Jinnah was the founder and first Governor-General of Pakistan. He was probably born on 25th December 1876 in Karachi, which was then part of Britain’s Indian Empire. He came to England to take up an apprenticeship with a trading company. Soon after he arrived he gave it up, and on 5th June 1893, having passed the preliminary examination, he joined Lincoln’s Inn to study law. On 29th April 1896 [1] he was called to the bar. At nineteen, he was probably the youngest person from the subcontinent to qualify as a barrister in England.
After pupillage in England, Jinnah returned to India, where he built up a very successful practice as a barrister. He was elected to India’s Imperial Legislative Council in 1910. In 1913 he joined the Muslim League and worked to make it collaborate with the Indian National Congress. In 1920 the Congress started a non-cooperation movement boycotting all aspects of British rule. Jinnah opposed it and resigned from the Congress.
In the early 1930s Jinnah returned to London, where he presented cases before the Privy Council and became even wealthier. He lived in a large house in Hampstead and had an English chauffeur who drove his Bentley, and English staff to serve him. There were two cooks, one Indian and one Irish, and Jinnah’s favourite food was curry and rice [2].
In 1937 the Congress refused to form coalition governments with the Muslim League in the Indian provinces, and Jinnah began working for the partition of India to create a separate Muslim state. Pakistan became independent in 1947 with Jinnah as its first head of state, and he died the following year. His birthday is a national holiday in Pakistan, called Quaid-e-Azam Day (“Quaid-e-Azam” is Urdu for “Great Leader”). He is also known as Baba-e-Qaum, “Father of the Nation”.
Jinnah was only proficient in English, which was the language he was most comfortable in [3]. So it was rather ironic that he championed Urdu as Pakistan’s official language. This was especially true in East Bengal, now Bangladesh, where most people spoke Bengali. In March 1948, at the Racecourse Ground in Dhaka, he told a largely Bengali-speaking crowd, in English, that the state language of Pakistan would be Urdu [4]. This helped spark the Bengali Language Movement, and resentment over the language question later fed into Bangladesh’s fight for independence in 1971.
Jinnah was said to be one of the best-dressed men in the British Empire [5]. As a barrister he never wore the same silk tie twice, and when he died he was found to own two hundred handmade suits [6].
Hear more stories like this on our Legal London walking tour of the Royal Courts of Justice and the Inns of Court.
[1] A Portrait of Lincoln’s Inn – Angela Holdsworth
[2] Akbar Ahmed, “Remembering Dina”, The Express Tribune, 7 November 2017 – https://tribune.com.pk/story/1551486/remembering-dina
[3] Yaqoob Khan Bangash, “Jinnah, culture and language”, The News on Sunday, 9 October 2016 – https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/561906-jinnah-culture-language
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOJ8ahH8cco
[5] https://defencepk.com/forums/threads/muhammad-ali-jinnah-the-great-leader.105/
[6] https://henrypoole.com/individual/muhammad-ali-jinnah/