Thank you so much for your kind words. I miss you too, and I would never have moved away from such warm friends as I had here if it had not become impossible to stay on and function freely with this kind of administration. Anyway, I will make sure you do not miss any more of my posts.
As for your comments below, they are very thoughtful and carefully articulated. I especially liked the parts in blue.
More soon. Take care.
Shyamala
Shyamala good to read your views on june 12th 13th... Miss your matured & different reviews a lot...
Even though I agree that HB failed as a mother in Jalaal, but she was a good mother to BB..
For BB she has to choose between Shariff & Jodha.. BB lost her first husband & now she doesn't want to loose shariff also and she loves him even though he beats her and abuse her..
If BB has to choose between Shariff & Jalaal also she is going to choose her husband, as she feels her life will not be there without her husband, so in this case it is Jodha (her bhabhi) so obviously she choose her husband.. It's not about right or wrong, it's all about my family and to satisfy her husband and his happiness she betrayed her mother, her brother, her bhabhi...
When Ruqu got married and came to Agra, Ruqu was more related to Jalaal, may be Ruqu that's why more closer to MA than HB... Ruqu and Jalaal believed in winning & ruling listened to BK & MA..
With passing of time Jalaal brought the women into haram & gave her all the authority to rule them what ever way she wants... He never interfere how she behaves with other women..
May be HB tried to change Ruqu also, but Ruqu is happy with jalaal praising her intelligence, controlling and ruling the haram...May be for Ruqu what mattered is Jalaal praises, happiness & his views on her, may be that's why she didn't feel listen to HB words & sidelined her as Jalaal.. I am not quite sure about this , but it is not impossible, and it is a very clever idea.
Jalaal started changing himself when he got out of BK influence, meanwhile JOdha came in his life. Jalaal started taking decisions on his own, changing himself, understanding others views while Ruqu still remained unchange, as her life, her importance and her Jalaal is allways with her... But seeing JO importance & feel that Jalaal is getting influenced by her...
For Ruqu she wants to rule Jalaal mind, now she feels she is lost it to Jodha particuarly in PRECAP where she got to know that Jalaal forgave her by listening to Jodha... This has irked her the most as she feared Jalaal would punish her & throw her from his life when the truth come out...
Ruqu is not going to accept Jodha easily, as now she started looking Jodha ruling Jalaal's heart & mind also and he shared her truth with her and listened to her..
Ruqu will not want to loose to Jodha, that's why she may do something worst, and now Jalaal will completely distance himself... I think then Ruqu will change, as her life will be changed completely till you don't loose the person, you don't understand their value...That might be the changing for her..
I think CVS will show Ruqu fall & raise and accept JJ relationship and will shower her love and accept Salim as her son...I think for the change in Ruqu the fall must be evident and loosing the one person that mattered her a lot..
But I still agree that in Badal-kajri track HB is the one who saw the jealous & insecured Ruqu may be that time she would have helped Ruqu to understand the changing JJ equation and make her feel that she is & will be always important in Jalaal's life.
Originally posted by: sashashyam
Dear Munni and Lashy,
Why Munni, it was so plain to see ! She wanted to tie Jodha down with taking care of her, so that Jalal would not be able to spend any time with her and so their relationship would not develop any further. It was a very clever tactic.
But Lashykanna, while your casuistry is admirable, and I loved the mother vs wife tack, which is very perceptive, you are not quite correct in your basic premise. There is a ruthlessness and a level of cruelty in Mahaam that is completely absent in Ruqaiya.
To take just one example, while Mahaam does care for Jalal in a twisted sort of fashion, that love does not prevent her from killing his unborn children. But Ruqaiya has some clear codes and a basic sense of honour; she will not, unlike Mahaam, ever stoop to murder, and she really cares for Jalal. She slaps Hoshiyaar for suggesting, during the BB track, that they should get rid of Jodha's (assumed ) baby, proclaiming that it would be Jalal's baby and that was what mattered to her.
