Originally posted by: sashashyam
Folks,
At the outset, my usual statutory warning. This one, my first in 2 weeks, is NOT going to be about Jodha Akbar over these 15 days, nor even about the Friday episode as a whole.
Folly beyond comprehension: It is not going to be, if I can help it, about the asinine script, especially about the idiotic and patently dangerous vachan Jodha is forced to renew by her Sujamal Bhaisa who clearly tops her in obstinate and illogical folly .
Or about the Keystone Kops sequence of Dilawar-Sujamal running away from the Agra palace soldiery, with his khwaja sera costume coming apart, piece by piece, in a kind of bizarre strip tease😉, while he flails about with his talwar like a farmer scything hay, laying low one unfortunate Mughal soldier with each sweep.
Or about the bizarre precap, clearly intended to make Sujamal seem to be one up on Jalal, since the bodies of the soldiers - presumably despatched by him while escaping from the prison (thus adding himself to the roll of honour of Agra Palace prison escapees, up there with Abul Mali) - 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. It also, with obvious intent, simultaneously sought to elevate Sujamal to near mythic status as the swordsman No. 1 in all of Hindustan.
When he finally dies, after having saved Jalal's life (this privilege is by now reserved for Jodha's family - first Bhagwandas, in that incredibly inept encounter with bandits at Sujanpur, next Jodha herself, and now Sujamal😉) he will surely be decorated with a nice 24 carat halo, only a bit smaller than his sister's will be after the Grand Reconciliation next week.
Of course, in this process , Sujamal's having compounded the idiocy of his reckless khwaja sera charade (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.
I am not going to follow the standard practice here and issue the usual disclaimer for having, however inadvertently, hurt anyone's feeling by this take on Sujamal. Those who admire him unconditionally are free to do so. 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. If he had told Jalal, even at the last minute, when the soldiers had got hold of him, who he was, and why he had embarked on this charade, so much anguish and suffering would have been spared for his beloved sister, and there would not have been any need for him to die to save Jalal either. A man who is awash with pigheaded nobility, but cannot think straight, is a walking menace, no matter how brave he might be.
Shakespearian heights: This post, folks, will be almost entirely an ode to the 11 minutes and 56 seconds of Rajat's epic Shakespearan performance that we were privileged to witness on Friday. A performance that truly deserved that mostly misused adjective, "epic".
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. So was King Lear raging on the heath, or Shylock raving against the injustice of the system he lived under, and so would Othello have been had he confronted his beloved Desdemona, instead of strangling her in her sleep for being, as he believed, unfaithful to him. At such times, the actor has to go over the top to convey the depths of what he wants to get across.
Those carping about him for being OTT would have been delighted with Jodha, who was decidedly UTT (under the top).
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.
As Rajat's Jalal turns himself inside out, as he flagellates himself to the pitch of frenzy, bleeding inside from a thousand lacerating whiplashes on his zehen, we feel his agony as our own. We suffer with him as he mocks himself, again and again, pounding his chest with bitter mirthless laughter, Kitne nasamjh the hum, kitne bewakoof!
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. Humein yakeen tha ki aap kuch galat nahin kar saktin, humein yakeen tha ki shayad koyi majboori rahi hogi jiski wjah se aap yeh raaz humse chupa rahi hain..Hum har roz yeh sochte the ki shayad aap ab wo baat humein batayengi, par aap har raat jhoot bolkar is shaks se chori chupe milti rahin? Hum ne bahut koshish ki aap humein yeh baat batadein, par aapne har baar is raaz par parda dala.Kya aapko hum par itna bhi yakeen nahin tha, Jodha Begum, ki aap humein apne dil ki baat bata sakein?
Could there be any appeal more full of pain, of pathos, of a helpless emotional dependence that overwhelmed all else that a standard issue husband would have felt? Which man, not to speak of a 16th century emperor, would bend so far to coax a wife - whom he had seen consorting with a strange man outside the palace in the middle of the night, and who was now meeting the same man right in her rooms in the palace, into which he had sneaked thru a disgraceful trick - to trust him, to trust in his faith in her integrity ? Not one in a million. Not then, and not even now.
Why, any king of those days, Rajvanshi or Mughal, would have first killed the supposed paramour right in front of his wife as soon as he saw them both together, and saw the lingering look of farewell with which the stranger regarded his wife as he was dragged away. And seeing his wife looking guilty enough to invite capital punishment, he would have decapitated her as well with one sweep of his sword. That is how blind rage and jealousy work in an absolute ruler. But not with this Shahenshah-e-Hind.
