Posted:
Friends, after being one of the people on this Forum roundly and soundly cursing Ekta, her storyline, the behaviour of Jalal, the behaviour (or lack of it) of Jodha, and the dragging out of this whole miscarriage saga for close on ten days ...
... I wanted to express something that has struck me since last night!
In all our judgements of Jalal's behaviour and his extreme prejudice against Jodha and her family (for their prejudice against him!), have we perhaps forgotten the stark truth of Jalal's age?!
* Do you all think that perhaps we should not merely judge Jalal for his role as husband, and as King, but also as a young man of just twenty two, who is barely out of his adolescence, so to speak, with very under-developed emotional maturity?
* Should we perhaps make allowances for the fact that his extremes of behaviour may stem from the fact that he has still not achieved any reasonable self-control over his swinging emotional states that his age creates?
* Could his behaviour be explained by the fact that he may want desperately to be a father, but he is as yet very underdone to really be one because he is unable as yet to handle the highs of happiness and the lows of depression with any measure of emotional equanimity?
Sometimes, people learn early to handle their growth years with some measure of maturity because they get the benefit of some institutionalised education or some form of formal learning system - from teachers or parents - that allows them to discuss and work through their issues. They learn to rub shoulders with others their age - their peers - and to interact with these others in a more civilised way, even if their hormones are raging or teenage or adolescent emotional mood swing or turbulence is high.
We know that Jalal had none of that opportunity. In fact he has always been a young boy on the run from captors and war-oriented, and made to feel that he was just a young boy, in the midst of wily old heads such as Bairam Khan and Mahamanga, who never taught him how to handle emotions. They instead fed him on the easy myth that he has no heart and thus conveniently (conveniently to themselves!) taught him not to acknowledge that emotions exist and that there can be pleasure and pain that can at times be very intense and one has to have the skills to cope with it all. They gave him no coping skills, perhaps because they wanted him to lean on them for these skills and thus stay within their clutches.
The only friend or peer Jalal has ever had has been Ruqaiya, who is even younger than him, and from what we see, rather emotionally immature in her behaviour herself. Her intelligent mind cannot be mistaken for emotional maturity, nor can her ambition be mistaken for emotional control. In fact in the hands of one who is emotionally immature, ambition and intelligence can also go awry. Ruqaiya, if anything, is perhaps absolutely the wrong person, I feel, to be in the vicinity of Jalal at this stage, simply because he should be learning at this time about the skills to manage his emotions rather than be egged on further to ignore his emotions because they seem inconvenient to acknowledge. Ruqaiya shares his yearnings for a child but between them both how much emotional maturity is there to handle the responsibility?
I am not trying to make excuses for Jalal's behaviour here nor am I in a mood to forgive Ekta for extending this torture on viewers, but it was just a passing thought I had that we are looking at Jalal through only two dimensions - the roles he plays as husband and as King. We are all perhaps not giving enough attention to his age and his emotional growth even for this age is inadequate.
A normal twenty two year old in our times is very mature these days, but if we look at him as a product of his times, twenty two was barely an age to be a good husband and a good King. He would have needed much more wisdom than he had to be even that good husband and good King he was expected to be, and the fact that he wanted also to be a good father to a child was probably more than he could handle given his emotional resources at the time. And without formal education and interaction with his age group, and with no one to show him what growth pains are about and how to handle them, he must have found himself all at sea.
The whole thing gets even more complicated for an emotionally under-ready fellow when his new wife comes to his home with much greater emotional maturity than he has, but with her emotions blinded by prejudice. At a time when he needs validation at every emotionally mature step he takes, Jodha may be actually demotivating him or leading him back to unbridled and inexplicable anger by her reactions and prejudices against him.
If this is the case, I can find a corner of sympathy in my heart for him, for being so "naive" when everyone was expecting him to be "wise". And I can understand if Ekta's creative weredeliberately portraying him as a man of "ungrown emotions" and therefore so out of whack in times of trouble.
But his position as both husband and King of a really vast estate, as also his ambitions to be a father as soon as possible, also give him very little time to grow. He has to double up, so to speak, to even run in the same place. So I hope his learning curve from this whole miscarriage episode will be very steep for his own sake.
How many of you agree or disagree with me?
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