Ruttie Petit Quotes

“Jinnah’s rise had seemed unstoppable, but in 1918 he had scandalised Bombay high society by courting Ruttie Petit, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Parsi baronet and one of the most ‘envied debutante[s] of her generation’.20 The patriarch of the family, Sir Dinshaw Petit, happened to be a vocal supporter of interfaith marriages, believing like many liberals at the time that they would be vital in gluing India into a single nation. When forty-two-year-old Jinnah had asked to marry his teenage daughter, however, Sir Dinshaw was horrified and banned the two from meeting. Jinnah and Ruttie continued their courtship, however, and Ruttie writes that Jinnah burned ‘storming passions into the very fibre of her being’. In his presence she appeared utterly radiant: ‘like a fairy,’ wrote one observer, and two months after her birthday they eloped, with Ruttie converting to Islam the day before the wedding.21
‘Jinnah has at last plucked the blue flower of his desire,’ wrote Sarojini Naidu, who was closely following the scandal along with the rest of Bombay society.
It was all very sudden and caused terrible agitation and anger among the Parsis: but I think though the child has made far greater sacrifices than she yet realises, Jinnah is worth it all – he loves her: the one really genuine emotion of his reserved and self-centred nature and he will make her happy.22
Sarojini’s optimism proved misplaced, however. Parsi society ostracised Ruttie, and her father summoned the couple to court, alleging that Jinnah had abducted her. Here Ruttie defiantly stood up and told the judge, ‘Mr Jinnah has not abducted me; in fact I have abducted him.’23 But in the aftermath she was excommunicated from her community, banned from all Parsi social occasions and told she could never return to her childhood home.”
― Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

“Outside of Congress, however, Jinnah’s political career began to decline and his relationship with Ruttie deteriorated. Depressed and alone, Ruttie sought solace in Bombay’s jazz clubs while Jinnah focused on building a political base in the Muslim League – a rival political party to the Congress. But his growing emphasis on his Muslim identity only alienated Ruttie more, and one day, when she drove to meet him at the town hall, he screamed at her for packing ham sandwiches. ‘What have you done!’ he exclaimed. ‘If my voters were to learn that I am going to eat ham sandwiches for lunch, do you think I have a ghost of a chance of being elected?’29 Ruttie distanced herself from her husband after that, and instead started experimenting with drugs and spirit communication, leading friends to worry about the number of morphine needles she left scattered around her room.
With their marriage falling apart, both Jinnah and Ruttie neglected their newborn daughter, who would remain nameless for almost six years. The ‘little baby is one of the most pathetic, heart-breaking things I have ever seen,’ wrote Sarojini’s daughter Padmaja Naidu to her sister in 1921. ‘I simply cannot understand Ruttie’s attitude – I do not blame her as most people here seem to do, but whenever I remember the dazed, scared child, like some mortally hurt animal, I come near hating Ruttie in spite of my great affection for her.”
― Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia