At the outset, I need to warn you that this bi-centennial post, my first in nearly 3 weeks, is being written reluctantly, because of force majeure from some young friends who tired of trying to locate anything in my last thread, on Episode 187, which stands now at a daunting 102 pages.
I am afraid this one is going to be considerably at odds with the general trend in the forum, which seems to be one of great sympathy and empathy for, no, not Jodha, but Jalal. This might just flummox you - seeing that Jalal/Rajat (for me, they are mostly a seamless whole) has always been my blue-eyed boy, even at his most exasperating. It might flummox you enough for you to go ahead regardless. If so, you are more than welcome, but please note that you have been forewarned!
Jalal: the Lost Emperor: The curious thing is that my post for Episode 150 was called Lament for the Lost Emperor. It could, bar the welcome changes in Jodha's attitude towards Jalal, be almost the same now. I was in fact tempted to call this one Lament for the Lost Emperor II, but I refrained in the end. In the Slough of Despond will do just as well!
The dictionary meaning of "lost" is one who does not know where he is, or how to get where he wants to go.
If you take a long, hard look at our Shahenshah-e-Hind now, what do you see? He does not know where he is, i.e. where he stands vis a vis his sabse zyaada kareeb Jodha Begum.
And where does he want to go? Obviously into the zone of her trusting him enough to keep no secrets from him, especially as he has repeatedly reassured her that she can do so with her dost, who would help her cope with any problem of hers. But he does not know how to get there.
All he can do is to lament endlessly: Aap hamein kis gunaah ki sazaa de rahi hain, Jodha Begum?.. Hum jaante hain ki aap kisi galat kaam ko anjaam nahin de saktin... Sahi waqt aane par aap hamein sach bata dengi... Hum aapko yakeen kyon nahin dila paye? ...Hum sirf khaufzada hain ki aapko koyi khatra na ho.. And so on and on and on and on, as he paces the corridors of the Agra palace ceaselessly, like an unquiet ghost, and ends up periodically, unannounced, at Jodha Begum's hoojra, only to be told that she is not there.
His visits to her rooms, merely to confirm what he already knows, are of a piece with his cutting his finger on the edge of his khanjar. It is a masochistic gesture of inflicting pain on himself, just as the visit to the empty hoojra is another, to remind him once more that the woman he now cares for more than any other, more than himself, is lying to him and keeping things from him. That she is apparently neither the humsafar he thought he had found in her, nor a humraaz.
He is thus well and truly lost.
Shaayad wo aaj raat bhi jayegi :How, folks, would you give a visual definition of pathetic? Not in a sneering way, but pityingly, with reluctant understanding? Well, for me, it would be the sight of the Shahenshah-e-Hind wandering down the palace corridors in a near daze, muttering to himself Shaayad wo aaj raat bhi jayegi... shaayad nahin ... before he fetches up, as usual, in Jodha's rooms, like a lost puppy.
The overt bitterness on the other occasion might be different, but when he tells Jodha, before shambling off wearily, Kaash aap hamein sach keh paatin..kaash kam se kam koshish to kartin.. Hum samajhte aapki baat ko.. the pathos that Rajat brings to the scene - in the tired disappointment in his eyes as he gazes into hers, in the bitter shake of the head - is just as strongly visible.
This Jalal is no longer a dominant alpha male. He is so piteously, so desperately emotionally dependent on Jodha, or rather on his need to believe that she trusts him and cares for his feelings, that he seems like a hollow man.
He sees her with a strange man in a desolate hut in the middle of the night, but he cannot summon up the courage to confront them on the spot. Or even to question her about it later. He is afraid that he will alienate her by what might be taken as his suspecting her virtue.
Instead, he goes to her rooms every night unannounced. After entering Jodha's hoojra and seeing for himself that it is empty, he looks despairingly at Motibai as if she could unlock the key to the puzzle that is Jodha. The way he looked back at Moti, as he says to himself that he knows where Jodha is, was the worst of all.
