Jodha Akbar 210: Shakespearian heights DT 50 - Page 14

😆😆 It was quite farcical, that show of the invincible Sujamal. Wonder how anyone can admire it so profusely.

Or about the bizarre precap, clearly intended to make Sujamal seem to be one up on Jalal, since the bodies of the soldiers - had been deliberately stacked up to look a taller pile than the similar one shown when Jalal was attacked by Suryabhan's soldiers when he was escaping from Amer with the badly wounded Abdul.

The precap, complete with Jalal sporting his usual furious look, coupled with the total ineffectiveness of his whole band of courtiers, succeeded in bringing the image of the Mughals down to rock bottom.

You know aunty... I actually loved that scene..it was shown so well.. a man depicting anger and helplessness... 😳 No, my dear, I have not made myself clear. His charging up and down the Diwan-e-Khas was acceptable - where was Atgah Khan then? - though there was no logic in yelling at all of them equally, when most had nothing to do with the harem, which was the sole centre of action, for which he should have cornered his Badiammi more sharply than he did. But what was not nice at all was his charging off himself, presumably after hearing that Sujamal has done an Abul Mali, shamsheer held aloft, only to be brought up short and left staring at that pyramid of corpses.

It also, with obvious intent, simultaneously sought to elevate Sujamal to near mythic status as the swordsman No. 1 in all of Hindustan.

Apparenlty, he was a master swordsman and his warrior skills so astute that Akbar wanted to have him enrolled in his army ...😊 My dear, if Jalal wanted to enroll someone in the Mughal army,that need not mean that he was the best there was. I am sure Sujamal was very good as a warrior, but so were many others too. This kind of buildup for him is excessive, plus the chap's harem idea was so harum(pun intended) scarum that it was clear that his upper storey is to let. The long, lingering farewell look he gave Jodha in front of a livid Jalal confirmed this.

How on earth did he think he was going to unearth the conspirator?By eavesdropping on harem gossip?) by the worse folly of exposing his sister to the deepest disgrace, and punishment, by not releasing her from the vachan even when Jalal had found them together in her hoojra, will be totally forgotten.

Yup... it made not an iota of sense.. !

As for me, his bidding farewell to Jodha with a long, soulful look(which must have stoked Jalal's fury by another 100 degrees), and then letting her face the music from her murderously angry husband, was enough to negate any admiration of his eventual sacrifice.

I have no soft corner for him either...when we had no soft corner for Jalal during the Tasneem track (noble intentions, silly behaviour) then, why for this dude? 😆 It is not just silly, Lashy, it was murderous folly on his part as far as what he let Jodha in for. WHAT did he think Jalal would do to Jodha if he was not told that the intruder was her brother? He could easily have killed her on the spot.

OTT? Of course!: And before we go any further, let me dispose of the carping remarks that Jalal was over the top on Friday. Of course he was over the top! He had to be.

Those carping about him for being OTT would have been delighted with Jodha, who was decidedly UTT (under the top).

I agree I found Jalal's reactions too Over the top and Jodha's too downplayed... 😕 Yes. but Jalal HAD to be over the top. It was not, as I wrote elsewhere on this thread, a Victorian tea party, it was an incendiary situation straight out of A Lion in Winter, the screen version with Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn, minus Kate, of course. Jodha was a shunya.

Symbiotic suffering:To revert, this was a performance that, more than ever before with Rajat as Jalal, erased the dividing line between the actor and the character, but far more difficult and thus far rarer, between the character and the viewers as well. He drew us in with him into the vortex of agony, of despair, of bitter self-contempt, of the searing hurt of the worst betrayal he could ever have suffered, that had him in its grip. And this for nearly 12 straight minutes of screen time. Which, in cinema, is an eternity.

Yes, that's true.. it must have taken an immense amount of energy and dedication from him to complete those twelve minutes .
Also talent and technique. It was a very, very tough scene from the point of view of the actor's craft, his technique. He had to maintain the emotional pitch, raise and lower it by turns, like a sine curve, modulate his voice to match, and remember all those lines perfectly, for the slightest hesitation would have called for a retake from the beginning, to maintain the emotional continuity. The boy can do anything.

The only other such scene I can remember was that of Mohit Raina as Jalandhar in DKD Mahadev, when he was holding his dead wife in his arms, talking to her and refusing to acknowledge that she was no more, and then again as he sits by the side of her burnt out pyre, running his hand thru the cold ashes and once again talking to her. That was at the other end of the OTT scale, very soft, but it gave me goose pimples.

But it was not this kind of one take 12 minute monologue, with a blank-faced woman who gave him nothing to play off. It is but rarely that one gets to see anything like this onscreen. We were very lucky. And if he had had an even halfway good co-actor, the scene would have been so much better. As it was, as I wrote, I wanted to pick him up, as one does with a little boy who hurts himself, and make him well again.

