Folks,
Here is the second part of my marathon post, the analysis of Episode 65.
Maham Anga: Mistress of deception: That she was finally self-revealed to be the Dibbi Lady came not as a thunderclap, but as an anticlimax. In 2013, even I, who started out with her as the most likely suspect, was taken in by that conversation of hers with her Girl Friday Resham, and I switched to believing that it could not be Maham as she sounded so sincere there. But in hindsight, the matter is so very dangerous that she would never have trusted anyone else, no matter how close to her, with this incendiary truth, not Resham, and definitely not her uncontrollable, drunken braggart of a son.
Now, it is like those traditional English country house murder mysteries, where one starts out with the butler - the butler did it! - goes the round of suspects, and finally ends up with the selfsame butler!😉
But for me, this was not the real McCoy. That was the revelation of what could be called the Real Maham Anga. In a terrifying scene, she herself strips away every layer of her persona, one by one, to finally reveal a weak and helpless woman, crippled by her overweening love for her worthless son, and driven by the desire to prove, not to him, but to herself, and beyond all doubt, that he is the dearest to her in the whole world .
Hamara saaya bhi nahin jaanta ki haqeeqat kya hai, par yeh haqeeqat hai, Adham, ki duniya mein sabse zyada hum aapse mohabbat karte hain! Sabse zyada!!
To prove this to herself, she betrays everything she not just professes to hold dear, but what she does hold dear. Her affection for her foster son, her loyalty to the sultanat-e-mughaliya, her fealty to the royal family and to the Shahenshah.
Listening to her proclaim that not even her saaya knows the truth (in this, she resembles no one so much as the master thief Aryan in Dhoom 2), I was struck by the folly of my initial conclusion, based on her apparently candid conversation with Resham, that she had not done it.
For this is a dissembler par excellence, who can dissolve into real tears on cue, and berate Adham, her voice nearly suspended in deep distress, for even daring to think that she could have done it (Adham's expression as he leaves seems dubious and unconvinced, however, maybe he knows his mother too well to be convinced by all her nautanki😉) . No one else, listening to her then, could have failed to be convinced that she was innocent. I was so convinced, all over again.
A split personality: Then comes the unveiling of the truth. With it, there was something else that sets Maham and her crime apart from the common, garden variety of poisoners down the ages. It is as if she has a split personality, and that now, looking at herself in the mirror of her soul, she would like to forget that she had done it. As Alakh put it so well on my old thread, a part of her doesn't want to accept what she did, for she is always torn between Adham and Jalal.
It is true that Maham loves Adham more than Jalal, but it is probably also true that Jalal is the son she would have wanted to have had. Adham must, the blood tie apart, have always been a sad disappointment for her, but she loves him beyond reason still, and she cannot change that or let him go to his fate. This is her tragedy.
The wailing, the fresh tears in her solitude after Adham has left, the breast-beating, none of it was necessary. These are not for show, for there is no one there who needs to be hoodwinked. This is all for herself, for what she has lost for the sake of Adham.
Like Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, who remains eternally pure and ageless and beautiful to behold, but whose portrait, kept hidden, shows every ugly wart and scar on his steadily rotting soul, Maham Anga sees her soul as black and ugly as that portrait, and she cannot stand it. That is her real punishment.
This revelation scene was so magisterial that I am still of two minds whether it was a tour de force on the part of the CVs, or just a serendipitous happening. It looked rather too intelligent even for the set who guide the destinies of our serial! 😉
A major reservation: I do not think a woman as intelligent as Maham Anga would believe that a daayima's son, without a drop of royal blood in him, could ever become the Shahenshah. She might have, in some early phase when Adham was being more difficult than usual, have held that out as a carrot for his reasonably good behaviour and then ended up with it like a millstone round her neck, but what she really thinks is what she tells him immediately after the Malwa encounter with Jalal, when she saves him by a whisker. That a sipahi like Jalal comes but once in centuries, and if Adham dared to stand up to him, he would blow Adham away in no time.
But her love for Adham, coupled with an ever present sense of guilt for having neglected him in his childhood, is so all-powering that it overrides both her intelligence and her commonsense.
Jalal: Admirable sensitivity: What revelation here, you might well ask. Patience, my gentle readers!
First, to those who feel that he was foolish to trust his Badiammi blindly and show her his trump card, the dibbi, I would only say No, that is not so.
For Jalal that very rare kind of king, a grateful one. At times grateful beyond what is called for, but that is a generous fault. He has had only 3 people in his life he could trust with that life, and Maham is one of them. I would think badly of him if he did not trust her till it becomes impossible.
Then it will be a crushing blow that will cripple him for a while. Remember how much it affected him when he thought that his new found trust in Jodha had been a bad mistake? How much harder would it be for him to learn that the loyalty and care of a lifetime had been corroded by baser emotions ?
But this is familiar ground. The real revelation about him last night concerned Salima. In the scene with her, Jalal (and Rajat) was throughout superbly subtle, magisterially manipulative, till he got at what he sought, the certitude that Salima was innocent as well. And then, he makes it up to her with such trusting candour, such delicacy, such admirable sensitivity for her feelings, that I was blown away. When he picks up her dupatta and drapes it round her, and assures her that for him she will always be his Khan Baba's amaanat, I was mentally standing up and applauding.
Only a man with a heart gentle enough, and perceptive enough, to feel what Salima feels then - and that would be a very rare sort of man - would have been able to do what he did to reassure and comfort her. This was a revelation.
As for what he promises himself - that he will never repeat the mistake he committed with Jodha, and will get at the real culprit - that was probably meant to be repeated to Jodha by Salima, and pretty soon at that.
