The most definitive writer on South Asia; Stanley Wolpert’s comments about Jinnah probably stand out as a tribute which few could have matched.
Stanley Wolpert
**Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three. **
Hailed as “Great Leader” (Quaid-e-Azam) of Pakistan and its first governor-general, Jinnah virtually conjured that country into statehood by the force of his indomitable will. His place of primacy in Pakistan’s history looms like a lofty minaret over the achievements of all his contemporaries in the Muslim League. Yet Jinnah began his political career as a leader of India’s National Congress and until after World War I remained India’s best “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.” As enigmatic a figure as Mahatma Gandhi, more powerful than Pandit Nehru. Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah was one of recent history’s most charismatic leaders and least known personalities. For more than a quarter century I have been intrigued by the apparent paradox of Jinnah’s strange story, which has to date never been told in all the fascinating complexity of its brilliant light and tragic darkness.
Students, barristers and benchers rushing in and out of Lincoln’s Inn nowadays rarely glance at the oil painting, hung since July 1965 on the stone wall over the entrance to their Great Hall and Library in London. Those who do may wonder why on earth the gaunt, unsmiling face of “M.A.Jinnah, Founder and Governor-General of Pakistan” should be staring down at them. Tall, thin, monocled, astrakhan-capped, the portrait’s subject was, so the strip of brass secured to its frame attests, “born 25 December 1876 and died 11 September 1948.” Nothing more is revealed of M.A.Jinnah’s history. The anonymous artist captured his upright, unbending spirit, as well as his impeccable taste in clothes, yet Jinnah’s face is almost as enigmatic and spare as the shinning brass plate beneath. His eyes, opened wide, are piercing; his lips, tightly closed, formidable. One would guess that he was a man of few words, never easily thwarted or defeated. But why is he there-in so honored a place on that hallowed wall of British jurisprudence.
Across the timeworn stairs of stone that supported Queen Victoria and Her Majesty’s entourage when she came to dedicate that Great Hall and oak-beamed Library in 1845 are two portraits of Englishmen who obviously do belong. Sir William Henry Maule was baron of the Exchequer, a judge of the Common Pleas, and a bencher, one of four officers elected to administer Lincoln’s Inn. Lord Arthur Hobhouse was legal member of the Executive Council of India’s Viceroy in 1875, the year Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli persuaded Queen Victoria to add “Empress of India” to her regalia. Two marble busts flank M.A.Jinnah’s portraits, like horseguards, their unblinking eyes staring ahead. These also seem appropriate to the setting for one is Lord Macnaghten, who was “Lord of Appeal in Ordinary” and not only a bencher but treasurer, while the other immortalizes Sir Francis Henry Goldsmit, “First Jewish Barrister,” bencher and member of Parliament. Jinnah, however, held no office at Lincoln’s Inn, nor was he ever elected to Parliament or appointed to preside over any British court, nor did he even serve on the cabinet of a single British viceroy.
Yet the story of Jinnah’s unique achievement was so inextricably the product of his genius as a barrister, perhaps the greatest “native” advocate in British Indian history, that his portrait richly deserves the place of high honor it holds. During the last decade of his life, in fact, Jinnah may have been the shrewdest barrister in the British Empire. He was certainly the most tenacious. He crossed swords with at least as many great British-born as Indian barristers, defeating them all in his single minded pleas for Pakistan. He burned out his life pressing a single suit, yet by winning his case he changed the map of South Asia and altered the course of history.
Stanley Wolpert is one of America’s leading experts on South Asia. He has taught South Asian history at the University of California at Los Angles. Apart from Jinnah, Wolpert has written biographies of prominent South Asian leaders such as Gandhi, Nehru, and Z.A.Bhutto. The above excerpt is from his book “Jinnah of Pakistan,”
—Contributed by Ammar Ali Qureshi
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