We suffer with him as he mocks himself, again and again, pounding his chest with bitter mirthless laughter, Kitne nasamjh the hum, kitne bewakoof!

Yes...that was painful! The fact that the realization of a presence of a 'heart' brought with it such pain..brought with it such trauma... brought with it an 'arm-twisting' scenario where he felt the need and the urge to still give her a chance and believe her.. where he felt compelled to want to hear from her that she was innocent - for his sanity, if not for her safety! Yes, my dear, that is just it, for his sanity. He is going mad with anger and the sense of having been betrayed, and so he is almost willing her to say that no, she is not guilty of betraying him, she has not committed zinakari. Else, why would he ask her that first question about whether she knew the man in her rooms?

We too hold our breath as he almost begs Jodha Begum, citing the faith he had had that she could do no wrong, the almost unbelievable patience he had shown, hoping that one day, she would come to him, trust him and tell him the truth.

Aunty forget husband - even a girlfriend wouldn't put up with her boyfriend doing any such thing today...its got nothing to do with shehenshah or modern man.. 😆Try telling that to the Honourable Women!

He loves Jodha Begum beyond all reason, and the one desperate desire of his heart is to somehow, anyhow, convince himself, despite all appearances to the contrary, that she is as he had believed her to be, paaksaaf, not an adulteress who would invite her lover to her own rooms a few steps away from where her husband was, under the same roof.

Exactly!

Bitter love: He does not even hesitate, so desperate is he, to expose the deepest,the most sensitive secret of his heart: his love for her. This is not the stumbling, shy, gentle confession of the night of the dhakka. That was from a young man new to love, who wanted to share the wonder, the sheer loveliness of his unfamiliar jazbaat with his beloved.

😭

This is distilled gall, the corrosive self-contempt of a man deeply ashamed of his weakness for a Delilah, who, he now believes, had entered his life only to destroy him by condemning him to a lifetime of agony:

Kitne nasamajh the hum, hazaron begumat ke malik, Mughal sultanat ke Shahenshah, jise Zille-Ilahi kehte hain, izzat uske saamne jhukti hai, aur wo jhuka bhi to aapke saamne, usne izzat bakshi bhi to aapko! Aut aapne usi ko dhoka dediya?

👏

As I listened to Rajat's Jalal lacerate himself again and again with such bitter self-contempt, such was the mesmerizing power of his performance that I felt as if a much loved child had fallen and hurt himself beyond recall. That I needed, somehow, anyhow, to pick him up and make him well again.

Awww aunty🤗

Death from a thousand cuts: As he finally accuses her openly of being an adulteress, who had not let him, her legally wedded husband, come near her, touch her, establish a relationship with her, love her, and had pushed him away with a dhakkabut had invited a gair mard into her rooms.

I could see that in all this, it was not Jodha who was suffering the most, for despite the horrendous shock of the accusation, she was sustained by the certitude of her innocence. It was Jalal, who was being subjected to death from a thousand cuts, self-inflicted, true, but deepening and bleeding all the more with every instant of Jodha's silence that could, to him, mean only one thing, her black guilt.

It was as if a kaleidoscope had been turned upside down in his mind. Jodha's image there, as the paaksaaf, loyal, infinitely courageous hunar ki khaan he had come to love, was reversed in an instant. Now everything she had ever done, per se and for him, was seen as if thru a distorting mirror, and the image was ugly, very ugly.

I was consumed with a sense of helplessness. And a sense of inchoate rage against the folly of the woman who sat there watching all this, seeing her lion of a husband being reduced to a self-hating wreck, with his soul poisoned by the conviction that he had given his heart at long last, but to whom

Beautifully penned Aunty.. beautifully written.. your anguish is evident!👏 Yes, I literally hated her for it.

She could have turned the kaleidoscope back with an anguished protest: Hum paaksaaf hain, Shahenshah, aap hum par vishwas karein. Ek aakhri baar vishwas karein!Humne aapse koyi vishwasghaat nahin kiya. Hum abhi vachan ke bandhe hain, Shahenshah, par hum aapko kabhi dhoka nahin de sakte!

I know, right. 😕

And then which woman would let herself be accused of adultery - the worst insult imaginable, and that too from her own husband - without saying a word in her own defence? Surely this mistress of sophistry could have found some way out, some trick of language to keep her idiotic vachan and still prevent her husband from slipping into this morass of bitter anguish?

So he threatens her with the most cruel death possible for the man he takes to be her paramour, and that too in front of her ; his face alight with near hatred as he asserts Humein yakeen hai ki aap royengi, aapko dard hoga. The savagery of the threat being lost in the almost pleading demand that followed Isliye keh rahein hai, jawaab dijiye humein!JAWAAB DIJIYE!!!

