Folks,
You would be surprised to see your break from me being cut short in this unexpected fashion, but it is not my fault! I was taken aback to see last night that Zee Anmol had moved, ahead of time, into the Shahi Shaadi one hour episodes, and if I had waited till Sunday, I would have had not five but nine episodes to cover in one post, something that I could never have managed.
So I have had to cut short my little holiday from the IF and to come back to cover these 3 episodes here, and then take on the real Shahi Shaadi ones. Ela my dear, I am sure you are pleased, and Devki too!😉
I am going to take these three episode by episode, beginning with Episode 32
Domination and duty: These were the two predominant elements in an episode that had only 2 significant segments - one, the Jalal-Mahaam Anga clash, for that is what it was, and the other the scene between Jodha and her father, which also explains how she is in the dark as to the identity of her bridegroom till the shagun ceremony.
Jalal seeks to dominate everyone around him , be it his Badiammi, or his prospective begum Jodha, and to make it clear to them that his will has to prevail under any and all circumstances. Jodha is above all dutiful, to Amer and to her father, again under any and all circumstances.
Domination: drawing the lines: Jalal obviously has no problem with domination! He is already irritated by Maham's asserting that Ek Rajkumari ka Mughal harem se koyi mel nahin, and that Jalal's decision to marry Jodha munasib nahin hai. His face is set and aloof.
Then she puts the cap on things by suggesting that he might like to keep Jodha in the harem as a daasi. I loved the level, freezing cold look he gave Maham Anga then for her impertinent suggestion, and the way he held it till well after she had lowered her eyes. If one has such an air of command, one does not need to raise one's voice at all.
Plus the categoric putdown that followed when he says, after taking another piece of the salty sheera and eating it with every evidence of relish: Hmm.. Namkeen hai.. Jo mazaa namkeen cheezon mein hai woh meethe me kahan... Pehle humein bhi zaroor alag laga tha.. Lekin alag ko apnane ka mazaa bhi alag hota hai .. was crushing.
He knows how to show anyone, be it Bharmal or his Badiammi, who is the boss in Agra, does Jalal! He is clearly to the manor born.
To drive home this point with Maham, he gives specific orders: Rajkumari Jodha ke liye ek naye mahal ka intezaam kiya jai. Unhein wo audha, wo sare aisho aaraam diye jain jo ek Shahenshah ki begum ko diye jaate hain..
Maham is dumbfounded , and her face is a study in baffled ,but hidden irritation.
As for what he goes on to add, in the desire to put Jodha in her place, Lekin, unpar wo saari bandishen bhi laagu hongi, wo saare farz, jo ek begum nibhati hai.Phir chahe wo parda ho ya Shahenshah ka intezaar.., is hardly anything earthshaking. Any begum in the harem would have comply with these restrictions, and it is in no way any punishment or compulsion specific to Jodha.
I think he is cheering himself up with the prospect of (a) shutting her up in his harem and (b) leaving her languishing for his company, whereas the truth is surely going to be that it would be a blessing for Jodha to be left alone!
However, Maham grasps at these tinke and consoles herself that Jodha will be miserable as a caged bird in the Mughal harem.
In this context, the editing of the transition between Jodha and her soon-to-be-liberated parrots, to Jalal and his firmly caged pigeons was excellent. When he says Humein parinde aasmaan se zyada pinjare mein qaid achche lagte hain.., he is clearly thinking of Jodha.
The reasons why: It was not nice of Jalal to make snide remarks, to all and sundry, that Bas ek baat ka malaal rahega, ki humse nikaah ki khabar jaanne ke baad, Rajkumari Jodha ke chehre ke badalte rang nahin dekh payenge. But we are looking at this from our point of view.
For him, despite the indefinable attraction and the desire to see her that pulls him into a dangerous venture into Amer, she is, right now, only an impertinent wench who dared to hold a sword to his throat, and put him, the Shahenshah, in a very tight corner for a minute. But for his icy courage and tremendous presence of mind, he would have been killed right there, or arrested, which would have been far worse.
She also repeatedly calls for his head, and produces a whole laundry list of his real and imaginary atrocities.
So what would he, an absolute monarch and a fierce warrior, think about her? Like Petruchio dealing with Kate in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, that she needs to be taught a good lesson. He would hardly be bothered about the inappropriateness of making that kind of off hand remark to his inner entourage. Remember what he says to Abdul when he has finished burning her portrait?
Still, he does not let even his Badiammi speak disparagingly of Jodha, which means something. That she is his choice, and no one, but no one, can speak contemptuously about his choice.
I think this is, firstly, because he does not want anyone, not even Maham, questioning his decisions or dictating to him. He had got to a stage when he would not take that even from his lifelong mentor Bairam Khan, what to say of a foster mother.
He has not sought her views on this matter, and he does not relish her unwanted advice, and such peremptory advice at that. In that sense, it was not just a reaction to her slighting Jodha, but to her slighting him as well by criticising his decision.
The other reason might be the various faux pas of Maham Anga herself. Her son has just mucked things up so badly in Malwa and she backed him. She has also, Jalal suspects even if he has no proof, been behind the murder of his Khan Baba. Each such incident eats away at Maham Anga's hold on Jalal, though she does not realise that as yet.
Finally, his pledge to Bharmal is that he would marry Jodha, and that, for a princess of this rank, implies the full status of an imperial begum. That is what he wants on his own as well, for though he is very eager to show her where she gets off, he does not want her humiliated by anyone except himself!
Why he does that is something he does not understand himself, at this point of time. We, of course, know better, do we not?
Duty: a commitment: To revert to the second stand out segment in Episode 32, I loved Jodha in the scene with her father. She had such a clear-eyed dutifulness and nobility about her, and this unmarred by any sanctimonious, tyaag ki murti airs and graces. She made it seem the most natural thing in the world for a daughter of Amer to do, and she let Bharmal off the hook very gracefully and without m-aking him feel the least bit ashamed or guilty.
Plus, she looked the best she has done so far.
This said, I think that it was very foolish of Bharmal to have gone along with Jodha's saying that she did not want to know whom she would be marrying. How could he have been sure, given her extreme hostility towards Jalal, that Jodha would not react very adversely in public, and make him lose face vis a vis the Mughals? Plus it was most unfair of them to let her face such a shock with zero advance warning, like throwing someone in at the deep end at a freezingly cold pool and expecting that person to cope.
As for us, let us remember the exact wording of the commitment that Jodha gives her father, for we will have reason to come back to it later. Bharmal asks her Kya tum Amer ki azaadi (not swatantrata? ) ke liye, uski sukh shanti ke liye, apna sukh dukh, apna bhala bura, sab kuch bhool sakti ho?
And Jodha, her whole face alight with the fervour of her words, says: Amer aur hamare bhaiyiyon ki suraksha ke liye aapne kisi ko vachan diya hai to har haal mein hum uska paalan karenge.. Agar Amer ki raksha ki keemat Jodha hai, to yeh samajhiye ki aapne wo keemat chuka di hai, Bapusa!
Now on to Episode 33.
Tangled skeins:Episode 33 was like a ball of wool with which a kitten has been having some fun, a mess of tangled skeins. One could not really disentangle any of them, but one learnt a good bit while trying to do so. Let us take them one by one, in no particular order.
Jalal: His two scenes today - the first with the banjara troupe, and the other with the would be assassin - were both extremely interesting and revealing.
In my first ever post in this forum, Ekta's Emperor Jalaluddin Mohammed: an assessment (https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/jodha-akbar/3647623/ektas-emperor-jalaluddin-mohammed-an-assessment), I had noted, with reference to the payal incident, that it showed not his love for Jodha but his possessiveness towards her, which is not at all the same thing.For him, the payal symbolizes Jodha, and he will not let go of it or her, even if he has to burn his fingers to secure it.
It was exactly the same today. When he listens to the banjaras' ballad in praise of Jodha's manifold beauties - of face and figure, of her eyes, her lips, her hair, her gait - he goes back in time and sees her again as he had beheld her on the streets of Amer, and he smiles to himself involuntarily.
Raw possessiveness: But immediately, his raw possessiveness towards this girl who is soon to be his begum, his and his alone, rears its head like an angry, hissing cobra.
No one, but no one, can be permitted to hear this song and then imagine his Jodha as an object of desire. The cold menace in his eyes and voice as he warns the banjaras - after having rewarded them for this performance - against ever repeating it, is truly frightening, and those poor folk must not have stopped shivering for days!
There is also an extra layer to it.
In those days, royal women were not seen in public, so the common people would not have had any real idea of what Jodha looked like. If the song had been about her gunas, her qualities - her courage, her compassion for the weak, etc. - it would have been quite acceptable to Jalal. But this song (which would never have been sung that way in the real 16th century milieu) sounds like a description of a ganika, a courtesan, not of a rajkumari.
So, the Mughal courtiers might have been shocked (provided they understood the dialect!) and might have consequently looked down on Jodha. It is like a conservative family girl's photo in a bikini appearing in a magazine. What would their world think of the girl?
Now Jodha is Jalal's choice, and he cannot tolerate it that anyone, Mughal or other, should think contemptuously of his choice. So he does not want that risque song repeated.
