ABSTRACT
Jinnah’s early life is shrouded in mystery. Jinnah himself was reluctant to speak about his ancestry, parentage, kith and kin, or immediate blood relations. It is not known whether any of his five brothers or his father’s brothers or their relations ever met him in his heyday at the Bar in Bombay or while he was emerging as a distinguished political figure in India or when he actually adorned the highest position in Pakistan, that of the Governor-General of Pakistan. M.C. Chagla, a close associate of Jinnah, who worked as his junior at the Bar for eight years and later served as the secretary of the Muslim League when Jinnah was its president, tells us in his autobiography Roses in December that Jinnah was ‘the uncrowned king’ of Bombay in 1918 and ‘an idol of the youth’.1 But not so, it seems, for his own brothers and sisters – except Fatima, his youngest sister, who kept his house after the death of Ruttie Jinnah in 1928, and remained a constant companion of Jinnah throughout his life until he died in 1948. It appears Jinnah was not fond of maintaining close contact with his family relations nor did he seem to be proud of his ancestry. If anything, he wished to forget his past for ever, as stated by his biographer, Hector Bolitho.2 Like Kemal Atatürk of Turkey, whose biography by H.C. Armstrong, Grey Wolf, An Intimate Study of a Dictator, was purchased and read by Jinnah in London around 1932, Jinnah seemed inclined to break away from the past: ‘Away with dreams and shadows! They have cost us dear in the past’3
Atatürk had said. For many days, Jinnah talked of nothing but Kemal Atatürk to his daughter Dina, who was then 13 years old. Dina, nicknamed her father Grey Wolf.4