I swear...OMG... reading this brought it all back!

But it does not work, and his hand is cut as he smashes it agains the wall in rage, and it bleeds. She reaches instinctively for the bleeding hand, but he now cannot even bear her to touch him, for her very touch is as if it was acid searing his skin. So he shoves her away to the other corner of the room in a spasm of violent rejection.

He boxes her in with kasams on all those she held dear - Kanha, Kaali Maa, her parents. It is a strange echo of his earlier appeal:Agar aap mein insaniyat baaki hai, toh sach batayiye!

The very strangeness of his first question shows the extent of his desperate need to see her redeem herself, any which way. For what sense does it make for him to ask her whether she knew the man she had been meeting outside the palace at the dead of night, and now in her own rooms? He just wants her to say No, I do not know him!, however incredible that might sound. And when she does not oblige him and confesses that yes, she knows him, Jalal cannot even bring himself to do what 99 men out of a 100 would have done, hit her.

😭 And yet, I have myself seen, there are those who actually say that Jalal hits Jodha, making it sound like a daily programme.

The rest follows, as the night follows the day, as Jodha confesses that yes, she had known that shaks since her childhood (why not add three words, you foolish woman, mere bhaisa hain? ), that she loves him. And so, finally, the curtain falls on this act of a Greek tragedy.

Jalal is a creature of extremes, and his emotions are all kingsize. So he roars full throatedly in his agony, as he did when his Khan Baba was no more, and takes his rage out, not on the woman who was its cause, but on the inanimate objects in the room.

I was proud of Jalal, who, despite his black fury and terrible sense of betrayal, managed to contain his rage and did not take it out on Jodha.

I wished he hadn't pulled her hair... but, otherwise he was within his rights.. yeah, I know what others would have done aunty...but still.. It looked bad, my dear, but it could, and with most others, been much worse. At that moment, he hates her for being the source of what he now perceives as a shameful weakness. My dear, where do you think crimes passionels originate? Why, in situations like this one, and till near the end of the 20th century, French juries routinely used to acquit the (male) accused in such cases.

After all - don't they need to justify him falling upon her feet the next day

Hum aapme ek mohabbat ki roshni dekhne lage the..Aur aapne apni zinakari se us roshni ko naapaak kar diya..

In the closure he chooses, Jalal is being merciful far beyond the norms of those days.He does not imprison Jodha, or shame her publicly in the Diwan-e-Khas, as he might well have done. He probably feels that to do so would be a tauheen of his love for her, however soiled and betrayed that emotion might be.

There can be no greater love than this, which can forgive even the worst betrayal and stay true to itself, retaining its dignity and its depth.

Your write up actually moved me more than the scene aunty.. I don't know if it makes sense.. 😭😕 The scene shook me up as no other, Lashykanna, plus I love Jalal. It is the combination of the two that has got to you.

Jodha: Unbearable silence: There is nothing much I have to say about Jodha, except that I wish the script had let her go at least halfway to match the depth, the power and the fury of Jalal. As she was shown, Jodha was pathetically lacking in resourcefulness, her trademark loquaciousness, in emotion and in depth.

There should have been a helpless agony in her face and her eyes, black despair as she sees her relationship with the man she claims to love in tatters, terror at the awful fate that awaits the brother whose life she seeks to protect by adhering to the vachan he has forced on her. There should have been terrible anguish at what she was putting her husband through, the hell of the betrayal of his innermost feelings into which he has been thrown and from which only she can rescue him.

There was nothing of any of this, bar a few shots of a pleading look in her lovely, tear-filled eyes.

Yes...some state she was like a deer-caught-in-the-headlights.. but, she wasn't...she knew all along what was coming by hiding all this.. and if she didn't well its again her fault..when Sujamal came back into her room (which seems to be open to visitors all the time) I don't see how she could expect that the secret not be out?

her lack of expression got to me as it did possibly 90% of the viewers.. I hope you have got your percentages right. It would go a long way to restore my faith in the judgment of the viewership.😉

In fact, I do not know how much Jodha understood of the soul-searing agony her husband was going thru. Not much, judging from her reactions.

By her face, it didn't seem like she was reacting much 😕 She doesn't get it, Lashykanna, and she never will. How can a babbling brook have any idea of what an oceanic storm would be like? I sometimes wonder how such a tempestuous lover could, in the long run, be satisfied with the kind of milk and water, placid affection that is all she would be capable of feeling.

The woman who could, by a clever play on words that defied logic but sounded convincing, managed to get the besotted Jalal time and again to do what he was dead against - about Bakshi Banu, about Sharifuddin, about Tasleem. It seems that this hunar too has failed her at the most crucial moment, just as Karna, in the heat of the battle against Arjuna at Kurukshetra, could not remember the mantra for the Brahmastra.