It is basically his ego at work, for he does not know yet that he cares for her and more. He does not yet know what it is to care for another person, really, truly, deeply. That will come, and accepting it will be not be easy for him.
An aside: Lagta hai ki Sharifuddin ki toh khair nahin. His folly, or impertinence, or both, in dragging his feet about bringing the Amer princes to the Shahenshah as instructed, will cost him dearly, Bakshi Banu or no Bakshi Banu. Note how Chughtai Khan, now a trusted and valued go between with the Amer royal family and thus part of Jalal's inner circle, who dislikes Sharifuddin, neatly does chugli to Jalal about Sharifuddin not having done hukum ki taameel without delay!
The scene that followed had Sharifuddin being taken down several pegs in public by a furious Jalal who asks him, with awful sarcasm, Kya tumhari soch ki keemat hamari zubaan se zyada hai? And then, when Sharifuddin, fully conscious of his new status as the Shahenshah's behenoyi, looks to the right and the left, in a mute appeal to Jalal to keep this dressing down private, Jalal barks: Idhar udhar kya dekh rahe ho? Fauran hamare hukum ke taameel ho!
The averted assassination attempt: This is even more revealing. Firstly, the Mughal security system seems to be dismal, seeing that a stranger armed with a khanjar managed to get into the Shahenshah's personal tent unnoticed, and that too to within 3 feet of him!
Next, Jalal is far more alert to potential danger than his entourage. He not only spots the khanjar but manages to remove it unnoticed by the bearer of the weapon.
A psychological coup: But it is when he deals with the man that we get the true measure of a great ruler in the making, with an unerring grasp of human psychology.
By daring the man to cut his throat, Jalal confuses him and puts him at a mental and psychological disadvantage. That man will never again be able to see Jalal as the devil incarnate, especially after he is pardoned and allowed to leave unscathed.
Here we see, in Jalal, the seeds of the future Akbar, for it was thru such gestures and such calculated magnanimity, multiplied a thousand fold, that Akbar won over much of hostile Hindustan.
Ruqaiya: My erstwhile favourite is going down the tubes, and fast. What sort of intelligence network does she have that she is still in the dark about Jalal's latest matrimonial venture? Instead, she sits there doing exactly what she ridicules the other begums for doing, accumulating jewellery (note the subtle but unmistakable boost for Rajasthani kaarigari in jewellery!) .
One curious point: why has Ruqaiya suddenly demoted herself from the Malika-e-Hind to merely the Malika-e-Khaas?
Bharmal & Spouse: They are an odd couple.
She is the antithesis of the traditional, strong Rajasthani (now replaced onscreen by a bizarre mutation, Rajvanshi, a rootless entity that could be from anywhere from Kamrup {today's Assam } to Kerala) matriarch.
She is eternally in a flood of tears these days, and takes to her bed, exactly like Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice after her favourite daughter elopes with a good for nothing young man. Where Mynavati should be there as a lightning rod and a safety net for Jodha, she instead imposes an additional emotional burden on her with her unexplained wailing and weeping.
He is square of both face and body, undistinguished and uninspiring, and of late he is also a man hounded by unfamiliar demons - ostracism and public humiliation among his own class, fear of what the future holds. He takes the easy way out, grasping at the escape route Jodha offers him when she refuses to let him tell her whom she would be marrying. It was his responsibility to tell her, so that she would be spared the shock and dismay of either learning it from an outsider, or worst of all, only at the ceremony itself. But he chickens out, and is now babbling of Jodha's niyati revealing the truth to her somehow, and then giving her the strength to bear it. Some father, this!😡
Jodha: Self-delusion: She remains curiously unaffected by the evident and unusual emotional turmoil around her , whether it is her mother, Motibai, or Sukanya. The tongue cutting incident was a very grave and shocking one, and it is strange that though she is distracted from probing the kaali zubaan comment, Jodha does not revert to it later.
She also explains away curious points - like the odd comment about Motibai's 'marriage' let fall by young Mansingh, Motibai's tears, or the hasty departure of Kunwar Pratap's delegation - to herself without showing the least urge to probe them, an urge that would have been expected in such an intelligent young princess. None of this is convincing.
It is even less credible that when the whole of Amer knows about the Mughal Shahenshah being Jodha's bridegroom, she has not learnt of it from someone by now.
