Folks,
This is one of those times when I am not happy to have been correct in a prediction.
It was not at 8 pm last night, but around 8:10. Jodha is trying to free herself from an amorous Jalal, who is convinced that her demurring and denials are part of her being ladylike. Like the old chestnut: If a lady says no, she means maybe, if she says maybe, she means yes, and if she says yes, she is no lady!😉
She shoves him (and don't kid yourselves that she did not. She caught him neatly on the left shoulder, with a good bit of vim,and why not? I would have done the same in her place, for she has no idea where he is coming from). Since he is not expecting it, he loses his balance and falls to the ground, as an appalled Jodha looks on helplessly.
Jalal has thus been rejected, and repelled, both emotionally and physically, and then he is an emperor. An alpha male Shahenshah brought down to the floor by a woman who, he believes, led him on deliberately, and then turned around and spurned him after he had bared his innermost feelings to her.
Tears of rage, hurt and humiliation make his eyes brim over, and as a distressed Jodha tries to explain what she feels for him and what she does not feel, he squeezes them shut and his face contorts in mute agony.
There might not have been the tinkle of breaking glass, but Jalauddin Mohammed's heart is indeed broken.
Jalal: I had written yesterday, anticipating just this, about the vertiginous fall that awaited Jalal. "For the higher his heart soared today in imaginary bliss, the greater the depth of the hurt and the heartbreak that will follow, as surely as the night follows the day. ... This is a vulnerable Jalal, bewildered by hitherto unfamiliar emotions, by a tug at his heartstrings that he has never known before. ...Tomorrow is going to be terrible for this Jalal, aur uske bare mein soch kar hi dil ghabrata hai."
As it all came true today, my heart bled for him in his rage and his bitter grief.
Not the L word!: I was right about something else, and this time I was very glad of it. I wrote, again and again, all thru yesterday that what Jalal felt for Jodha was not just desire (I HATE the L word) , or even primarily that. It was more subtle, more complex. It was in part the inexplicable pull of fate that drew him into that dangerous trip to Amer just to catch a glimpse of her, and in part, as time went by, a deep felt need for her to care for him, to care for what happens to him.
Love is a matter of individual definition, but the essence of it is caring, and a longing for the other. Jalal's feelings for Jodha meet this test, and he proved it beyond doubt last night. And the L word was banished to the dump heap where it belongs.
Candour unlimited : But first things first. Rajat deserves a dozen curtain calls for the Jalal that he created onscreen today.
It was a magisterial performance, and not only in the grand sweep of emotion as he bares his soul to Jodha. It was there even in the way he handles himself as he enters Jodha's rooms. The slight hesitation and half smile as he gathers himself up so as not to reveal to the maids that he is sozzled. The camouflaged peering into the room to try and see where Jodha is. The satisfied smile after he has rewarded and dismissed them. All the while retaining the slight loss of balance and control that are part and parcel of having imbibed far too freely. Everything done impeccably, and in miniaturist detail.
What follows between him and Jodha is an infinitely tender scene of love - not a love scene, for that needs reciprocity - one of the very best I have ever seen onscreen. As Rajat and Paridhi played off each other superbly, Jalal and Jodha made our hearts ache for them both.
And if mine ached much more for Jalal, who ended up bruised and shattered, that was in large part due to Rajat'a ability to bring this new found Jalal - with his hesitation,his endearing shyness, his vulnerability, his touching candour that seeks both understanding and caring, and yes, love, in return - before us with every nuance in place.
One has only to see him stretch his hand out to touch Jodha's back, and then stop short, or quickly take away the arm he had put around her as he draws her to the window to gaze at the moon, to understand how even an emperor can be so unsure of himself when he is in love and does not know it.
And then it all comes out, in a stumbling stream of words falling over one another, the husky voice thickened by unfamiliar longings, punctuated by self-deprecatory laughter. He speaks of an Shahenshah who bends before no one, and is yet ready to bow before this woman. One who commands an empire and an army, and is yet afraid to tell her what he feels. Whose hand trembled the most when he held her hand in his during their wedding ceremony. Who had begun by wanting to win her as a trophy for his harem, but had changed, insensibly, to now wanting her to understand him. Who had sought to conquer her, but had ended up losing to her.
This confession of his innermost feelings is, for Jalal, a kind of stripping of the soul, a peeling away of every protective shell that he has built up around himself for years. It leaves him as emotionally naked as a baby, and as vulnerable.
As all this comes pouring out, and Jodha holds his hand in hers in mute empathy, Jalal's face registers a kind of startled expression of suspended disbelief. He cannot quite take in that this is actually happening to him. When he turns back and sees the gentleness in her eyes, the amazement deepens. He puts out his other hand to cover hers, tentatively, as if afraid she would pull hers away.
