My dear Shraddha (I still like your id too),
As beautifully and thoroughly done as ever. A very smooth and satisfying read.
It does not seem to me that you have gone thru my Gordian Knot post of yesterday on the previous episode, with its different take on the whole temple visit, and the great significance of what Jalal did there, risking the very serious charge of butparasti (idol worship) which could have created major problems for the fledgling Shahenshah that he is at this stage.
While I detest Mahaam for any number of reasons, here, what she said yesternight makes perfect political sense. It would, if the full story had been leaked, have played straight into the hands of Jalal's enemies within his own camp.
Jalal surely knows that, and he takes a calculated risk. My assessment is, as I have said in my post, that it was not solely to quiet the turmoil in Jodha's zehen. It was for a vastly larger purpose, of winning over all of Hindustan and making it accept him by first accepting it, and respecting its faith and its beliefs. It is only incidentally about Jodha. It is more about Jalal morphing into Akbar. And Rajat brought that alive on screen with a sureness of touch and a gift for emotional nuance that was a feast for the eyes.
I liked your comment "I liked MA putting her points across to Jodha because Jodha got to learn the other side of the story too i.e. how the other Mughals would view Jalal's visit to the temple!" In fact,
I wondered if Jodha took in anything of what Mahaam yelled at her about the risks to Jalal from the temple visit. It did not seem so. For a princess born, she is strangely blank when it comes to politico-military and
siyasati realities.
But let us leave that aside, and see if Jodha's outpouring of grief and rage against Jalal was
(a) justified and
(b) uniquely effective in transforming Jalal, as Mansi's post has it, from a 'small man' into a 'great man'.
Jodha's diatribe falls into 2 parts, one the despoilation of the Kali temple, and second the killing of the Ameri soldiers.
What I could
not understand was her behaving as if this kind of outrage was unknown in her knowledge of history and thus so uniquely traumatic. In fact it was the opposite. I live in Pune, and I have read original documents in the archives here about how much looting and pillaging used to go on all around even before the Mughals. Not all the Rajvanshi rulers were like Maharana Pratap or his father Maharana Udai Singh or, later, Shivaji Maharaj. Some of them were pretty low specimens of humanity (a courtesy term when used for them) and they used to inflict these outrages on
their own subjects.
Jodha would surely have heard some of these stories, unless her auditory apparatus has a filter set to cut off anything that does not have the word Jalal in it, like the trigger word activating an intelligency agency wiretap!😉
I am not surprised that she also assumes that Jalal must have personally authorised the raid on the temple. Moti once tried to point out to her, long before he came into the picture with his secret descent on Amer, that he might have known nothing about such things done in his name.Jodha dismissed the idea out of hand then, and obviously would do the same now. As I noted elsewhere, imagination and perceptiveness are not her strong points
Next, her claim that the Kali mandir attack was unexpected, and the Ameri soldiers having been caught unawares and thus killed. If this was so, why the the escort at all? In those day, real safety was only within your fortress walls, and there could have been dacoits, like those patronised by Sujanpur, even if there had been no Mughals. So why was Jodha's escort unprepared? That is something for which they should have been punished for slackness, as I did see any number of Ameri survivors after the Mughal raiders had been beaten off and Motibai rescued. Not lamented over as Jodha seems to be doing.
Actually, Jodha was not referring to that incident when she was talking about the burning pyres. She was referring to the battle with Sharifuddin, where the Amer army was defeated, for she clearly mentions their desire of Amer to retain its independence. Now here again, there are 2 points.
One, as her wonderful Dadisa points out, Amer was constantly coveted by a number of her more powerful Rajvanshi neighbours. If one of them had overrun and captured it, what about that? Would Jodha have felt better if her beloved Amer had been annexed by a Rajvanshi and not by a Mughal? Perhaps.
Two, assuming that it is the Mughal attack that alone is being considered, Jodha's rant about the burning pyres of the dead Ameri soldiers made no sense at all. Most of the Amer army was taken prisoner by Sharifuddin, not killed.
And if she is talking of the soldiers Jalal killed while he was escaping from Amer with the injured Abdul (whom I miss more than I can say!) if he had not killed them all, he could never have got away. So that part was nonsense.
So, my point is that
Jodha's carrying on as if Jalal had authorised and presided over some uniquely outrageous attack against the Kali mandir is as unwarranted as her ranting about Jalal having crushed Amer's desire for independence. She is talking, as usual, thru her hat, or rather her pallav. If she had been married to the villainous Raja of Bundi, she would have found out at first hand what a king could inflict on his own people, and his wives.
As for the second point, the CVs may trot out the
Jodha ne Jalal ko haivaan se kaise banaya insaan mantra, but let us not fall into that highly misleading pit along with them.
Jalal was never a small man. He always had greatness in him, and once he was freed of his Khan Baba's harsh maxims, he came into his own, of which his descent on Malwa to eend Adham's atrocities was a prime example. That had nothing to do with Jodha.
Jalal is no small man who needs one woman's grief to make him great. The only thing Jodha did there was to let him know that this outrage had been committed, something he did not know. If he had known of it, he would have acted immediately to set it right.
He does not react now because the sense of outrage is Jodha's. He would have done the same if it was that little Hindu boy again who briefed him about the temple looting. So how is it a unique contribution of Jodha's? She just acts a public grievance system.
He does not defend himself to Jodha now not because it was some uniquely horrible incident, but rather because,
even if he did not know about it, much less authorise it, the buck stops with him as the Shahenshah, and he is morally responsible for anything wrong done by his soldiers. He does not fudge that responsibility.
In the transformation of Jalal into Akbar, there were many catalysts, and Jodha was one of them. But not even the most effective catalyst can trigger a chemical reaction if the basic ingredients are not already present. And then there are some chemical reactions that are auto-catalysed, as with Jalal a good part of the time, beginning with the breakneck 16 day ride to Malwa to save Baz Bahadur's former subjects from Adham Khan.
None of the above takes anything away from the lucidity and deceptive simplicity of your post.
Lastly, the delightful
precap reminded me of nothing so much as a wife waking up her husband at 2 am on a cold winter night and asking him to investigate a noise in the basement. Jalal's face as he looked at the
khanjar his biwi had handed him, even as she made Bharatanatyam style
nayanamudras towards the door, asking him to get on with it, was a treat!😉
Shyamala Aunty
Edited by sashashyam - 12 years ago
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