By the way, what was it with that gaggle of female servants at the confidential meeting where Bharmal reveals the truth about Jodha's marriage, whereas his 3 daughters are all kept out of it? He could just as well have hired the town crier to announce it to the populace !😉
It is also clear that thanks to Bharmal's pusillanimity, Jodha is now in for a very bad shock at her wedding. She is obviously under the impression that her bridegroom is a Rajput king, who she assumes has taken on the Mughals to help Amer out. Not only this, she is actually expecting this new savior to complete the task the unfortunate Suryabhan had sworn to achieve! The only saving grace today was that the Jalal ka sar mantra was not trotted out, but it was hanging over the scene nonetheless, like a ghostly presence.
Given all this, it is difficult to stop oneself from (virtually) clobbering the First Couple of Amer for their folly and cowardice in keeping Jodha in the dark till the end.
At point non plus: But all this said and done, to be fair to him, Bharmal really does not have any choice. If he had had a Kunwar Pratap for a son, something could perhaps have been done, but his sons and his nephews are all like suet puddings, flat and stodgy. Sujamal was the exception and he is now a renegade.
So what could the pot-bellied perisher😉, to use a term beloved of the immortal PG Wodehouse, do all by himself? Nothing except what he is doing now.
Jokes of the day: The Amer Ministers, who seem to competing among themselves for the first prize for stupidity, suggesting that their King palm Jalal off with Motibai instead of Jodha. I was in stitches imagining Jalal's face when he raises the ghunghat !
The choice of an Ekta regular, Anurag Sharma, who plays minor roles in her other soaps and who looks about 40, to play the fiery, 20 year old Kunwar Pratap.
This apart, the tone and tenor of Pratap's tirade against Bharmal in the latter's own audience hall was so harsh that one would have expected Bharmal or Bhagwan Das to call the visitor to order and have him ejected. This did not happen, possibly because of the athiti satkaar ki maryada, but I rather liked Bharmal's back-to-the-wall rebuttal of Pratap's unmannerly tirade, in which he got in quite a few neat jabs against his unwelcome and uninvited visitor!
Now on to Episode 34. It is from this one that I have taken my title for today.
Prelude to the storm: The image that stayed with me at the end of this episode last night was of the precap. The camera circled around the two principals - Jalal, smiling, looking like a cross between Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind, and a cat that has swallowed all the cream, and Jodha, looking far more beautiful than she has been so far, dark eyes huge in a face white and drawn with shock, staring at his reflection in the water as if it was something out of a nightmare.
This was the prelude to the storm that will break tonight. It will be a cleansing storm, clearing away the debris of the past few weeks. It will leave behind a lot of wreckage, but it is out of this wreckage that a new beginning will be made,though neither of the two knows, as yet, to which uncharted territories of mind and heart it will lead them.
Heroine of the day: Not Jodha, not Suryabhan's hysterical mother, and definitely not Mynavati. The honours today went, without the shadow of a doubt, to Bharmal's mother, Jodha's redoubtable Dadisaa.
As her insufferable daughter-in-law wails and writhes on her bed and on the floor, in an agony of irresponsible self-indulgence, it is left to the matriarch of the Amer royal family to take charge and salvage the situation. And she does it in style, literally shaking some sense into Mynavati, and expounding, with total and infectious self-confidence and self-assertion, that they have nothing to be ashamed of, but should instead be proud of what Bharmal had done for the sake of Amer and its people.
This morale boosting exercise apart, she also makes two very telling points that demonstrate her remarkable grasp of realpolitik and of reasons of state, as also of the shifting nature of political relationships.
The neighbouring Rajput kingdoms, she snorts, all had an eye on Amer and wanted to grab it, so why are they being holier than thou now? Secondly, she firmly corrects Mynavati when she wails that Jalal is an enemy. He was an enemy, the old lady points out, he is one no longer. If he had been as kroor as he is said to be, he would simply have sent them the heads of their 3 sons, not a civilized message about the marriage, in the proper form, with the shagun.
Then comes the clincher, and the one I expected the least from her. She tells Mynavati : Yeh sach hai ki Jodha shatru ke yahan ja rahi hai. Par yeh bhi sach hai ki Jodha Shahenshah ki malika banne ja rahi hai.. Tumhein is baat par garv hona chahiye, .. abhimaan hona chahiye! Dikha do duniya ko ki tum Hindustan ke honewale Shahenshah ki honewali malika ki maa ho!
To say that I was floored would be an understatement. Would that not just Mynavati, but Jodha too, had at least a fraction of the clear-eyed and at times cynical grasp of the realities of power that this rotund old lady has! 👏
Jalal owes her a special vote of thanks, for without her, his wedding would have ended up as a laughing stock for both the Mughals and the Amervasis, which would not have suited his pride at all!
