Dina Wadia

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. Jinnah family 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. 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.