congress at the party’s an
nual meeting in 1920, a meeting one congressman found akin to a “religious gathering celebrating the advent of a Messiah.” When Jinnah, hoping to voice his dissent against Gandhi’s strategy, stood to speak, he was shouted down and booed off the stage. He quit the party within the year. By the end of the decade, unsure that his own style of liberal constitutionalism had a future with the Congress and uncomfortable in the orthodox conservative milieu of the Muslim League, he had returned to London, concocting another self. He became the epitome of the successful London barrister: chambers in the City, a mansion in Hampstead, and a chauffeured Bentley in the driveway. Or maybe he was Achilles in the shade.
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Early in his Bombay legal career, Jinnah, invoking the influential congressman who had mentored both him and Gandhi, said he wanted to be the Muslim Gokhale. Gokhale’s liberalism, like its Western counterparts, recognized minority rights and had a strong sense of injustice, but it also took seriously community belonging and group identities. Which Indian politician could ever afford not to? Jinnah had tried to reconcile this liberalism with Islamic thought and Muslim realities, until he decided it simply couldn’t be done in his homeland.
For many of India’s Muslim intellectuals and educated classes, the prospect of an undivided India governed through democratic institutions had long been a source of anxiety. The theoretical axioms of Western liberalism bristled with warnings for a multicultural society such as India. “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities,” John Stuart Mill had written in 1861, “… each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the common arbiter, the state.”
You can sense Mill’s thought burning brighter in the minds of Muslim intellectuals from the late 1920s as British-managed constitutional reforms advanced in response to growing nationalist pressure. Muslim intellectuals were also watching liberal democracy unravel across interwar Europe. As empires dissolved, groups suddenly defined as minorities became vulnerable to persecution, mass exile, and death. Simultaneously, the language of nationalism spread, with groups claiming treatment as nations, deserving of their own states. The alignment of identity with territory seemed the answer to the problem of social differences.
Even the visionary Iqbal (35), who, with Tagore (32), was one of the sharpest Indian critics of European ideas of nationalism, began to advocate separate Muslim territories. “It is necessary to redistribute the country and to provide one or more Muslim states with absolute majorities,” he wrote to Jinnah in 1937. Yet the concept of the state was highly unstable in Indian debate during these years, and in a letter the following month, Iqbal seemed torn between the idea of a “federation of Muslim provinces” and that of a separate state.
Iqbal was writing in the wake of the most significant expansion to date of Indian self-government, achieved through a new, British-designed constitution. The expansion, introduced in 1935, had convinced Jinnah to forsake London and return to India to head the Muslim League. Under the new constitutional arrangements, the British created provincial assemblies elected on an expanded franchise of some 10 percent of the population, though voting still in separate electorates. The Congress, setting aside an earlier boycott, decided the terms were good enough to contest in the assembly elections of 1937. Knowing it had little Muslim support, the party signaled its willingness to form coalition governments with the Muslim League. But in the event, the Congress won big and shelved the deal, forming governments in seven of the eleven provinces largely on its own (including in the Muslim-majority North-West Frontier Province). Nehru, speaking for Gandhi and many congressmen, famously and perhaps fatefully declared that there were now only two political forces in the country, the nationalist Congress and the imperialist Raj.
Jinnah was left shocked and embittered. The liberal model that was supposed to protect minorities seemed instead to have disenfranchised them. Neither constitutional features such as separate electorates nor trusting in Congress had put Muslims in power, or even on an equal footing. With almost all the Muslim legislators on the opposition benches, the Congress looked exactly as Muslims had feared: a Hindu majority governing over a Muslim minority, even as it called itself plural and inclusive. If liberal theory was not workable in the conditions of the subcontinent’s diversities, the way to make self-government possible, Jinnah began to think, was to change the subcontinent’s frontiers.
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“The Mussalmans were in the greatest danger,” Jinnah said in a speech to students at Aligarh Muslim University in 1938, explaining why he had come back from London. “The majority and minority parties in Britain are alterable, their complexion and strength often change,” he went on. “But such is not the case with India. Here we have a permanent Hindu majority and the rest are minorities which cannot within any conceivable period of time hope to become majorities.” Hindu governments might interfere in minorities’ religious practices and laws (or worse) while doing little to support their economic and social interests. The only hope for minorities, he concluded, was “to organize themselves and secure a definite share in power to safeguard their rights and interests.” That meant redefining Muslims as a nation that could make equal claims on the British and against the “Hindu Congress.”
