A very good attempt at salvaging our lead pair, Divya, but then you are a very clever young lady. Only, I do not buy any of it.
Jalal is the emperor, the supreme authority with power of life and death over everyone. So he has to be all of it - investigator, jury and judge, for the buck stops with him. That degree of overall responsibility goes with the territory.
If he cannot cope with it, he should quit and go and sit in an ashram with his beloved Jodha Begum. Watching him feel sorry for himself on the terrace brought out all my worst instincts. I hate lachrymose men who weep for themselves, and then an emperor weeping over his own weakness is the limit.
Don't nourish any false hopes about Jalal activating any grey cells he has left. I had been, foolishly, of course, dead sure that the sentencing was a put on job between Jalal and Todar Mal. The precap taught me otherwise, This is not Adiana's TE. This is a weepy jellyfish, not the one with stings.
What if Todar Mal had been executed? Would you then just say that Jalal and Jodha should learn from their mistakes? Mistakes??
An emperor has to be able to assess character. Why does Jalal not execute Jodha at once for infidelity in the fake pregnancy case? Because he feels instinctively that she is innocent and then he sets out to get the evidence for it, and he does get it.
Why, pray, can he not get similar evidence in this case? He only has to suspend the case till he is satisfied, and then have someone discreet shadow Shehnaaz. In 10 days, he would have found out a lot. A baandi can eavesdrop easily on her self-congratulatory outbursts and her colloquiums with Mahaam. Her room can be searched. Shehnaaz is not all that clever, and she has to keep snooping around all sorts of hoojre for that farmaan. Why can she not be caught on one of those expeditions and grilled? Don't say it is not possible, Divya, just to try and get Jalal off the hook.
As for your take on the mahaepisode, what would be left if you left Jodha playing lawyer for the defence out of it, not to speak of the so-called bedroom scene? My point is that these days, if one wants to rejoice about an episode, one has to go about with a magnifying glass to find the plus points.
This said, my dear, I read your Take 5s, and comment on them, for you. because I like you so much. Whether you do them or not, I would not have to read them if I did not want to, would I? Only I wish I could, as in the older days, agree more with you.
Anyhow, there was one point on which I did agree with you even here, and that was about the way Todar Mal conducted himself in the DEK. He was stoic and brave and noble.
Jalal looked hunted, incapable and cowardly; he literally ran away from the DEK and would not look Todar Mal in the face. The old Jalal was far more involved and concerned even for a baandi, Motibai, and this was when he has no soft corner for Jodha at all. Why does he do nothing like that now for this man to whom he owes so much?
And don't talk to me of relationships not being taken into account when Jalal dispenses justice, that is hogwash. He bends the rules all the time for his family and for Jodha. If anyone other than Abul Mali or Sharifuddin had done what they did, they would have been executed for high treason without a second thought.
Jodha was rigid, vengeful and graceless; as a true blue Rajvanshi, something she never fails to mention, why can Jodha not understand the stoic courage of Todar Mal's wife? That comment of hers to Moti was pathetic.
As for the rest, I found sun29's take on the whole nearly perfect, much better than my own. As she has correctly pointed out, Jalal and Jodha have by now had more than enough experience with cooked up evidence and lying witnesses, and he should have been far less ready to believe such contrived circumstantial evidence.
To take only a most recent case, as I wrote on Ela's thread 2 days ago, the case of Jodha-Sujamal and Todar Mal-Shehnaaz are similar in the sense of
what was seen not being what actually happened. Of course Jodha demands that Jalal not misuderstand her on the basis of what was seen, but here she does exactly the same thing as Jalal did then with far greater justification. And it never occurs to her to look back at her own case and wonder, at least for an instant, whether the so-called evidence was not what it seemed to be at all.
But as sun29 says, neither Jalal nor Jodha will ever learn anything, from those earlier cases or from this one. Even if Todar Mal had been blown up. Jodha has such a cast iron armour of self-righteousness that she would soon have convinced herself that it was not her fault at all, and Jalal would have agreed, and all would have been hunky dory.
Except for Todar Mal's wife of course, and she would have been out of their sight in Mathura, so that too would have been ok for our imperial couple who would have got on with manufacturing Salim's predecessors in the
angoori bagh, for there seems to be nowhere else that they are even reasonably close! Or perhaps the stork brought them in the time honoured fashion.
Shyamala Aunty
Originally posted by: divyavm
Edited by sashashyam - 11 years ago
