E-Book - Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi – His Life & TimesChapter XIJinnah And GandhiMOHAMED Ali Jinnah, who considered himself Gandhi's opposite number, livedin a large, crescent-shaped marble mansion from which a classic flight ofmarble stairs and a series of carefully moulded terraces led down to the sea atBombay. He had built it during the second World War and he apologized, when Isaw him in 1942, that it was still inadequately furnished. His little study,however, and other parts of the great house on Malabar Hill revealed thecultured and opulent touch.Jinnah was over six feet tall and weighed nine stone. He was a very thin man.His well-shaped head was covered with thick, long, silver-grey hair brushedstraight back. His shaven face was thin, the nose long and aquiline. Thetemples were sunken and the cheeks were deep holes which made hischeekbones stand out like high horizontal ridges. His teeth were bad. When notspeaking, he would pull in his chin, tighten his lips, knit his big brow. The resultwas a forbidding earnestness. He rarely laughed.Jinnah wore a knee-length straw-coloured tunic, tight white Indian trousersthat clung to his bony legs and black patent- leather pumps. A monocle dangledfrom a black cord. He often dressed in European clothes. He was, wrote GeorgeE. Jones in the New York Times of May 5, 1946, 'undoubtedly one of the bestdressed men in the British Empire'.Jinnah, the first child of a rich skins, hide and gum-arabic merchant, was bornon Christmas Day 1876—seven years later than Gandhi—in the Kathiawarpeninsula, Gandhi's birthplace; his native language was Gujarati. 'Jinnah' is aHindu name; the family were recent converts to Islam. Jinnah was a KhojaMoslem. Many Khojas carry Hindu names and maintain the Hindu joint familysystem. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Khojas attempted toreturn to Hinduism but were rebuffed.www.mkgandhi.org Page 449