Book Reviews Sheela Reddy, Mr. and Mrs. Jinnah the Marriage that Shook India

Authors

  • Editor

Abstract


In Mr. and Mrs. Jinnah, author Sheela Reddy writes about a very public passion of a very private individual. The role played by Mohammad Ali Jinnah in the unfolding history of South Asia has been praised, propounded, or condemned; but never has his life, his marital life been treated as the center-piece of his existence, and never before has it been treated with the lyricality that Sheela Reddy has brought to it. Fictional accounts of the Jinnahs: Dinkar Joshi, Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah (New Delhi, Pentagon Press, 2012) and Kiran Joshi, Jinnah Often Came To Our Home (New Delhi, Tranquebar Press, 2015) are fairly recent, but even with that latitude, they have not been able to approach the allure of Sheela Reddy‘s narrative. Oddly, Sheela Reddy achieves this not by excelling in imagination, but by excelling in research. She looked for the couple at places others had overlooked; the correspondence of Sarojini Naidu and her daughters both with and about Ruttie. She put marginilia under the magnifying glass. Comments written on the margins or printed words under lined by either Ruttie or Mohammad Ali Jinnah, were focused on and made the basis of induction. Not the least is her anthropological inquiry into the Parsi and Khoja communities in the colonial era.

Downloads

Published

2020-02-14