Ruttie Jinnah - The Woman Who Stood Defiant

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This endeavour is an attempt to revive and restore the memory of Th a remarkable lady, who had a seminal influence on the shaping of modern history-and geography-of contemporary South Asia. Rattanbai Maryam Jinnah, formerly Rattanbai Petit, was a national level political activist, a prominent personality of her times and the madly loved and pampered spouse of the founder of Pakistan and its first governor general, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

Notwithstanding Jinnah's reticence to seek publicity of any aspect of his personal life, his wife included, multiple accounts portray Mrs Jinnah as brave, beautiful, tender-hearted and, in the words of Dr Syed Jaffar Ahmad, a professor of history at the University of Karachi, 'a mythological character. . . imbibe[ing] the qualities of intelligence and eloquence'. She was a lively person, according to the memoirs of a prominent Muslim League politician, Jahanara Shahnawaz, taking part in all games at a party and being the life of the party herself. Mrs Jinnah was so beautiful that Sayyada Badrunnisa Begum, another Muslim contemporary, called her 'a fairy come down to earth.

The beauty that Badrunnisa talks about, one may argue, is not ordinary. There was something sublime, something divine and something matchless about her, going by how her prettiness is described in various narrations.

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