Books​ Reviews

Ruttie Jinnah: The Woman Who Stood Defiant is a biography that unravels the mystery around Ruttie Jinnah, the wife of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Besides her personality, the book makes an attempt to detail her role in political developments both during her lifetime and afterward. It tries to answer questions like ‘Did she impact the creation of Pakistan? Did she have a posthumous influence on Pakistan’s polity? Does her legacy still affect Indo-Pak relations?

In her own right, Ruttie Jinnah was a fierce nationalist who stood up against British rule. Her conversion from Zoroastrianism to Islam and the subsequent marriage to Jinnah brought a lot of controversy and may well have resulted in her been shrouded out of the limelight. The book is, therefore, a deep dive into the short life of an understudied figure in history who had an undisputed influence on Jinnah and an unacknowledged role in the shaping of the geopolitical landscape of contemporary South Asia.