OTT stuff: Let us move swiftly over the assorted over the top scenes. I will not even mention Mynavati, for she is OTT nonstop. 😡
Suryabhan's mother, wielding a pair of lathis which can apparently crush a man's neck and kill him. She not only landed Mynavati a blow on her back with one lathi, but then, for no good reason that I could grasp, closed both of them with a clatter inches away from the head of the cowering woman, as prelude to the shrill diatribe she then let loose. One can understand and empathise with her grief and outrage, however, far more than with the uppity and ill-mannered Kunwar Pratap of Mewar.
Sujamal, sneaking into Amer by a secret route to warn Jodha against her father's perfidy. It is apparently all right for him to pledge loyalty to the Shahenshah in return for Mughal assistance to get him the throne of Amer. It is also all right from him to lead Sharifuddin against Amer, after betraying all the secrets of its defence. But it is not all right for Bharmal to arrange Jodha's marriage with Jalal in order to save Amer!
The best thing about this mindblowing hypocrisy is that Sujamal appears to be unaware of it, and is convinced that he has done no wrong.
We are also treated to yet another hairsbreadth escape for Bharmal & Co, for Jodha still misses out on the Great Secret. None so blind as those that will not see!
Sharifuddin ranting against Jalal to his fluffy-headed biwi, for the public ticking off he received from the Shahenshah. He is proof positive of the inadvisability of Jalal bestowing such extravagant largesse - his sister's hand in marriage - on a subordinate just because he opened up the path for him to gain his heart's desire - no, not Jodha, but teaching Jodha a proper lesson.
The only saving grace here was that but for Allah's raham, it might well have been the abominable Adham Khan! Sharifuddin, while he might sulk and indulge in non-coperation just short of rebellion, will never reach the heights, or rather the depths, that Adham can plumb effortlessly. The best bit of unintended humour re: Sharifuddin was his reference to Jalal inflicting wounds on him, for which Bakshi Banu namak chidakne ki tayyari kar rahi hai !
Not quite OTT, but ridiculous in the extreme: Bharmal and his better (?) half gulping as though they both had a frog in their throat, and looking petrified when Jodha and Bhagwan Das make an unexpected entrance. Of course this is just when the portly pater familias is declaring that he is , in the current TV lingo, looking for the sahi waqt to disclose to his daughter dearest that she is slated to become not a Rani of something or the other, but Begum Jallad.
Husband and wife look so appallingly guilty that a half blind man could have spotted it from a hundred yards away. But not apni Jodha, of course!😉
Highlights: Jalal: The Shahenshah once again demonstrating, 250 years ahead of Napoleon Bonaparte, that one can dominate much taller men by sheer force of will. Jalal hauls Sharifuddin ruthlessly over the coals for failing to obey his orders at once, and the idea of giving his brother-in-law this dressing down in private would never occur to him, for he snaps Idhar udhar kya dekh rahe ho?
Jalal again, his eyes gleaming in pure boyish mischief, saying that he had deliberately kept both his lachrymose Ammijaan and his Malika-e-Khaas (in the lady's own very recent words) in the dark about his impending nikaah so that he could watch the faces of the Mughal begums when the new Rajkumari landed up in the harem! What is this but just another nikaah, he adds brashly, and I was thinking to myself, That, Buster, is just where you are wrong!😉
A point I would like to make here, for those distressed because Jalal seems, in this segment, to be totally indifferent to Jodha, whereas earlier, he was so possessive and protective of her standing, with Maham Anga and wrt the banjaras' song about Jodha.
The fact is that right now, Jalal has no soft feelings for Jodha at all. As noted above, she is for him, at this moment, only an impertinent chit of a princess who dared to hold a sword to his throat, and who abuses him repeatedly and calls for his sar to be kalamofied. A chit who needs to be taught a good lesson. But while he is doing that, no one, but no one, can utter a single disparaging word about her. Not even his Badiammi, who was thus coldly slapped down the other day for her impertinence wrt Jodha.
I don't think Jalal knows or understands what he feels deep down, any more that he understood, that rainy night in Amer, why he picked up Jodha's payal,and then burnt his hand recovering it from the fire. When he does begin to understand what he feels, he will fight that realisation tooth and nail. He will lose that battle, of course, but it will be hard fought, for it will be a battle against his own ego. That, as all the sages tell us, is the toughest battle of all.
So, when he asserts now that this is just one more nikaah, no more, he is telling the truth as he understands it. This will change, but not for a while yet, and that will be, for us, half the fun!
Jodha: A sight for sore eyes: Lastly, the scenes of Jodha getting ready to leave Amer for good. They have been shot lovingly and are gorgeous, as is the leading lady, who is obviously one of those lucky females who looks her best when all decked out in lavish finery.
So en avant, folks, to the Shahi Shaadi of this incredibly glamorous couple!
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