It needs to be understood that this is not a question of his suspecting Jodha of an affair. He does not, at least as of now, and rightly so. The question is not of her morals, but of propriety, of the honour of the Shahenshah and the Mughal sultanate. It is also a question, the only one that Jalal clings to even in his private thoughts, of Jodha's personal security.
I cannot imagine any man, even in this century, not to speak of a 16th century alpha male emperor, who is so afraid that this wife of his would throw him over as a friend (for Jalal is too scared to try to move an inch further than that even now, and with just that dosti, he seems to thinks that he is on the doorstep of Elysium !), that he does not lift a finger to stop her from going again and again, at the dead of night and all alone, not just out of the palace but into the jungle next to the river, to meet an unknown man and confabulate with him behind the closed doors of a hut.
It is not just pure folly, it is insane.
What if Jodha had been attacked and carried off by bandits wanting to loot her of her shahi zevar? She goes out looking like a glittering Christmas tree half hidden by a blanket, and her gold nose ring, almost as big as a cartwheel, would attract thieves from a mile away.
NB:One would think, seeing the way both Jodha and Sujamal carry on, that 16th century Mughal Agra was a revival of the Tretayuga Ramarajya -which was defined as a place where a lone woman laden with jewellery could wander about the streets in the middle of the night in complete safety.😉
What if Jodha had been stopped by a patrol when she was with Sujamal? The ensuing scandal would have reduced te honour of the Mughal imperial family to shreds. When Jalal rescued Jodha from committing suicide, he gave a big Jodha-style bhashan about the paramount need for him to preserve the honour of the Mughal sultanate. Where has all that gone now?
Instead of putting a stop to her midnight gallivantings by ordering the guards to bar anyone, without exception, from leaving the palace, Jalal goes about bleating that she might or might not have gone to meet the mystery man yet again, interspersed with laments that she should trust him and tell him the truth.
To put it plainly, Jalal has clearly lost it.
He had lost it, if to a lesser degree, even earlier. It is not a question of suspecting your own shadow. It is more a question of incessant curiosity and eternal vigilance. They are both be the necessary attributes of a successful ruler.
When Jalal saw the writing on the temple leaf that he had picked up in Jodha's hoojra, like any normal man, he should have been curious about it, especially as there was so much of it and very clearly visible at that. Even on the crushed leaf, Mahaam could read all of it, as could Jodha a bit later. He would have asked his wife what was written there, even if he assumed that it was just a prayer. He would have expected her to explain what it was, and that would have been, he would have assumed, the end of it.
Next, if Jalal had taken even the most fleeting look at Jodha's face as he was holding the leaf platter, he would have known at once that something was seriously wrong and that she was hiding something and was mortally afraid that he would find out about it. Doubt, even if it was merely that she was endangering herself with unnecessary secrecy, would have set it at once.
Why, if my Sasha had looked like that when I was clearing out his cupboard, I would have smelt a rat at once!😉
But when it comes to Jodha, Jalal is like Gandhiji's three monkeys. Both when that is justified, and when it is not.
Helpless desperation: Let us come back to Friday last. I watched, with growing dismay, the abject helplessness in his face as Mahaam was pushing him, inch by subtle, camouflaged inch - with endless repetitions that Begum Jodha could do no wrong as she was paaksaaf, nek neeyat - into suspecting that very Jodha. The desperation with which he was resisting it, again inch by inch.
His refusal to confront Jodha because he would then be seen as suspecting her yet again was meaningless. He can object to her midnight trysts purely on the grounds of her own safety, and of propriety and the honour of the Mughal imperial family. Which respectable family would allow the women of the house to do what Jodha is doing? How did Bharmal react on learning about her nighttime boatride with Suryabhan? He wanted to strangle her.
When Jalal finally offers Mahaam the excuse that Jodha might have been meeting Sujamal, he adds that she would have been afraid to tell him so because Hum Sujamal ko apna gunehgar maante hain. Not gunehgar hai. And this is the man who has attacked and captured Mewat, a Mughal territory, and killed two of Jalal's close relatives.
What did Bharmal, and Jodha herself, think of Sujamal after he attacked Amer? How does Jalal now define an enemy when he is related to Jodha Begum? Remember, he does not know that Sujamal has saved his life, so that factor does not enter into it at all. It is just his obsessive fear of offending Jodha, plain and simple.
