Dina Wadia

Dina's paternal grandfather, Jinnah bhai Poonja, was a merchant who hailed from Gondal in Kathiawar, Gujarat, and had moved to Karachi in the mid-1870s.

He had made money, but only a few of his many children managed to complete school.

Nevertheless, he had been able to send one of his more academically promising sons, Muhammad Ali, to England for higher education.

The family belonged to the Ismaili sect of Shia Muslims who are followers of the Aga Khan, and to the Lohana caste, Lohana Hindus who had converted to Islam centuries earlier.

Dina's father, Jinnah, was the leader of the Pakistan movement and the founder of Pakistan.

After achieving the partition of India on a religious basis and secured the creation of Pakistan as the homeland of British India's Muslims, Jinnah became the first Governor General of Pakistan.

He was bestowed with the title Quaid-i-Azam or "Great Leader."

Dina's maternal family, the Petit family were rich, titled, well-educated and highly Westernized.

They belonged to the Parsi community and followed the Zoroastrian faith.

Dina's great-grandfather, Dinshaw Maneckji Petit, founded the first cotton mill in India.

This and many other contributions to industry, trade and philanthropy had earned him a baronetcy.

Dina's mother, Rattanbai ("Ruttie") was the daughter of the second baronet.

The third baronet, Dina's maternal uncle, was married to Sylla Tata, sister of JRD Tata; the Tata family were the richest in India.

The Petit family disowned Dina's mother, Rattanbai, when she married Jinnah, who was twenty-four years older than her.

Dina's parents were mismatched in age, religion, habits, temperament and views.

These differences led them to separate shortly after Dina's birth, and Ruttie began living in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai along with her infant daughter, Dina.

Dina Wadia (née Jinnah; 15 August 1919 – 2 November 2017) was the daughter of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, and Rattanbai Petit.

She belonged to the prominent Jinnah family through her father, the Petit family through her mother, and to the Wadia family through her marriage to Neville Wadia.

Dina was born in London, shortly after midnight, on 15 August 1919, to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and his second wife, Rattanbai Petit (whose name was legally amended to "Maryam Jinnah" after her conversion to Islam and marriage, though she did not use her new name).

As Stanley Wolpert's Jinnah of Pakistan records: "Oddly enough, precisely twenty-eight years to the day and hour before the birth of Jinnah's other offspring, Pakistan."

Her premature arrival was unexpected — her parents were at the theatre but "were obliged to leave their box hurriedly."

She was reported to be "a dark-eyed beauty, lithe and winsome, with a smile like her mother's."

Dina's paternal family were upstart merchants of high social status.

After Ruttie's death in 1929, Jinnah's sister, Fatima, moved in with Jinnah to help raise Dina, who was then 10 years old.

Jinnah raised his daughter as a Muslim.

According to Jinnah's chauffeur, Bradbury, Jinnah asked Fatima, "to teach her niece, Dina, about Islam and The Holy Qur'an."

During Jinnah's time in London, during 1930–33, Wolpert commented, "Dina was [Jinnah's] sole comfort, but Dina was away at school most of the time and home only for brief times, yet still the pampered daughter could be a joy to her doting father."

In November 1932, Jinnah read H. C. Armstrong's biography of Kemal Atatürk, Grey Wolf, and seemed to have found his own reflection in the story of Turkey's great modernist leader.

It was all he talked about for a while at home, even to Dina, who consequently nicknamed him "Grey Wolf."

Dina's relationship with her father became strained when she expressed her desire to marry the Parsi-born Neville Wadia, who was the son of Sir Ness Wadia and Evelyne Clara Powell.

Jinnah tried to dissuade her but failed.

M. C. Chagla, who was Jinnah's assistant at the time, recalls: "Jinnah, in his usual imperious manner, told her that there were millions of Muslim boys in India, and she could have chosen anyone. Reminding her father that his wife had also been a non-Muslim and a Parsi as well, the young lady replied: 'Father, there were millions of Muslim girls in India. Why did you not marry one of them?' And he replied that, 'She became a Muslim'."

Chagla recounted in his autobiography Roses in December that when Dina married Neville, her father said to her that she was not his daughter anymore.

This story, however, is contentious as some say that Jinnah had sent a bouquet through his driver, Abdul Hai, to the newly married couple.

Their relationship was a matter of legal conjecture as Pakistani laws allow for a person to be disinherited for violating Islamic rules (in this case by a Muslim woman marrying a non-Muslim), and hence no claim of hers was entertained on the Pakistani properties of Jinnah.

The Wadias lived in Bombay and had two children, a boy named Nusli and a girl named Diana.

The marriage did not last long, however, and she separated from Wadia in 1943; the couple never formally divorced because divorce was illegal in India at the time.

Following the marriage, the father-daughter relationship became extremely formal, and he addressed her formally as 'Mrs. Wadia'.

This, too, is contentious as Dina rebuffed this information calling it a rumour.

In an interview with Hamid Mir, she said: "My father was not a demonstrative man, but he was an affectionate father. My last meeting with him took place in Bombay in 1946. When I was about to depart, my father hugged Nusli (who was two years old then). The grey cap (Jinnah was wearing) caught Nusli’s fancy, and in a moment, my father put it on Nusli’s head, saying, 'Keep it my boy.'"