In Quest of Jinnah

This book is a compilation of previously unpublished and expunged portions of Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan by Hector Bolitho, the first biography of the Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and Bolitho’s own diary and notes, and correspondence with functionaries of the Government of Pakistan and highly placed individuals in Britain, India, and Pakistan who had known Jinnah personally. The book also includes the English and American reviews of Bolitho’s celebrated and influential biography. The volume is a treasure trove of oral history concerning Pakistan’s founding father. Bolitho’s interviews with people who had known Jinnah personally in various capacities, and at various stages of his life, recorded within four to five years of his death, have preserved for posterity a good deal of information and historically important material that would have otherwise been lost forever. This contribution is, in fact, more valuable and has greater significance than Bolitho’s published biography. These texts comprise material that the author was not allowed to include in his biography but is presented in this volume for the benefit of scholars and interested readers. In Quest of Jinnah provides a three-dimensional view of the original published version and offers fresh and authentic insights into the personality and politics of Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

Sharif al Mujahid

Henry Hector Bolitho was born in 1897, in Auckland, New Zealand. From 1915 he worked as a reporter for a New Zealand newspaper for seven years before leaving for England where he published his first novel. Before the Second World War, he travelled throughout Europe, Africa, North America, and Australia. During the war, from 193945, he served as a squadron leader with the RAF and was the editor of the RAF journal. After the war, from 194749, Bolitho conducted lecture tours in the United States of America. Bolitho wrote widely on historical subjects, most notably on the royal family, in Albert the Good and the Victorian Reign (1932), The Reign of Queen Victoria (1948), and Albert, Prince Consort (1964). One of his early novels, Judith Silver, won critical acclaim in 1929. Hector Bolitho died in England on 12 September 1974.

Sharif al Mujahid (19262020), a recipient of Sitara-i-Imtiaz, was one of South Asia’s most prolific writers on the history of the freedom movement and an authority on Mohammad Ali Jinnah. He died in January 2020 at the age of 93.