Rushdie and Jinnah: More alike than different?

[sanddy]

Rushdie and Jinnah: More alike than different?

I was reading Salman Rushdie’s memoir,
Joseph Anton , when it struck me that
Pakistan’s Mohd Ali Jinnah, the Muslim
hero, and India’s Rushdie, the Muslim
villain, shared a few things in common.
Here they are:

First : Both were South Bombay boys, the
most sophisticated part of India that spoke
Gujarati. In a city where an 800 square
foot two-bedroom flat may cost up to a
million dollars today, Rushdie lived in a
bungalow on Warden Road. Jinnah built a
mansion on the even more posh Malabar
Hill, worth perhaps US100 million today.
Both men liked the city. Rushdie’s father
was a member of the exclusive
Willingdon Club, while Jinnah liked
lunching at Gaylord, off Marine Drive.
Both men thought they would easily keep
returning to their Bombay, Jinnah after
Partition, Rushdie after Satanic Verses .
Both were wrong.

Second : Both of them lived many years in
Europe, having gone there in childhood
and early youth. Both were at home there.
Gandhi was awkward in London and tried
without success to fit in, taking dancing
and violin lessons. Jinnah was so
elegantly turned out in his beautifully-cut
suits and two-tone shoes, that the Labour
Party refused him a ticket for being “too
much of a toff”. Rushdie went to the elite
Rugby school, followed by a stint at
Cambridge University.

Third : Neither man could communicate
with the people their work affected most,
the Muslims of the subcontinent. Both
were essentially monolingual, speaking
only English. Rushdie sprinkles his novels
with Hindi and Urdu words and names,
but cannot really speak the language.
Jinnah spoke no Urdu and his native
Gujarati he did not speak very well. He
delivered his two-nation theory and
separatism speeches in English. This
means 99 percent of Indians couldn’t
understand him (though people often
reminisce how his audience heard Jinnah
in awestruck attention), nor did he
understand 99 percent of them.

Fourth : Neither man was particularly
devout. Rushdie was not religious at all,
as most intellectuals tend to be. Jinnah
was not attracted to the orthodox
traditions, though nobody can say for sure
that he was totally put off by organised
religion. In my experience Ismaili Khojas
(Jinnah became voluntarily a twelver Shia
later in life) are fairly conformist as all
mercantile cultures tend to be. I wonder
what Jinnah would have made of the fact
that a Deobandi maulvi, Shabbir Usmani,
led his funeral prayer.


Fifth : Though they were personally not
very attracted to faith, both used it
effectively. Jinnah to create a state and
effect the Partition of India; Rushdie, who
without doubt would have known what
his blasphemy would produce, to make
himself a literary martyr. Both turned to it
as a last resort. Jinnah after he thought
Congress was being intransigent, Rushdie
after going through a period of
intellectual barrenness following
Midnight’s Children . His writing “was not
going well”, he writes in his memoir, a
couple of years before Satanic Verses was
published.

Sixth : They had a strange connection
through Alexander Dumas. I translated an
interview Jinnah had given to Gujarati
magazine Visami Sadi (20th century). In it,
written in his hand, he said his favourite
novel was “Monte Cristo” (Count of Monte
Cristo , by Dumas). Reviewing Rushdie’s
memoir, Jake Kerridge wrote: “He
repeatedly refers to himself as a prisoner
and there is something of the Count of
Monte Cristo about him, keeping himself
going by thinking of the revenge we will
take on those who have wronged him
when he’s free.”

Seventh : Both were able to fire up India’s
Muslims. Jinnah in the cause of loving
Pakistan and Rushdie in the cause of
hating Rushdie. Both men bring out
strong feelings on the opposite side too.
Rushdie’s supporters, the intellectual elite
of Europe, writers like Martin Amis and
Christopher Hitchens, love him as much
as Jinnah is disliked in India by non-
Muslims.