That is why I feel that with a proper upbringing , her negative traits would have been suppresssed and the positive ones enhanced. But she never got that kind of upbringing. The real fault re: Ruqaiya's poor upbringing lies with Hamida Banu. She was a small girl when she came into Hamida's care, and she could have been shaped into a caring young woman, who behaved with the kind of dignity and benevolence one would expect of the chief queen. Hamida seems to have been a complete flop in the mothering department - witness the kind of products she turned out, first Ruqaiya and then Bakshi Banu! 😉
Then there is Jalal. As I never tire of repeating, he should, once he started getting so close to Jodha, have sat Ruqaiya down and explained to her, gently but firmly, that she would continue to be his dearest friend and his Begum-e-Khaas, but he cared a lot for Jodha too and she would have to adjust to that and behave well with Jodha. He never even attempts that, taking shelter under his pat excuse that he cannot understand women.
He is, like most men, reluctant to face sticky situations, that is all!😉 But that does not stop him for offering elaborate and very flowery explanations to tackle Jodha's nakhre. Whereas he does not make even a fraction of that effort to tackle the nakhre of his childhood friend.
Knowing perfectly well that Ruqaiya is jealous of Jodha, Jalal should have known better than going to town making such a fuss over her return. Ok, he is in love for the first time, so let that pass.
But again, he is so OTT while lauding her to the skies for her courage during the attack on the way to the orphanage, that even Jodha feels awkward about it. Even among siblings, praising one child too much in front of the other always causes negative reactions. And these are soutens!
Earlier, the excessive fuss made over Jodha's return to Agra, plus the odd shaadi ki saalgirah celebrations, acted like tinder for Ruqaiya's already short fuse. Till then, she keeps herself under control, and behaves very well during the preparations for Jodha's reception, but with the saalgirah, the strain gets to be too much, and she plunges into this insane fraud.
Well, this sort of thing would not have been uncommon in medieval royal households. In Maharana Pratap, Maharana Udai Singh's favourite queen, the gorgeous Dheerbaiji, plots and plots relentlessly to get rid of the heir to the throne, Kunwar Pratap, since she wants her own much younger son to succeed Maharana Udai Singh.
To revert, Mahaam might have been honest in her tirade against Jalal and to Jalal, but she was taken unawares and was simply not savvy enough. Her insane lashing out appalled me by its sheer stupidity. At one stroke, she destroyed her mother image and replaced it by that of a selfish, manipulative woman who cared for Jalal only because of what he could give her.
Which, moreover, was not true at all. For Mahaam risked her life for Jalal at a time when no one knew that he would become what he has become. But she buries all that 6 feet deep with her "honesty".
As for Ruqaiya, to expect her to hand Jalal a catalogue of all she had done to trip Jodha up is neither here nor there. What is there that has not been 'fessed already? Not much, in the final analysis, for she has already confessed re: the moorti kaand and her partial support for Mahaam against a Jodha who, as Divya has pointed out correctly, Ruqaiya believed to be guilty. What more, then?
Ruqaiya naturally offers the most appealing excuse, anyone in her situation would, and one cannot fault her for that.
As for her monumental folly in perpetrating this fraud, it was a cruelly insensitive thing to do, though Bakshi Banu's and Mahaam's misdeeds were worse, and both could have got Jodha killed for infidelity by a madly angry Jalal,and in the first case, even Hamida Banu does not have faith in Jodha. But what I could never understand, apart from the betrayal part , is this.
How did a woman like Ruqaiya, supposed to be sharp enough to give Jalal political advice, embark upon such a risky exercise without an exit plan? Remember, when Mahaam asks her what she proposes to do as the months go by, she seemed to have given it no thought at all.
It is this that is the worst of all about this stupid track, which was clearly aimed at gilding Jodha's halo some more, and bringing her much closer to Jalal. Which it seems to have accomplished.
Ruqaiya does feel deeply guilty and ashamed of her kartoot, but only because she has been caught out (thanks to that highly artificial speculation by the senior Hakima Sahiba) and she is now afraid that she will be consigned to the outer darkness by Jalal, if not worse. It is only her equation with Jalal that matters to her, which is understandable. What is not understandable is how stupidly she handles this core relationship.
As for the quasi-universal lament that Jalal should not have forgiven Ruqaiya, it is misplaced.
He has done no such thing.
I am reproducing below the relevant extract about the Jalal-Ruqaiya scene from my latest post on the Friday episode, since it might be of interest to others here as well.
I am not sure, Lashy, if you have seen my Equal Honours post on this episode. It is there in my new habitat, and also, due to Divya's insistence, on page 12 above. It is one of the few that I liked a lot myself.
Take care, Lashykanna.
Shyamala Aunty
My post on Jodha Akbar 262: Confusing Emotions (Extract)
Jalal-Ruqaiya-Jodha: Confusing emotions: That Ruqaiya pretends to Jodha that she has really lost her baby is hardly surprising; she would not know that Jodha is in on the secret.
What I could not understand was why Jodha goes there at all. What was she planning to say or do? She would feel awkward lying and pretending to commiserate with Ruqaiya. Perhaps she wanted to bridge the gap between the 24x7 caring she was providing earlier and the break that was bound to come now. Either way, it was an ill-considered move.
Luckily for Ruqaiya, Jalal arrives before she has had the chance to say anything really nasty to Jodha, or she would have copped it from him. As it is, the way he behaves is cold and off-putting enough to freeze any errant wife to the marrow.
It was absolutely clear that though he says he wants to forget her perfidy and never refer to it again, he has NOT forgiven her, not at all. In fact, if one looks back on the previous episode, one realises that Jalal never says, clearly and unambiguously, that he has forgiven her. Ruqaiya simply assumes it is so because he has not punished her.
But forgetting and forgiving are two very different things. It is more common to forgive but not forget. Here, it is the other way around. Jalal wants to forget it all, for her sake and even more so for his own peace of mind, though in fact he is very far from having reached this stage. He has NOT forgiven her at all.And in this scene, it was clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is still very hurt and angry inside, for all that he tries to get over it.
It shows when he has the palna moved away from Ruqaiya's rooms, with the superficially convincing reason that it would hurt her to look at it. That it goes back to Jodha's rooms has been interpreted by some as the shifting of his hopes, but I do not think he is quite there yet. To my mind, he is still recovering from this shock, and it would be a while before he picks up enough courage to dream again about a child calling him Abba huzoor.
It shows even more clearly in the cold aloofness with which he treats Ruqaiya, and in his strange and cutting remark about God having punished her by making it impossible for her to ever have a child.
Now this is completely illogical, for that miscarriage, and the ingestion of the ark that made it impossible for her to ever have a child again, happened to Ruqaiya for no fault of hers. But when has anger ever bothered with logic?
Worse, there follows the other remark, like a stiletto being turned in her wounded ego, that she could thus never become the Maryam-uz-Zamani.
I found that part decidedly interesting psychologically, for though Jalal does say that this last was the greatest sorrow for him, ie that his Begum-e-Khaas would not be giving him his heir, the whole tenor of the comment is almost sadistic in its intent to cause the maximum pain. For he knows that for Ruqaiya, becoming the Maryam-uz-Zamani would be more important than becoming a mother, and he obviously wants to hit her where it would hurt the most.
It was this last jab that convinced me that Ruqaiya has now finally lost Jalal. The only way for her to get back to whatever extent would have been to learn from her mistakes, and turn herself inside out to convince him that she had indeed changed at long last. But the precap would seem to indicate that Ruqaiya, whatever her guilt, regret, shame and desperation, has learnt nothing at all.
Which is a pity, for instead of an interesting triangle of husband-friend-beloved,, we are apparently going to have a high-pitched negative character in the typical Balaji mould. Ruqaiya will probably attempt something even worse in its unregenerate folly pretty soon, without or without Mahaam's advice and assistance.
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Pushpa Impossible
