In yesternight's episode, what stayed with me was not the understated, tentative steps - mostly taken by him, true, but not entirely one-sided - towards overt caring and affection between Jalal and Jodha.
- Jalal waiting, openly and without any pretence, for Jodha to come down. How many contemporary husbands would do this, without complaint and without hustling the spouse? How many would not fight shy of stating plainly what they were doing? And he is a 16th century emperor!
His obvious pleasure at seeing her in that (pretty awful) green joda of his choice; murmuring to himself about her new hunar in refusing and obliging him at the same time. His stealing a march on her by proclaiming that she had worn it for him - Jodha's lips are half open to protest, but then she thinks better of it!
And when he announces that he likes green, and he likes it especially on her, her involuntary preening in pride at the compliment. It is as instinctive as the proprietary pride in her sidelong glance when the chotti fauj raves about Jalal's sundar looks.
- Jodha stealing a look at her relaxed, smiling happy husband during the banjara dance. It is noteworthy that he is not then looking at her, so it is not a reaction on her part, but an initiative.
- Most revealing of all, the sheer terror on Jodha's face as Jalal grapples with the rampaging elephant and , at one point, falls down. It is true that anyone would have been panic-stricken at the sight, as all are the onlookers, especially the women. But there is an edge to the blind fear in Jodha's face, as her breath is caught in her constricted throat, which is far deeper than the normal human reaction to another human being in mortal danger.
Even after Jalal has managed to climb on to Hawai's back and is soothing it down, the terror and shock on her face are still there, as if frozen in time. Maybe, in those few instants, it was brought home to her what that man - not the Shahenshah - who was defying death to save the others in the pavilion, and also his beloved pet, meant to her, and what kind of void he would leave behind in her zehen were he to be killed in this dangerous enterprise.
NB: the promo and the spoilers: About the latter, for the record, I had felt that it would have been rather nice if Pratap had helped Jalal with tips on how to control a rampaging elephant, and they had developed a solid respect for each other, though it did seem unlikely to me even as I wrote that. Jalal would sure know his pal inside out and would need no back up for dealing with him.
But as Vicki has noted on her thread, it would have been nicer if Pratap had at least made a move to offer his help, even if it was not needed in the end, instead of keeping up a running commentary with his chamcha-in-chief, like Harsha Bhogle at an IPL match, and finally announcing, pontifically, that Jalal was a shreshtha yoddha.
In the event, I was very happy that Jalal did it on his own, coaxing the maddened elephant away from the terrified crowd (why can the director never produce a convincing scene of crowd panic? The helter skelter running around they show always looks fake), and then slowly reasserting his affectionate equation with it by the tones of his voice alone, till it lets him climb up to its back and soothe it back to normalcy.
About the fraudulent promo, of course I was ready with a slipper for Jodha. But after seeing that promo, one could not be blamed for being led astray. Mansi had even cooked up an ingenious theory to fit in with the promo and yet keep Jodha free of blame .
It was a relief that it proved to be a complete fraud, for Jodha's stature would have plummeted had it been true. My own feeling is that a misleading promo, made so by clever editing and transposition of shots, and only half the spoken lines being shown, is one thing. Showing a radically different take on the scene, as was done this time is quite another. It is a lie direct, and such dishonesty makes the CVs lose credibility. I do not think this one would have gained them much by way of TRPs either.
Sharifuddin: Coming back to the episode, I found the sudden spike in the creepiness quotient in Sharifuddin eyeing Jodha to be highly unrealistic.
It does not at all matter what he felt towards her in the pre-marriage period when he was squeezing Bharmal and hinting darkly about not having even touched Amer ka asli khazana. Why on earth would he, naturally a cautious man, now run such a risk by leering at Jalal's begum, and to what purpose? How can he be sure, seeing how soft Jalal is towards her and the fact that they share his rooms, that Jodha will not tell Jalal about his unpleasant behaviour? He knows full well how Jalal would then react, Bakshi Bano or no Bakshi Bano. It is bizarre.
Curiously enough, whereas I would have expected our Amer ki baaghin to look daggers at the obviously leering Sharifuddin, if only to let him know that she has read him aright and will not take such impertinence lightly, she looked uncomfortable and awkward. That was precisely the wrong signal to send out to a lecherous creep, because it eggs him on to push his luck the next time around. Jodha is going to realise very soon that she has made a mistake.
