Originally posted by: sashashyam
Folks,
Episode 47: L'affaire du farman
This was the only segment worth mentioning in the whole episode. For Mynavati's prolonged advice to Jodha about what falls to a queen's lot, and about the fact that man ho ya na ho, use Raja ka nirnay maan na hi padta hai, was clearly so much water off a duck's back as far as Jodha was concerned. She obviously let all this in thru one ear and let it out thru the other.😉
I liked Maina's advice to Jodha, but then again like Ela said, every husband-wife relationship is different. Maina is not the one dealing with the likes of MA and BEK. She is not the one whose husband is behaving like a middle school bully at this time. Jodha is dealing the best she can in the situation she has been dumped in. And if she is not coming to terms with this drastic change in her life fast enough then that is completely understandable.
Sending the unwanted Shahi farman back to Jalal thru a servant was unnecessary , impolite, and ill-advised on Jodha's part, especially after her mother's parting homily about the need for a Rani to show obedience to her husband, but that is Jodha all over. After all, she listened to another such homily about the danger for Amer if she did not accept Jalal's gifts, and then came out and deliberately burnt the shaadi ka joda, endangering all of Amer with this heedless, self-centred gesture. Uske saamne yeh farman kya cheez hai?
Sending the Farman back was rude but so like Jodha to do it. She really knows how to push Jalal's buttons.😆 Any surprise as to why Jalal cannot get her out of his mind?
I for one cannot understand why Jalal needs to force his Shahi firman on her; it seems to have become a matter of his ego now. She, having predictably left the Diwan-e-Am before Jalal showed his soft side, is ready to bite his head off. And so she does, metaphorically speaking.
🤣 Jodha, the little head snapper.
Is sansaar mein aisa kuch hai hi nahin jo aap humein de sakte hain ( it is another matter that niyati lands Jodha a left handed blow, and forces her to eat these grand words,😉 and use the despised farman to save Moti, and that very soon!) ..Jo vyakti sirf cheen na jaanta ho, wo kisiko kya de sakta hai?.. And then on to the rest of the tirade about what Jalal had done to that little boy.
Jalal probably considers it beneath his dignity to explain that he did not punish that Hindu couple after all, so he merely tells her, with ill-suppressed anger, grasping her arm hard: Adhuri jaankaari gunaah hoti hai, Jodha.. Hum kya kar sakte hain aur kya nahin, yeh wo 6 saal ka bachcha bhi achchi tarah jaanta hai..
He then descends from the general to the personal, asserting, as far as the farman is concerned, that he could have forced her to accept it in front of her parents, par humein aapko apni taaqat dikhane ka koyi iraada nahin..Finally, his face mere inches from hers, Shahenshah ka adab kiya jaata hai, us se khauff khaya jaata hai.. Bar bar hamare sabr ki aazmayish na karo, ki uska sabr tooth jai..
Jodha's reaction: She is hardly the kind who will wonder which adhoori jaankaari he is referring to, and try to ascertain the details, which must by now have been broadcast across the harem. She has never been able to put herself in another's shoes and see things from that person's point of view, and her attitude to facts is selective; they are welcome only if they buttress her pre-conceived notions. So she will hug her resentment to herself and luxuriate in it.
Methinks, that is an unfair judgement of Jodha. Why should she not believe what happened in front of her eyes to that couple? It is not as if she deliberately chose to ignore what Jalal did afterwards, she is completely unaware. As far as the Harem thing goes. She usually does not hobnob with the haremites since she is not into paan and hukkah and is as different from them as chalk and cheese. She keeps herself busy, chewing Kanha's ears off with her chitchat, cleaning his mandir, basuri, mookut, adjusting and readjusting his morpankh, etc,etc.
Unfortunately Jalal is the lucky recipient of all her ghrina. But patni apne pati ko attitude nahi dikhayegi toh phir kisko dikhayegi? That is her janmasiddha abhikar.
