TAKE A BOW FOR THIS BRILLIANT ACTOR- SHYAMALA AUNTY'S NOTE ON PAGE 3 ! - Page 5

Originally posted by: sashashyam

Anjali dear,

Thank you for setting up this tribute to Rajat, and the Jalal he brings alive for us, day after day after day. He deserves all this and more, and above all he deserves a script that can do justice to his tremendous but often underused talent.

I was very pleased that you found that quote of mine from The Emperor Strikes back, which is one of Sandhya's favorites,and mine as well. One needs an episode that offers so much scope for Rajat's Jalal to be able to pay him such tributes. I personally also love my The Gordian Knot, and Heartbreak ++ posts, both of which covered what were among Rajat's best in this serial. I am taking the liberty of putting both excerpts up here for your readers, many of whom might not have seen those posts at all.

I hope this is not going to be too much of an imposition!

Shyamala Aunty

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Jodha Akbar 131: Heartbreak ++: December 18, 2013

https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/jodha-akbar/3852259/jodha-akbar-131-heartbreak

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.

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Jodha Akbar 87: The Gordian Knot: October 17, 2013

https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/post/94145591

1562 AD: Amer, Rajputana: Shahenshah Jalaluddin Mohammed faces the statue of the Devi Maa in the Mahakali mandir near Amer, listening to his wife, Jodha. He turns to her, his eyes wide in incredulous shock?- or is it dismay? - and repeats what she has just said was her only sankalp before the goddess: To aap hamara sar inke kadmon mein rakhna chahti hain?

It is more of a statement than a question, for he knows his Begum Jodha, and when he sees her eyes, normally serene after her pooja, now clouded with tears of frustration, he realises that this is, for her, a matter of her salvation.

He turns away from Jodha and moves towards the huge statue of the Devi Maa, in her ugra kapalakundala roop, festooned only with floral garlands. He looks up at the Devi for a long moment, his eyes dark with both sadness and a troubled appeal.

The courage of his convictions: There is a perceptible hesitation, for no one should underestimate what this gesture costs him. What he is about to do would be taken as butparasti (idol worship), specifically forbidden in Islam. If anyone had spread the word across the Mughal sultanate that their Shahenshah had paid obeisance to a Hindu but, there would have been an uproar, and not only among the maulvis. Even decades later , when he had long been the all powerful Emperor Akbar, his initiative to found a syncretist religion merging Islam and Hinduism, the Din-e-Ilahi, had attracted widespread criticism. Now he is, as yet, nowhere near that level of unquestioned domination, so the risks are that much more.

Still, he does not hesitate, for in Jodha's troubled and angry gaze, he sees not just the woman whose acceptance he craves, even if only subconsciously as yet, whose barely veiled hostility hurts him like nothing ever before.

He sees the whole of the Hindustan that he wishes to unite under his rule, not by brute force,but thru willing acceptance. Na ki shamsheer ki dhar se, par rishton ke reshmi dhagon me piroke.To win the heart of this Hindustan, he knows now what he has to do. For them to accept him, he has first to accept them.

Jalal already has the breadth of spiritual vision, the inner clarity, that lets him see his Allah in the Devi. Not many even today, anywhere in the world, are able to do that, for all the current politically correct patter about accepting all religions. And in the 16^th century, when Protestants and Catholics were massacring each other and burning each other at the stake all over Europe and in England, for the Emperor Jalaluddin Mohammed to demonstrate such purity of thought, such innate humanisn, was nothing short of a miracle.

And this is not just because of Jodha, for even if she might have been the catalyst for this specific act of his, she is not the sole motivation for it. It is about something infinitely bigger and grander, Jalal's vision for this vast land that he hopes to rule one day in peace and prosperity.

Epiphany: the Gordian knot untied:

Slowly, he goes down on his knees, his face once more upturned to the Devi's. There is the same questioning look, the mute appeal to Her. Is he asking Her whether She will accept him?

He bends down to the floor and pays obeisance to the Devi, his forehead at Her feet, and kisses the ground in the gesture of submission that is traditional for him. As he rises, his forehead is stained red with the kumkum.The Devi Maa has blessed him. His prayers have been answered. His sins, both those committed knowingly and those committed in his name, but unknown to him, have been forgiven.

In that one gesture of self-surrender to the Universal Divine, which he is able to perceive in the alien Devi Mahakali, in that act of submission to this Divine heedless of his ego, Jalaluddin Mohammed becomes Akbar.

All that followed in the years and decades to come was but the embellishment of the basic structure that was established in that single moment of epiphany.

The Gordian knot of incomprehension, of a sense of acute oppression, of discrimination, and of the resulting hostility and hatred, that divided Jalal, and the Mughal rule he embodied, from the Hindustan of his dreams was sliced thru as surely as the original one had been by Alexander's sword.

Jalal now turns to face Jodha, whose unblinking eyes are incredulous with. what? Amazement? Disbelief? His own are now serene and untroubled, reflecting the peace that now pervades his zehen, yet bright and lit with an inner conviction. Then he speaks:

Kisike kadmon par sar rakhne ke liye, sar katane ki zaroorat nahin hoti, Jodha Begum. Sar jhukana hi kaafi hota hai.

I do not know if Jodha understands the true import of this, of what he has done and why, or of what it has meant for him to do it. Imagination was never her strong point.

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