11/12/13
Folks,
For those of you who might have noticed my absence, it was not entirely because I went into a depression because of the bizarre goings on of late on TV at 8 pm. I am by now hardened to the ways of the CVs and nothing surprises me any more. I would not bat an eyelid even if Jalal was to actually turn into the headless chicken he strongly resembles of late, or if Jodha were to walk on water, which, I am convinced, she can, going by her consistent track record in the miracles department😉.
The explanation was far more mundane. I was, and in fact still am, considerably under the weather with a very bad bout of viral fever, compounded by assorted ancillary ailments. I would never have attempted this one but for 2 things.
One, young Sandhya' s vehement and decidedly un-Gandhian request that I should come back and "bash Jalal". Which, incidentally, she then proceeded to do herself, so strongly and competently, stoutly refuting any and all counter suggestions, that she has left me nothing to say that would add anything to the debate. But just to please her, I will try my hand at analysing Jalal this last week. This post will thus be mostly about him.
And the second, that I simply could not pass up the chance to send out a post dated 11/12/13, something that will not recur for another century. Add to that the fact that it also happens to be my birthday, which I often forget. But not this time, for this is truly a date to remember!
Now to business, and as my head feels like it wants to come apart, this will be blessedly short.
Jalal: Sandhya my dear, there is no point in bashing Jalal. This Jalal, that is. What we hav to do immediately is to register a fraud-cum-missing person report with the daroga in charge of Agra. Our Jalal has gone mysteriously missing, and has been replaced surreptitiously by a doppelganger (double) who looks like him, right down to the gelled hair, but that is about it. Everything else has been screwed up beyond belief.
This Jalal is such a far cry from the subtle and magisterially devious Shahenshah who ran rings round the Rat King in Amer only a month back that one does not know where to start in listing out his failings. Or even the one who, after consulting Salima Begum, went on to solve the false pregnancy case swiftly and effectively, even if a tad melodramatically.
This one, first of all, seems to have made such a fetish of admiring his Jodha Begum's brainwaves, unconditionally and uncritically, that one wonders what has happened to his brains. In that stagy scene with the drought stricken villagers - who are so close to Agra that the imperial couple can trudge their way to them on foot, and yet so far that they cannot elbow past petty thieves and adulterous spouses into the Diwan-e-Aam - Jalal behaved as if this case was a revelation from on high, with Jodha Begum as the lightning conductor. It said very little for his commonsense.
Later, when the awaam turned up in incredibly large numbers to thank him for the well, he was so effusively grateful to Jodha Begum for having introduced him to his people that one was sure he was a changeling. For this was the same man who had, just a few days ago, spoken from his heart, with rare and compelling eloquence, to the same awaam about the bond between him and them, calling them his janasheen and his aulad.
Well, one should be thankful for small mercies, for he seemed to be so moved that he might well have taken a pickaxe and tried to dig the well himself!😉
His praise of Ruqaiya's birthday gift to him, in the open court, and then, after the balcony appearance, of Jodha's gift trumping that one, was both ill-advised and unnecessary. Also unbecoming in a monarch whose dignity should automatically rule out such gushing, and this in either case.
I have nothing against his traipsing to Jodha Begum's rooms in the middle of the night to voice his profound gratitude to her all over again, for all that her first instinctive move is to look at him as though he is about to make unwelcome advances to her. Nor against his mooning about, literally, and sighing at the silvery orb while clutching his cardiac region as if a heart attack was on the way (apologies to the romantics who adored that scene, but I am "like this only"!). There has to be a Jalal-Jodha romance (though God, or rather Ekta alone knows when), so even I cannot object to such mushy stuff.
I did not like it when this Jalal received Ruqaiya's advice about the subedarial appointments - which was based on the most elementary principles of divide and rule, permit no alternate power centres to develop, and trust no one - as if it would have never occurred to him on his own. Why, these precepts must have featured promptly in his Khan Baba's Siyasat 101 course for a very young Shahenshah! The real Jalal would never have forgotten them, but this one looks so blank that one's heart sinks.
However, what made me acute register dismay, if not worse, was when this Jalal lets Adham Khan, who is no Chanakya, con him into a trap of Jalal's own making. Probably Jodha Begum's mahaanta complex is contagious, for nothing else can explain Jalal's rash move to renounce his imperial status above the law. He wants to seem to be extra noble, extra fair, and he ends up, predictably, in the suds.
Even then, the "no retrospective application of any law" is such an elementary principle of any jurisprudence that I fully expected Jalal to grab it at once.
But no, he seemed to have been dropped on his head, for he promptly announces that he will dissolve his longstanding marriage with his childhood playmate for absolutely no fault of hers, solely so that he can look good to the awaam, as the 16th century avatar of the Maryada Purushottam.
In fact, this sequence was so strongly reminiscent of Lord Rama banishing an expectant Sita to the forest because of the dhobi's comment about her (which will, for me, forever be a dark spot on his character) that I was looking for some reference to it by an bystander.But then I realized that Ekta would never risk an assuredly incendiary reaction from the present day awaam to any such parallel being drawn!
I have nothing to say about Jalal then letting Ruqaiya weep buckets all over him (one presumes that his costumes are not dry clean only'😉), though his acutely lachrymose countenance in all these scenes made me want to clobber him, if only to try and shake his frozen gray cells loose. He seemed so totally clueless, so resigned to having the closest relationship of his life destroyed due to his own folly, that one was left speechless. How could this be the same Jalal we had admired so often in the past?
Well, one could say that this divorce is a private matter, that affects only the two of them, and probably Ruqaiya far more than Jalal, who can easily compensate for losing her by mooning still more over his Jodha Begum.
But what does one make of his incomprehensible fiat that all marriages of underage girls in the 12/13 years since he married Ruqaiya should also be mandatorily dissolved? What did Jalal think - that his divorcing his empress was going to make the awaam accept this fiat, that would affect hundreds of thousands of young women and rip apart their families and harm their children, without protest? This is incomprehension and folly on such a grand scale that one does not know what to make of it.
Nor does one know what to make of a clueless Jalal, who is shown sharpening a blade when he should have been trying to sharpen his brains, clutching at Jodha Begum's equally incomprehensible proposal like a drowning man clutching at a straw.
Her proposal hardly makes any sense. What does she mean - that by exposing Adham Khan's role in precipitating the Jalal-Ruqaiya divorce, Jalal can reverse the awaam's rage against the new law that mandates all these talaqs retroactively? How? And why? They will be satisfied only if the retrospective application of the law is reversed, and it is implemented only from now on.
And if, as Ruqaiya asserts in her speech to the ever-ready-to-be-assembled awaam, Jalal is divorcing her to set a compelling example of non-tolerance of underage marriages, how will accusing Adham Khan, or even (as Jalal says in the precap) delivering him up to mob fury, change the above logic and the consequent need for the divorce to go through? It is all absurd and illogical.
I wish that stone had found Jalal's head instead of Mahaam's. Maybe he might, just might, have actually started using the grey cells which would have been activised by the shock. As it is, it is only his knee jerk loyalty to his Badiammi that resurfaces in full strength. So much for those who were hoping that he was becoming wiser about her and even a tad wary of her!
So we come back to my title: Reductio ad absurdum (Latin: "reduction to absurdity"). Could any title be more appropriate for the last week and more?
As for Jodha, Ruqaiya, and the rest, I leave them to your care. My head will take no more punishment!
Shyamala B.Cowsik
Anupamaa
68