The editing of Jodha's shots was also bewildering at times. When Jalal is declaiming about the hazaar begumaat in his harem, and lists the various reasons for which he married them, ending with bachpan ki dost, ie Ruqaiya, Jodha stares at him with shock and fear in her eyes. Why on earth would she look afraid at that point?

Then again, when he says, at the very end, Humein aapse mohabbat ho gayi thi, Jodha Begum, she is completely out of sync, still nodding her head in negation from the previous shots, and they retained that!

I expected a much stronger reaction - if nothing else - when Jalal says with such vindictive agony about the painful death that Sujamal will be subjected to ... her reactions were flat there too - like she didn't expect he'd follow up on what he'd just said... That is a plausible excuse, but she was flat before that and after that as well.

What was Sujamal's original reason, tenuous as it was, for the vachan he had made Jodha take? That Jodha should not get into trouble by being seen to meet an enemy of the Mughal sultanate. Now, that vachan has been renewed, her hand on his head, for exactly the same reason , unhe tum par sandeh ho jayega.

But once Jalal has seen the fake khwaja sera in Jodha's rooms, all this went automatically out of the window, and there was no longer any rationale for this vachan . Sujamal, who is presumably not a dunce, should have realised at once what Jalal was bound to think as soon he saw them together, if he was not told that Sujamal was her brother. Why, if Bharmal has seen a strange man in his daughter's rooms, he would have executed both the daughter and the intruder. Remember his reaction to Jodha's moonlight boatride with Suryabhan, her fiance? He wanted to strangle her.

Let us for a moment leave aside Sujamal's unbelievable folly in leaving her to face the music from a murderously angry husband. Let us stick to Jodha alone. Why does she not ask Sujamal to release her from the vachan, since the situation was bound to be fatal for him if she stayed silent?

For if she keeps quiet, she is condemning the very brother whose life she wants desperately to save - which is why she will not break the vachan - not just to certain death, but to the most horrendously painful death that Jalal can think up, and this in front of her.

Whereas, if she confesses that he is her brother and also why he came into the palace as a khwaja sera, all will be well. Maybe Sujamal will get a token punishment, but his life will be saved, not to speak of Jodha's honour and her nascent relationship with Jalal.

So how does what Jodha is doing make any sense? I am here leaving out entirely the terrible anguish she is inflicting on the husband who, she now knows from his own mouth , loves her. Anguish that is tearing him apart, and will do so for the rest of his life unless he learns the truth somehow.

Aunty, that vachan makes no sense whatsoever... and Jodha promising to keep it up at the cost of her husband losing his sanity further and further (first for being blind to his questions/ annoyance/grief and then mute during the confrontation scene) makes just as little sense too!

What lies ahead: I simply do not care, I am afraid. The last part of the Friday episode was back to the old format, with Jalal pacing furiously up and down the Diwan-e-Khas, and then running to dispatch Sujamal, looking exactly like the Energiser bunny. The last shot of his glaring eyes as he contemplates that pile of corpses, so artistically arranged, was hardly edifying.

Not at all aunty.. I LOVED this scene.. because the anger and helpless depicted here was a stark contrast to the ones in the earlier scene.. his disappointment with MA was on a completely different plane from what it was with Jodha...

After a long time, I felt like I was seeing a leader shouting at his faltering forces - asking them to buck up and start taking their responsibilities more seriously.. better than him being blind to the ongoings. Do see my comment about this, right at the top.

I preferred to go back of the 11:56 minutes of the previous segment, harrowing as it was. I hope The Great Reconciliation Scene is not too mawkish, and that Jodha is given something substantial to do there at least. I have grown fond of her from her Kajri days, and I want that girl back!

The New Promo: One pertinent point, especially for those waiting with bated breath for The Kiss. If Jalal is going to kiss Jodha, he is going to have to figure out in advance how to deal with her cartwheel of a nose ring. I do not see how anyone could kiss a woman sporting that thing.😉

And in the final Grand Embrace scene in the promo, Jalal, who is only as tall as Jodha , looks to be a good half a head taller. This is probably what is meant by her helping his all round growth!😉

🤣 loool

Brilliant write up aunty.. no wonder you'd said you'd not read anything else on the forum till you get this one off your chest. Yes, my dear, like an actor of the Stanislavski school (of method acting) I wanted to stay in the same mood till I had finished it, and not let myself get distracted by other things.

There, my pet, it is now exactly 4:26 pm. I was called out for 4 minutes, so that makes it 46 minutes for this reply. I hope you are satisfied, and if not, I will come after you with a stout slipper!😉