Life And Death Of The Mother Of Pakistan

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney who serves on the board of directors of Amnesty International USA. The Upstairs Wife is her memoir, a dual narrative that traces the history of her family along with the history of Pakistan, where her family emigrated from Bombay in 1962.

The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan, Rafia Zakaria, Beacon Press (February 3, 2015).

The following excerpt from her book discusses the fate that befell Fatima Jinnah, sister of Mohammad Ali Jinnah:

July 8, 1967

Mohammad Ali Jinnah had come to Karachi in 1947 with a woman who would be acceptable to the new nation. His sister, Fatima Jinnah, had at that point kept house for her brother for years; after he was gone, she would become the first to contest elections for the country’s highest office. A trained dentist and an educated woman at a time when few Indian Muslim were, Fatima Jinnah had reveled in the role of “Mother of the Republic”, never balking at the contradiction that she had not ever married or borne any children of her own. Perhaps it had not mattered as much then, or perhaps people accepted that her child was really Pakistan, the country her brother had wrought from the British. Her demure presence at the elbow of her brother was acceptable to all, even in the contentious moments that preceded Pakistan’s birth: her clothes were modest enough to please the mullahs yet sophisticated enough to reassure those who swore by secularism. It was Fatima Jinnah, in pastel tunics and flared floor-length skirts, who presided over state functions at which her brother and the new country required a hostess. It was Fatima Jinnah who tended to the dying Jinnah when he took to his bed one year after Pakistan was born. It was her face, wan and worn, that flashed on news clips across the world at the founder’s death.

Two decades later, in 1967, Fatima Jinnah had been pushed to the margins of the city she had presided over in its first days as Pakistan’s capital. No longer the sister of the governor general, she lived all alone at the edge of Karachi in a red stone palace near the sea. From here she would make her last heroic effort, contesting elections against the military general Ayub Khan. This woman who was running for office against men could not, however, command the support of other powerful women. When Hamida Bogra’s women had begun their campaign against polygamous husbands, they had deliberately chosen to ignore Fatima Jinnah. The virginal spinster sister of the dead founder was of no use to them. How could she, never having been married, understand the fury of a betrayed wife? …

…So the backs of the women who championed women’s rights remained turned to the woman who was Pakistan’s first female candidate for governor general. They remained averted after she lost to the general and after he signed into law legislation that required men to receive permission from their existing wives before marrying another. So Fatima Jinnah, alive but forgotten, receded further and further from the political consciousness of the country her brother had founded. No one seemed to know or care when or why she moved to Mohatta Palace and shut herself up alone in its twenty-four rooms.

The palace had its own story. Its eerie pink domes and elaborately carved terraces were a remembrance of Shivrattan Mohatta, the Hindu businessman who had lived there before Partition took it from him. The palace had been his summer home at a time when the Arabian Sea, not yet pushed back by land reclamations, crashed its turbulent waves before the palace’s front lawn.

In 1947, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs requisitioned Mohatta Palace. When Shivrattan Mohatta had wept, no one had listened. When at a state function for Karachi businessmen, the homeless magnate managed to get a minute next to Jinnah, he used it to intercede for his house. He received no sympathy; the founder had himself given up too much. “It is a matter of state,” he simply said before walking off.

Nearly twenty years from the day Jinnah uttered those words, his sister found herself in a similar position of wanting. The Pakistan she had heralded at the side of her brother as an independent, democratic, and progressive republic for the subcontinent’s Muslims was ruled by a military dictator and rife with ethnic enmities. The spats with India, in 1948 and again in 1965, fomented an attitude of permanent siege that justified routine suspensions of the law and an unquestioning worship of the military. The generals hated her because she touted democracy, and the mullahs now denounced her because she, once merely the sister of a leader, had had the audacity to try to be one herself.

Made incongruous by the country’s new reality that had erupted around her, Fatima Jinnah became a relic and a recluse. By the summer of 1967, the woman who had for decades led the most public of lives, instrumental in the ideological contest against the British and fervent in her political maneuvering and visions of Pakistan’s future, shut herself up in the quaint palace hoping perhaps to disappear among its looping porches and porticoes. If anyone in Karachi noted her absence, they said nothing at all about it. Every night she locked herself in the second-story bedroom she had chosen in Mohatta Palace. Every morning when she awoke, she dropped the key from the balcony upstairs so that her attendant below could retrieve it and bring her morning tea.

On the morning of July 9, 1967, no key dropped from the bedroom balcony. No one minded and no one cared. The gardener let himself in and watered the lawns, not giving the old woman a second thought when he didn’t see her. Noon passed and then also the afternoon. It was evening when the washerwoman who did Fatima Jinnah’s laundry finally called on a neighbour with her worries about the mistress. It was near dusk by the time a locksmith was called and the door opened. Inside her bedroom, Fatima Jinnah lay cold, having passed away hours before she was found.

She left behind a small poodle, a goat, and a duck. A funeral was held in the grounds of Mohatta Palace the next morning. Hundreds of mourners – dignitaries and bureaucrats and politicians and their wives – came and sighed and waited to be photographed. Karachi in July was brutally hot, so fiery that even the electric fans and the nearby ocean could not alleviate the heat under the tents. By early evening, everyone was gone. At dusk on July 9, 1967, Mohatta Palace was shuttered up and left to the stray gulls and thorny bushes. It would remain that way for decades, with all who wanted it unsure of the strength of their claim, or of its wisdom, and whether it must be bought from the distant descendants of the Jinnahs, the government of Pakistan, or even the descendants of the Mohattas, now scattered somewhere across the border in India. It could have been given to Dina, the daughter of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. But she had stayed in India after the birth of Pakistan, stayed an Indian and then married a non-Muslim against her father’s wishes. Under the inheritance calculations of the laws of the Islamic Republic, she was not entitled to what either her father or her aunt left behind.”