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.
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: Aap yahan aayi thin hum par vaar karne k liye, humse badla lene ke liye. Aapne sab ke saamne imaandaar banne ka dikhawa kiya aur zeher pi liya. Aap jaanti thin ki Benazir ka zeher humein ek pal mein maar dega, par aap chahti thin ki hum har din, har pal, roz marte rahein aapke dhoke se!
Kitne nasamajh the hum ki humne apna dil aapke saamne rakha! Yeh bhi nahin dekha ki aap use todne aayi hain. Kitne nasamajh the hum ki humein laga ki aapke dil mein hamare liye koyi jagah hai...
As his bitter laughter reechoes thru the room: 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?
Jalal's face is rigid with grief and disgust. Humara nikaah hua hai aapse, phir bhi humne aapki izaazat ke bina aapko chua nahin.Aur aapne hamari isi sharafat ka fayda uthaya?
And Rajat pours this gall all over not just Jodha, but us as well. I for one knew full well that nothing of what Jalal raged against was true, that Jodha was innocent, if incredibly foolish and self-centred. But 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.
So I hung in there with him as he raged on against Jodha's obstinate silence, her refusal, even when she saw what her silence was doing to the husband who, by his own confession, loves her to the point of obsession, to give him the answer to his one question Who is this man and what is he to you?
As he tears into her Rajvanshi guroor, junoon, jazbe, usool, which he had always respected but which now lay in tatters. As he demands to know what it was about her that had drawn this shaks , in defiance of all those Rajvanshi mores, to his death: her love for him and/or her hatred of her husband?
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. Sharm aati hai, Jodha Begum? Ek gair mard ke saath naajayaz rishta banana mein aapko sharm nahin aayi, par use qubool karne mein sharm aati hai?
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.
..Kab se chal raha hai yeh, humare nikaah se pehle as us se bhi pehle?..Bataayiye, jab aap humse nikaah kar rahi thin, to kya wohi shaks aapke zehen mein tha? Jab aapne humein dhakka diya, toh uski wajah kya is shaks ke liye mohabbat thi? Hum aaj tak sochte aaye ki jab aapne zeher piya aur maut se ladkar wapas lautin to hamare liye, par ab humein samajh aaya ki aap is shaks ke mohabbat ki khatir wapas lautin...
And then the same bitter refrain: Kitne nasamajh the hum, kitne bewakoof the hum! Aur aap kitni shatir!
As his laments, for that is what they were, laments for a lost love that had been tainted and soiled even befor e it had blossomed, gather strength and fury, 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? To, as her silence forced him to believe, a traitress of the worst, most deceitful, most shameless kind.
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!
She could have grabbed his hand and held on to it no matter what he did to try and shake her off. She could have wept and raved and ranted about her innocence, and fallen at his feet in a paroxysm of self-exculpation. She could have abandoned her ego to save her love, for now she knows that he loves her, and it is her silence that is killing that love, and she knows that she loves him too.
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?
But she does nothing, and continues to stare at him with wide eyes that say nothing. I felt, even more than Jalal, like shaking her till her teeth rattled and the truth was forced out of her. Not so much for her - she had, to a large extent, brought her fate on herself - but for him. I could not bear to see him chatpatate huye like a soul in torment, hiding his suffering behind a smokescreen of rage.
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!!!
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.
The last roll of the dice: He has by now nearly exhausted every trick he could think of to get her to tell him that no, she had not betrayed him, that she had not committed zinakari, that she had not done all this, or any of this, to take revenge on him and satiate her hatred of the man who had married her against her will.
But he has not yet quite given up. He tries once more, hoping against hope that she would, even at this late stage, throw him a lifeline, and drag him out of this whirlpool into which he is sinking. Khuda ki kasam, Jodha Begum, aap batayengi to hum sunenge! 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.
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.
Noble closure: Someone had written the other day, in all seriousness, that Jalal is an abuser who hits Jodha. I wonder which serial that person had been watching (there are plenty of hitters and slappers scattered across the other soaps on Zee). On Friday, any abusive husband would have pummelled his wife black and blue. And any king of those days, faced with such a situation, would most likely have killed her on the spot.
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.