Jodha: Unseemly behaviour: She is now revealing herself as a spoilt brat, with all the royal breeding, with its emphasis on total self-control under all circumstances, dignity and self-possession, that she presumably received in Amer , gone out of the nearest window of the palace at Agra the minute her patidev enters the scene. Instead, in the precap, she resembles no one so much as Scarlett O'Hara, deliberately smashing a vase at Jalal's feet. Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind throws a vase at Ashley Wilkes, so I suppose Jalal should be grateful for small mercies, that it was not hurled at his head!
It was exactly like the time when she burnt the shaadi ka joda. I don't know about you folks, but I do not appreciate this kind of fishwife like behaviour. She should be grateful that Jalal is not a Petruchio, for he, whether he was badly in the wrong or not, would have given such an impertinent wife the thrashing of her life😉.
When there was criticism of Jodha, at her last confrontation with Jalal, for her relentless outpouring of resentment and fury against him, especially the chale jayiye part, I did not agree with it. I felt she was justified in doing what she did, because she was then uncontrollably angry with him, and rightly so. It was not just what he had done in terms of accusing her and her brothers. It was more his subsequent treatment of her, literally going berserk, losing all his judgment and his sense of justice, and descending to emotional cruelty amounting to sadism.
But I would not say the same now. I did not like the smashing of the vase, and I did not like the high pitched sermon Jodha launches into immediately thereafter. Jalal deserved to be told off, not just once but many times. But this is not about him. It is about a princess, now a queen, who behaves like an ill-mannered virago, when she should have been cool, dignified, collected, and aloof, while still being as off putting as she wanted to be.
Besides, the whole scene is contemporary in its tone: no 16th century queen would ever have dared to talk to the king as Jodha does to Jalal! Remember her father's admonition to Jodha before the tilak ceremony? Wo tumhare pati hai, aur unke nirnayon par sada unse sehmat rahna tumhara kartavya hai! It is rather the Ekta Kapoor version of nari shakti that is repeated in serial after serial.
Jodha-Jalal: Fatiguing confrontations: Jodha, when with Jalal, is beginning to sound monotonous. I am already bored stiff with the variations on their bitter confrontations of the last 2 weeks. Not even such a handsome pair can make that kind of stuff palatable!
As my last post would have shown, Paridhi had grown on me, both visually and in terms of her acting, and I had come to appreciate her a great deal in both these respects.
I cannot say the same of Jodha, who is, in many ways, a mirror image of Jalal, not his complementary other half. Both are arrogant , hot-headed, quarrelsome with each other, opinionated and prone to snap judgments while disregarding inconvenient facts, biased, tenacious in their prejudices that often cloud their good sense, and almost always convinced that they, and they alone, are in the right.
But of the two, Jalal is, despite being an autocratic monarch, more ready to admit his failings and mistakes, to himself and at times to others, to accept sound advice and act on it. Not so Jodha.
She routinely disregards her mother's advice, even in the most serious of situations, as when the shaadi ka joda arrives. She says whatever comes into her head when she is in a rage, and worse, she has no ability to judge a person or a situation objectively.
A provincial at heart: Plus Jodha has, strangely enough in a well educated princess, no perception of the pressures of ruling an empire, which Mansingh has even at such a young age.
It is also curious that she has no more understanding of sensitive matters of state than Motibai, and actually expects that she would be told who the real culprit is! It is left to Ruqaiya to give Jodha a lesson in confidentiality and affairs of state, along with a very sharp dressing down to this choti moti begum.Yeh siyaasi maamle hain, jinhein samajhne ki na hi aapki taab hai, aur jisme padne ki na hi aapko ijaazat!
Which, incidentally, Jodha swallows without attempting even a weak retort. Her fulminations are reserved for her patidev!
A dangerous blank cheque: Given all this, I was alarmed when Jodha's cheerleader-in-chief, Hamida Banu, stated, in the previous episode, that Jodha could do no wrong. For this will remove any remaining faint reservations our Amer ki mirchi might have had about the wisdom of her ways. Motibai has far more sense, common and otherwise, than Jodha!
It reminded me irresistibly of Archana in Pavitra Rishta, and her junior edition, Purvi (that is the only Ekta serial I watched for more than 2 months), both of whom brought disaster on all the men unlucky enough to fall for them, while swanning around with 24 carat haloes firmly in place.
In fact, I suspect the reason why the saas and the bahu here get along so well is that they are both convinced that they are faultless and always a pattern card for others, and so everything that goes wrong is inevitably someone else's fault. Usually Jalal's.
Thus Jodha never remembers the times when she insulted Jalal, nor that when she now claims that she and her family were accused and humiliated despite sakshya ka abhaav, she is being, what else, economical with the truth, given the whopper of a clue in the poisoned kesar. Again, not so Mansingh.
Similarly. Hamida Banu never remembers all the times when she was not there for her son when he needed emotional support, most recently when he had learnt that his child was no more. It was Maham who held him close then and comforted him. Where was Hamida all that while?
The Hamida-Jodha duo thus constitutes the perfect mutual admiration society. One that is, contrary to every hallowed canon of the saas-bahu code, directed against the son/husband!😉
But in contrast with the likes of the hapless Manav and Arjun, Jalal has one trump card. It is the ace of spades: History, where his place is secure. Not even Ekta can tamper with that to his disadvantage!
OK, so this is it for a week or so, my luck holding. Meanwhile, Jodha can smash that glass vase at Jalal's feet, then join the tafteesh brigade, and do a botched Miss Marple act with Rahim, Jalal, and Maham, in that order, while the tiger and the narnaal beckon from the distance in spoilers!
Enjoy the episodes, folks, and one fine day next week, you will find me among you all again. When that happens, I hope none of you will groan: Oh no, not so soon! 😉😉
Shyamala/Aunty/Akka/Di
Anupamaa
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