But it seems that Jalal's last words give her some pause, for she does not fling the farman after Jalal's departing figure. Maybe even our veerangana is a tad afraid of him, after all!
And so we start all over again, with the next round of the battle of this quintessentially Odd Couple: Rhett and Scarlett, or Petruchio and Kate: take your pick.
Its been a while since I read "Taming of the Shrew" but I love Gone with the Wind. Rhett and Scarlett would've made each other's life hell if Rhett had hung around. To me they didn't seem like a couple which was made to last a lifetime. Good thing he left. I'd rather Rhett had chosen Melanie(now that would seem like an odd couple but the chances of them lasting a lifetime seem higher to me). Instead Melanie got that dreamer boy Ashley. 😒 Scarlett should've married Ashley(they would very odd too😆). She would have slapped him out of his dreams of the good ole days.😆
Rooh ki baatein: Along with the scene of a sleepless Jalal deeply disturbed by Jodha's accusation that he knows only how to snatch things from people, there was a charming helping of this staple. When Jodha asserts that Jalal was wrong in claiming that he had no heart, and thus was incapable of loving, what struck me was Jalal's bitter, self-deprecating comment: Haan, Jodha.. Shayad yahi faraq hota hai soch aur sach ke beech.. Faraq ek aaleem ki soch aur ek anpadh jaahil ki soch ka..
Bitter because it reveals the depth of regret that Jalal now feels at his inability to read and write, a regret that leads him to downgrade his phenomenal intellectual strengths - not to speak of his unbelievable ability to retain anything that was said or read out to him kantasta - by labelling himself an anpadh jaahil.
😭 This soul talk was one of the best. Very touching.
NB: A historical footnote for those interested in such matters. The Emperor Akbar and Queen Elizabeth I of England were contemporaries for practically the whole of their very long reigns: Akbar from 1556-1605 and Elizabeth I from 1558-1603. They also appear to have both had a very rough and endangered childhood
After her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed for treason by her father, King Henry VIII, the Princess Elizabeth was always walking a tightrope with her terrifying father. Later, she was constantly exposed to the risk being executed for treason by her elder stepsister Queen Mary, whenever some of the Protestant opponents of the rigidly Catholic Mary plotted to assassinate her and replace her by the non-Catholic Elizabeth.
Jalal seems to have been equally at risk from his uncle, and then was always on the run from his father's enemies in the court of Sher Shah Suri.
That they both surmounted all this childhood trauma and went to become very great rulers who wrote their names in history is truly remarkable.
On a jocular note, in my old post, my chronically tongue in cheek friend, Moontide, had suggested
What if the nuptial-political alliance was not between Amer and Agra...but between the last of the Tudors and the best Mughal of them all? Would we be rooting for Elizabeth-Akbar right now?
Then who would have changed whom? Would the Tudor dynasty have continued? Or was that a healthy way of having kept the British colonization of Hindustan at bay? Or would that pre-pone the reverse colonisation process of today by several centuries...meaning would it have been a colonization of the British by the Mughals/Hindustanis?
To which I replied as follows, and this gives a good idea of the relative strengths of Tudor England and Mughal India to those misled by British accounts the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
I am so glad to find someone who actually reads and likes my footnotes! As for the Agra-London alliance, it would never have got off the ground, as London would have seemed, to the successors of Bairam Khan, a tinpot capital of a tinpot kingdom, huddling for safety behind the protective width of the English Channel. And riven by religious discord, with its Queen constantly under threat from the Catholic Church, acting thru Philip II of Spain, a hugely powerful and rich empire, all the hype and hoopla about the defeat of the Armada notwithstanding.
Agra would have thought it an unequal match, and then again Elizabeth was no hoor pari to bewitch a Shahenshah, even in the highly airbrushed portraits exchanged before royal marriages in those days, a practice that often had disastrous consequences.
Remember Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII's Wife no. 4? When she arrived in London, she proved to be so
Have you watched The Tudors? Beautiful series. A little graphic but good nonetheless.
Anne of Cleves had a lucky escape. 😆
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