Jalal looks for all the world like a little boy who has unexpectedly got the gift that he had long yearned for. As Jodha assures that yes, she did mean every word she had written in that letter, and they came from her heart, his eyes are lit up with a wonderment at his good fortune, a childlike delight.
I could not but be both awed and moved by the depth, and the transformative power of what, for lack of a better word, I shall call love.
Alas, the words each is referring to are disastrously different. And so the edifice of trust between them, built up with such difficulty in the face of so many obstacles, comes crashing down and buries even their nascent friendship in the debris. But not for long, of this at least we can be sure.
Jodha- a blinkered thoroughbred: I was, for once, not cheesed off with Jodha today, For one thing, I was profoundly relieved not to have to endure a standard ashobaniya aacharan aur vaasnapoorti bhashan.😉 Indeed, the respect, and more than that, the empathy and the affection she showed Jalal was heartwarming, and one realized anew how far she had travelled towards him in these last few weeks.
But the problem with Jodha is this: she has no perceptiveness where the ideas or emotions of others are concerned, and thus no notion of what Jalal is feeling as he talks and talks and talks to her of what she has come to mean to him.
It is said that a woman always knows when a man is in love with her . The one who coined this aphorism had obviously never met the likes of Jodha Begum!😉
That she could listen to all of that, and that too from a man whose pride and power are both immense, and still believe that it was a platonic friendship that lay behind it passes my comprehension, but so it is.
So apni Jodha has no inkling that the gestures she makes to comfort and encourage Jalal look very much like ladylike come ons. All that handholding and shoulder patting would have given any man ideas, and this even without the assurance of the letter. Has Jodha Begum majored in platonic love by any chance, do you think?
More to the point, how does she imagine that a man like Jalal can be tamed, for the indefinite future, into a 'friend' (without benefits, bien entendu) because that suits her? That she can keep him at arm's length forever, while continuing to enjoy at the prestige and privileges of a Shahi Begum and, from time to time, getting her pet schemes through using his imperial status and powers ?
No, I am not saying that Jodha is selfish or greedy or grasping or manipulative. She is not hardwired for any of that, in fact quite the opposite. She is merely unimaginative, self-righteous, self-absorbed, and in a word, plain cuckoo.
Reverting to The Shove, which is what made matters so disastrous, Jodha realises that it should never have happened. She deeply regrets that, and the resultant hurt to Jalal's ego, judging from the lamentations with which she bombards Kanha the next morning. He must have promptly pressed the ear plugs (which Ritu had thoughtfully passed on to him when it became clear that there was to be no ashobaniya vyavahaar bhashan) into action!
But Jodha takes it for granted that a heartfelt apology to Jalal will fix everything, which again betrays her ignorance about the male psyche. For what stokes Jalal's fury is not so much that she does not love him. He was reconciled to that. It is rather that he had exposed himself to her as to no one else before, in the belief that she loved him. He had in effect confessed that he too loved her - he whispers that he now wants to say to her what she had said to him in the letter . Now that she has, as he believes, gone back on what she had written, and had snubbed him and spurned him, the confession that was meant as a proof of his love for her has now become a source of lacerating shame at his weakness for an undeserving minx. .
Of course Jodha, devoid of any feminine intuition, would never be able to decipher any of this. She is like a blinkered thoroughbred, always plunging ahead regardless.
Heartbreak and humiliation:As for Jalal's predictably violent reaction to his rejection, I was relieved that it was anger, rather than a debilitating, self-destructive grief. An emperor cannot afford to become a Devdas.
This said, it is a double blow, to his heart as well as to his ego. Heartbreak and humiliation do not have to be in separate compartments. They mesh into a toxic whole and embitter and corrode a person from inside. His imperial ego would not be able to take not just rejection, but rejection after what he would see as having been deliberately led on by her and then humiliated. Plus being knocked to the ground to boot, intolerable for an alpha male!
It was written elsewhere that both Jalal and Jodha felt they had suffered beizzati. This could not be more wrong. Jodha does not feel humiliated in any way, for she realises - and this is a measure of her regard for him now - that there must have been some misconception or mistake in her letter to trigger his altered behaviour. It is only Jalal who is seething with inchoate fury, and possibly a desire for revenge against Jodha as well.
If this was a Thomas Hardy or Anne Bronte novel, they would split for keeps and Jalal would plot dark revenge against her. Here the happy ending is mandatory, which spoils the fun to a large extent, but also simplifies matters.
So Jodha will probably now find out, at least for a while, what it feels like to be consigned to the outer darkness because the Sun King has turned away from her. It will be interesting to see how she handles this, and anyway it will not be for too long, Benazir or no Benazir.
Shyamala B.Cowsik
PS: What was it with the 21 st century nightdress for Jodha? A sleeveless undergown and an outer wrap, no less! And she used to commune with Morpheus in her full stiff regalia till the other day!😉
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