It was unbelievable, the total lack of any clear thinking on Jalal's part, not to speak of the absence of the kind of swift, decisive action needed to nip all this dangerous stuff in the bud. He is a puppet of his obsession with staying in Jodha's good books, and that clouds all else in what passes for his mind these days.
What kind of emperor is this, who aspires to rule all of Hindustan? When I was an IFS probationer at the National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, our riding instructor used to scold the poor performers (I was not one of those; I loved riding!) Agar ek ghoda nahin sambhal sakte. to district kya sambhaloge? One could say the same for this Jalal, Agar ek begum nahin sambhal sakte, to pura Hindustan kaise sambhaloge?
Mental paralysis: I watched Rajat's bravura take on crippling weakness as Jalal sought to defend his non-action vis a vis Jodha. The twisting and turning to escape the net of questions that Mahaam was, slowly but surely, closing around him. The naked fear in the pathetic eyes, like those of a trapped deer. The thrashing about for any explanation that would be consistent with Jodha's innocence. And my heart sank, or rather it plummeted into my non-existent shoes ( I am always barefoot inside the house).
Rajat was splendid as the clueless, depressed, haunted Jalal, who cannot bear the very idea that he has not been able to make Jodha trust him - see how here too he makes out that the fault is really his, not hers? .
Who repeats endlessly to himself that his restless misery is due to his fear that she might be in danger (from a man whom she permits to hold her comfortingly by the shoulders, and with whom she goes willingly inside a remote hut in the dead of night?? ).
Who repeats endlessly to himself that he cannot run the risk of accusing her wrongly one more time (but he does not need to accuse her at all, he only needs to halt her reckless shenanigans).
Who repeats endlessly to himself that she can do nothing wrong and he is sure of that (but she can be, and is, exceedingly thoughtless and foolish).
While all the while, seething inside him, is the terrible fear, the fear he refuses to acknowledge, that she is perhaps doing just that.Mahaam has made sure of that when she tells him that if he does not get a proper explanation from Jodha, Shak aapke dilodimaag mein baith jayega..
If he would only face that fear up front and centre, and ask Jodha point blank, NOT whether she is cheating on him with another man, but WHY she is risking her honour and his, and that of the Mughal sultanate, to meet a strange man outside the palace, alone and in the middle of the night.
If only he would ask her why she does not trust him, her husband, enough to confide in him, despite his having tried, again and again and again, to reassure her of his understanding and to persuade her to do so.
If he had done this, the suppurating ulcer of latent suspicion would be lanced. The unacknowledged, but still very much present poison would flow out and the ulcer would be healed. And Jodha too would be freed from the crushing burden of guilt that is weighing her down.
But he does not , and instead, when the last straw breaks the camel's back, there comes Jalal's savage outburst (in the promo) to a terrified Jodha.
NB:Whether this uncontrolled outburst is going to lead to her fleeing Agra and entering the vanaprasthashrama decades ahead of time remains to be seen. If indeed she does take refuge in the forest, we can be sure that when Jalal goes after her, apologises profusely for her acts of omission, and brings her back, it will not be before she has founded a Nirdosh Pashu Pakshi Raksha Kendra in the forest and got Jalal to fund it.😉
Jodha: Contrary to what some might expect, I have hardly any complaints against Jodha. She is what she is. As I once described her, Jodha is like a brisk, gurgling stream flowing over a bed of pebbles. The water is pure and clear and you can see right thru to the bottom. What you see is what you get. There are no treacherous eddies, no underwater currents to drag you in. But there is also much less gravitas, less depth, less subtlety. It babbles on, this brook, unconscious and uncomprehending of any world but its own simple, and simplistic, one.
So it follows that Jodha is totally lacking in comprehension of what a deep, turbulent ocean like Jalal can be like, with raging storms beneath the surface, and even an occasional tsunami. She cannot read his moods, cannot hear the words he does not say, as most wives can with their husbands, using the fabled feminine instinct. It is the same now.