Instead, he turns to his only refuge, bitter, self-mocking laughter at his having made himself so sharmsaar, and the Mughal sultanate as well. I have rarely seen anything as heartbreaking as the smile on his face as he tells Jodha that, and adds, Bahut hunar hain na aapme..lekin yeh badla lene ka aapka yeh hunar sabse niraala hai!
But the helplessness, the crippling sense of loss in love, wells forth again:Humein aapse mohabbat ho gayi thi , Jodha Begum.. Hum aapme ek mohabbat ki roshni dekhne lage the..Aur aapne apni zinakari se us roshni ko naapaak kar diya..
He is by now at the end of his tether, and all he wants is to get away from her presence, to escape the searing pain the very sight of her gives him. So he formally releases her from the bond of marriage with him, and tells her to leave Agra. As Jalal turns and walks out of her room, all that he feels can be seen in his body language, in the stoop of his shoulders, in the weariness of his stride.
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.
Coup de Maitre:I do not how far I have been able to do justice to Rajat's coup de matre, a turn so masterly and so dazzling that it left me, for once, bereft of words, and I had to cast about to find them. Perhaps not too well, for it needed the Bard of Avon himself to describe this Shakespearian performance.
Rajat must have done it at one take; having worked himself up to that pitch, he could not have interrupted it to do the scene in parts. I am not over fond of the CVs, but I must say that for once, the script gave Rajat all that he could have asked for as a performer.
What would I not have given to see him live, on the stage, in this scene! He could never have got such a 11 minutes and 56 seconds all to himself - seeing that his heroine was mostly passive, like a prop - in any film, only in the theatre. Or in Othello, where he could have let himself go even more, seeing that his Desdemona would have been angelically asleep!
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.
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. This is not surprising, for as I described her once, she is like a clear, burbling brook, transparent and without any dark nooks and corners, but shallow, simple, and uncomprehending of deep passions. Her face yesterday did not indicate much grasp of what this betrayal (as he was bound to see it) by the wife he had come to love does to Jalal.
If I had been in her place, it would have been what I was doing to this husband who loves me that would have mattered the most. Besides, was that not the most sacred of the vachans she had ever taken, her marriage vow that for her, her husband , jis se hi uska soubhagya hai, would come above all else? How is it that she has either forgotten that vachan, or ranks it below the one now forced on her by her Bhaisa? Strange and totally incomprehensible.
Most of all, Jodha should have had something substantive, telling, convincing, and appealing to say in her own defence, and to try and rescue Jalal from his raging depression. This is, after all, the bhashan ki malika, 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!
Apart from her pretty much solo emotion shots throughout, the way she cries at the very end, after Jalal has left, is very odd. Here was an occasion which called for grand tragedy, for stormy wailing and lamentations, and Jodha sounds, with her Aanh..aanh..aanh, for all the world, to quote my young friend Anne (AJSharma79), as if she had failed in her mid-term exams!
Paridhi should take the CVs and the director to task for having shortchanged her so badly in such a major, climactic, demanding scene. She would not have been able to match Rajat at his superb best, true, but with a good script, she would have done vastly better than she was allowed to do on Friday.
The Great Vachan Factor: There has been a lot written about Jodha's helplessness because of the vachan she had given Sujamal. Leaving aside the overriding loyalty she should have had to her marriage vows, as noted above, let us see the logic of what Jodha does.
She was forced to take that vachan on her brother's head, and the reason she clings to it is because he will, she believes, die if she breaks it. It is this belief that underlies the weight attached to a vachan/kasam.
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.
Anyone, Rajvanshi or not, would know what any husband would think of his wife under such circumstances if the situation was not clarified at once. So why does Sujamal not release Jodha from the vachan at once? Instead, he departs after a long, soulful look at Jodha that, as noted above, must have raised Jalal's fury by 100 degrees.
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.
As noted above, Jalal might well have killed her on the spot as an adulteress. Most kings of that ear, Mughal or Rajvanshi, would have done precisely that.
Now, how much time would it have taken her to say Woh mere Sujamal Bhaisa hain aur woh mujhe batane aaye the ki mahal ke andar hi koyi aapki jaan lena chahta hai.? 10 seconds? She is never at a loss for long, edifying, convoluted speeches. Why not blurt out this one single line and save her Bhaisa's life and her own honour? Instead, she behaves exactly like the worst kind of 1960s Hindi film heroine.
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.
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!😉
Shyamala B. Cowsik
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