As for Bakshi Bano, with her doormat attitude and her eternally weepy eyes, she gets on my nerves big time.
The precap: the turning point - or a mirage?: What stayed with me was really the precap.
It was the single most hopeful thing re: the Jalal-Jodha relationship that I have seen so far. I am not at all a Mills and Boon aficionada, and as I wrote some time back (apologies for repeating it, but it is relevant here), my idea of the Jalal-Jodha romance would be :
Intelligent sparring between them, as between two fiercely competitive individuals, but now devoid of the harsh edges that marred their interactions till the Ajmer pilgrimage. Mutual caring and affection developing, slowly but surely.
Of an edgy friendship morphing, insensibly, into love, with all its yearnings, its restlessness in the absence of the loved one, the misunderstandings, the jealousies, the protectiveness and the possessiveness, and beneath it all, the undercurrent of a hidden sensuality.
Of a Jodha whose pride in her magnificent husband would make her say, as Cleopatra once said to Julius Caesar : "But for you, the world is full of little men".
There has been none of that so far, even hinted at as a remote possibility, with childish bickerings and tana maarna being irritating staples, especially from her side, interspersed with predictable and tiresome RK Films logo type stunts, and assorted jejune instances of physical contact. But as for any meeting of the minds, no way!
In this precap, Jalal is , with unsparing candour about the risks he runs, making Jodha face up to the kashmakash of being an emperor. What is more, he is treating her as an equal whose advice he seeks. She is now at the foot of the wall, and there will be no easy refuge in a retreat to ghrina or deliberately misunderstanding him. She will have to stand and deliver.
Let us see what she does. This could be a real turning point in their relationship. At least, so I hope.
Moontide, reading Jodha's face in that last shot, is sure that she looks absolutely ready for Bhashan number 234567890 .
I feel otherwise. I did not see her eyes as indicating that she is getting ready for another bhashan. It seemed to me that she was shellshocked by the implications of what he had done - put her in the judgment seat - and by the brutally frank dilemma he had set out.
She is now, finally, coming face to face with the self-evident truth- self-evident to all but herself - that in an emperor's world, it is but rarely a choice between black and white, between good and bad, between right and wrong. It is almost always a choice between two shades of grey, between the bad and the worse, between the lesser wrong and the greater one.
What Jalal is really doing is to drill into her pretty cement concrete head that the Mughal empire is not a tinpot little principality like Amer, and that he has other and broader concerns than catering to her parivaar and to her nakhras.
It should be a salutary Lessons in Leadership 1.0., coming on top of Mahaam's little tutorial of the day before on the Art of Receiving 2.0 ( which I feel was a contributory factor in making Jodha wear Jalal's green gift, along with Jodha's residual sense of shame at having made that comments about Mughalon se raksha to Jalal).
I am even willing to stick my neck out on the precap , despite the CVs' propensity to cheat and my dismal record in such matters.
Somehow, I feel Jodha will be, for a change sensible, sensitive, perceptive, and supportive. She will respond that his pride and his stature as a Shahenshah are paramount, and so they should stay here and fight it out with Jalal's enemies, together.
But I do realise that interpreting freeze frames is tricky and it could go Moontide's way as well, but then the whole point of this pathbreaking scene would be negated. Why have it at all then?
Comic asides: There were many curious and unintentionally comic things today: Pratap redefining woodenness with such finesse that he would have given solid oak an inferiority complex, Pratap's court jesters hissing into his (undoubtedly tin) ear, Jalal and the Amer halwai, though I could make little of their mumbled exchange (the CVs have obviously forgotten that Jalal had already forgiven him at the Shahi Shaadi, when he poked the halwai mischievously in his tummy), Adham waving that red bandanna at Hawai, possibly confusing him/her with the proverbial bull, and finally, Jodha looking, despite the seriousness of the moment, very funny in that shahi pagdi.
So we wait, as we do so often, with bated breath, for Jodha's reaction to Jalal's dilemma. She is now Portia (from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice), and he is summoning her, like a Daniel, to judgment. If Jodha muffs this one too, then I wash my hands, both of her and of my hopes for the Jalal-Jodha bond on my dreams.
Shyamala B.Cowsik
Anupamaa
Pocket Mein Aasman
Cricket
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