Let us go a bit back and take the shamsheer riyaaz/tulsi aarti scene. Jalal came across very strongly in that scene, especially the raw anger in his eyes when he stares at Jodha over his shamsheer till her eyes drop. Then the deliberation with which he washes his face and hands before he turns back to her with that unsettling question about her looking tired.
Even the least perceptive of women would have known at once that something had gone badly wrong overnight, seeing this drastic change from the dost who sought to share her worries and to ease them, the one who set the caged birds free because that was what she would like, to this remote new Jalal with the sharp probing questions and the weary disillusionment with which he refers to constant betrayal by those closest to him.
The only conclusion possible was that her guilty secret was out. But Jodha's face looks blank, and I doubt if any of the above penetrated into her cerebral processes.
It is only after the Diwan-e-Harem scene, where Jalal goes from the smouldering sarcasm with which he asks Jodha Batayiye, kaunsa naya kanoon lagoo karna hai, harem ka kaunsa rivaaz badalna hai?, to the narrow-eyed anger as he looks up at her from under lowered brows, to the cutting dismissiveness when he says that he had always told her that Ruqaiya handled the harem the best, that it seems to finally dawn even on Jodha, accustomed of late to his constantly praising her in abundance for her hunars, that something is amiss with the Shahenshah and her own equation with him.
Contrary to some views elsewhere in the forum, I do not think Jalal's overt anger here is due to his disappointment at Jodha Begum having let him down by failing to exploit her management talents to the full. It is because of the reason she offers for dropping out - her (sudden) personal problems. That, for Jalal, is like a red rag to a bull, as it is shorthand for her involvement with the Mystery Man in the hut.
To continue, I found the way in which Jodha's turns up later in Jalal's rooms, to ask him why he seems distant and unconcerned by her harem tyaag decision, rather cute. Even more so the way in which she immediately stands up when he says he had not asked her to sit down. The whole thing was exactly like an abashed schoolgirl in front of the headmistress.
I do not blame her for not having told him about it in advance, not to speak of consulting him, for what convincing excuse could she offer him? She would have been cornered in an instant. So she avoids him beforehand and blurts out her decision cold turkey.
But I did find her badly wanting in her reaction to Jalal's infinitely touching parting remarks: Kaash aap hamein sach keh paatin.. kaash kam se kam koshish to ki hoti,,Hum samajhte aapki baat.. coupled with the weary disappointment and visible pain in his eyes as he looks at her before turning away.
Any woman with an iota of perceptiveness would have known how badly he was hurting. She would never have let this incredibly trusting, caring and supportive husband go away without reassuring and comforting him. She would have assured him at once that that she wanted to tell him everything, but was bound by a vachan she could not break, That she needed just a little more time,and then he would be the first, the only one to know all. Till then, she would implore him to trust her. What a difference that would have made!
But Jodha sees nothing except that he is not normal towards her. She can perceive nothing of the inner turmoil he is going through, the helpless despair he feels, because of her prevarications, her lack of openness, and her silence. Nothing at all.
It was exactly the same as when she went to him, radiant and brimming over with gratitude, to thank him for all that he had done to protect her honour and her good name in the false pregnancy affair. Then too she had no clue as to the anguish at Bakshi Banu's treachery that was raging inside Jalal.
Nothing much seems to have changed in Jodha in this respect. It is evidently going to take a while before anything does.
Mahaam: For me, she was the Star of the Week. Watching her weave her nefarious webs with silken efficiency was like rolling scrumptious dark chocolate under one's tongue. She had two spectacular scenes with Jalal, and Ashwini/Mahaam was tops in both.
In the first one, the subtle tonalities of her voice, the fake reticence and hesitation, the praise of Jodha's paakhizagi, the feigned regret at having to alert Jalal to what was going on behind his back - it was all so perfect ki dil khush ho gayaa.
A superlative bit of emoting. Not for a moment did she slip out of her role: even if Jalal had been staring at her face unblinkingly from beginning to end, he would have spotted nothing wrong.That is what is meant when they say that a secret agent has to stay in character throughout. She betrays her real feelings only for a split second at the very end, when Jalal has turned his back to her.