Jinnah was already wounded politically when he decided to raise the cry of danger in his Aligarh speech. In the wake of the Muslim League’s electoral failure in the 1937 elections, Nehru was leading a mass campaign—a “massacre” campaign, Jinnah complained—to win Muslims over to Congress by appealing to their economic interests. One prong of the campaign was to convey to the poor majority of Muslims that Jinnah and the rich landowners of the Muslim League didn’t have their interests at heart.
Politics, Jinnah would often say, was a chess game: it had to be won with the pieces you had left on the board. Iqbal had warned him of the need to combat the “atheistic socialism” of Nehru, and now, with greater regularity, Jinnah began to reach for the queen: religion. According to the historian Venkat Dhulipala, at this point Jinnah had “no qualms in using religious ideology for his politics.” By 1937, having dropped his suits for sherwanis and a karakul hat (which came to be known as the “Jinnah cap”), he was describing the Muslim League flag as a gift from the Prophet. By the 1940s he was publicly imagining Pakistan as a kind of Islamic state, with sharia law.
Yet his most influential statement, to the Muslim League at Lahore in March 1940, played down any explicit religious appeal, in favor of the language of nationalism. He claimed that trying to fit Hindus and Muslims into a single state, “one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent, and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state.” It was a direct echo of Mill’s caution—and, taken up, it would produce the very violence about which Mill had warned.
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In 1939 the provincial Congress governments had all resigned in protest after the viceroy took India into the war without consulting them. Then, from August 1942, the entire Congress leadership was imprisoned by the British after Gandhi launched his Quit India movement. In the political vacuum, Jinnah became the sole interlocutor between India’s Muslims and the British. By the time most of the Congress leadership was freed, in 1945, Jinnah was established as the leader of all India’s Muslims, and primed to be the man in the viceroy’s study in the summer of 1947.
In light of Pakistan’s post-1947 history (its own partition in 1971, with the secession of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh; the long dominance of the military; and the unending spread of religious sectarianism and violence), it’s become common to say that Pakistan was from its inception a country “insufficiently imagined”—or, as a skeptical American intelligence officer put it in a 1943 report, “a kind of Muslim Never-Never Land, a fairy tale Utopia.” It’s a view that takes support from historians who argue that Jinnah never intended to see India divided into two states, or to create Pakistan. He was engaged, they cla
im, in an elaborate endgame with the British and Congress, and used the demand for Pakistan as a psychological maneuver to secure guarantees for Muslim interests and more autonomy over their affairs. An impatient Congress, hungry for power, called his bluff.
That argument has the merit of annoying both Indians and Pakistanis, since it makes the Congress leadership responsible for Pakistan. Yet it underplays the self-confounding rigor of Jinnah’s intellectual project: his aspiration to a kind of liberal perfectionism, beyond the realities of social difference, which used religious feeling to forge national homogeneity. Jinnah was an idealist who thought he was a realist, suggests Devji: “Jinnah seems to have had almost no sense of history, of memory, and of the possibility of trauma. He thought that one could just socially engineer this thing, and that people would forget.”
The history of the Indian subcontinent over the past century and more contains an encyclopedia of identifications (from Shakta to Tamil to Syrian Christian to Deobandi to non-beefeater to LGBT) by which people have sought to act collectively. Jinnah’s Pakistan was premised on the idea that there was one key identity, religion, which could lock in all the others. Yet even in Pakistan, created on the principle of religious homogeneity, Muslim or Islamic identities have always had to compete with other forms of identification, their relative attractions shaped by politics. East Pakistan’s transformation into Bangladesh in 1971, and the continuing struggles of Baluchis and Sindhis to assert their cultural autonomy against a national Pakistani identity, bears this out. Even the effort to sustain a singular Muslim community has faltered, blown apart by the regular clash of sectarian groups.