When she mentions the message written in chandan on the leaf, as a clinching point, she guards against a likely question from Jalal as to why she did not come to him at once with that information. She wanted to be sure if anything was wrong, she says, and to make sure Jodha would be safe, she had personally followed her to the temple.
But Mahaam must have been in despair after that session, and even more so after they both sighted Sujamal with Jodha that night. For even after listening to Mahaam's masterly kaan bharofying, Jalal unhesitatingly gives Jodha the benefit of the doubt, and believes that firstly, she can do nothing really wrong, and secondly, and this was wonderful, that she will tell him about it when the time was right.
So, being the master tactician that she is, by the time she corners him for the second session, Mahaam has refined her technique. She repeats that Jodha Begum is paaksaaf aur nek neeyat even more frequently and emphatically than Salima Begum would have done. Fortified behind this wall of fake faith in Jodha, she draws Jalal into a chakravyuh of unanswerable questions, each posed with what seems to be infinite regret.
She pins him down into the net that she draws ever tighter, nixing his hope that it was Sujamal after all by citing the fake intelligence report she has planted in advance in his mind. By the end of the session, he is exhausted and defeated, and that shows in his eyes.
And yet, not just Jalal, but no dispassionate outside observer could have found even a single remark, or a word, in all that Mahaam says, that could be interpreted as being hostile towards Jodha. Mahaam is truly one of her kind, and her Renaissance counterparts in Europe of a couple of centuries earlier - Catherine de Medicis and Lucrezia de Borgia - would have applauded her.
Those who want her to be disposed of in short order in the most painful manner possible know not what they are asking for. Without Mahaam, we would all be in imminent danger of contracting diabetes.😉
Moti: She behaves more like Jodha's sister than her maid, even in front of Jalal. Her impertinence in standing there like a lamp post and letting the Shahenshah bend and pick that temple leaf up from the floor was hardly surprising. That is the way she behaves these days. The old Jalal would have paralysed her with a look and sent her scurrying out of the room. This one just stops short of asking her permission to speak with Jodha Begum. But if Moti had tried any such stunts with Bharmal, she would have copped it good and proper.
Sujamal: A ham of the worst kind. His exchange with the suspicious daroga at the temple would have been laughable even in a high school play. As for the suhaag ki raksha stuff, enough has been written about it already. It is pure poppycock, as illogical and senseless as can be. What if Jalal were to lead the campaign to retake Mewat? Would Sujamal protect him against his own Rajvanshi army?
Yes, he does not know that Abul Mali's co-conspirator, who was meeting him near that poisoned well, is Sharifuddin, because he cannot see his face from his perch on high. But he should, at a pinch, have been able to recognise Sharifuddin's voice, for after all he spent so much time with him preparing to conquer Amer!
NB: During that scene, I was amusing myself by imagining Sujamal tumbling out of the tree right on top of Abul Mali, like Alibaba's unfortunate neighbour. Alas, no such thing happened!😉
And why the devil does Sujamal get Jodha to promise to keep their meeting(s) a secret? What if someone had spotted her and told Jalal? Moreover, where was the need for him to call her to meet him is such a desolate spot near the river, just to tell her that he had nothing to tell her and they should not meet any longer? It is plain nuts.
Finally, how does he propose to find out who the ghar ka bhedi out to get Jalal is, by hanging around near the Ambe Maa mandir looking like a suspiciously well fed fakir/bhikari?Does he imagine that someone is going to write the name on the temple notice board?
Well, there is no point fretting about these trifles in a script as full of hole as Swiss cheese.
But even so, the Friday precap seems very odd. It appeared to be after Jalal's outburst, and what I presume is Jodha's continued vachan badhdhata, for their dresses are the same as in the promo. But Jalal's lines about beinteha mohabbat sound misplaced. But then when have such considerations prevailed in Jodha Akbar?
Well, folks, that is au revoir for the next 2 weeks at least. Till we meet again, do not fret over the onscreen goings on, and have as much fun as you can.
Shyamala B.Cowsik
Mannat Har Khushi Paane Ki
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