Originally posted by: sashashyam
Now this, my dear Gargi, is a very clever defence of Jodha. Perhaps the most cunningly plausible one I have encountered thus far!
I am in two minds as to whether you are serious about this argument of yours, or you are just offering it as a debater against the proposition does. On the balance, and since you are citing your own example, I will go for the former. Let us begin on this basis.
NB: The proposition here being that Jodha is a curmudgeon who is unwarrantedly rude and ungrateful to Jalal. Note that she is not being pilloried for not falling for him, because that is an entirely different matter, and one cannot fall in love with all the men who are very supportive of you! There are a lot of other khunnas that I have against her, like her self-righteousness, but those are not germane to the present discussion, so I am shelving them.
Your main thesis that one simply cannot accept things which are foreign to one's ingrained culture, one's religion, one's comfort zone, and that this is why Jodha shies away from the very idea of falling in love with Jalal.
Now, this would apply, within India itself, to North-South, East-West differences as well. Food habits, ways of dressing, rituals, all would different even if all concerned were from the same religion. I would not agree that one cannot accept such differences and be happy - you are over-generalising here basing yourself on your own case - for there are any number of people from all classes within India, and foreigners marrying Indians, who have done it . But I would agree that it would be difficult, and it might be very difficult at the beginning.
But we are here talking of royals, and for them, the only thing that mattered for matrimonial connections was royal blood on both sides, and of course power and prestige. Thus, Gujarati or Rajasthani princesses were married to Assamese princes or kings, and Kashmiri princesses to Maharashtrian princes or kings. In these cases, which were prevalent right down to the 20th century, the only common factor on both sides was the royal lineage and the Hindu religion. Nothing much else.
Still, those marriages did not seem to have had any serious problems, for it was the norm that the girl had to adjust to her husband and her in-laws, and that was that. If she was a Krishna-bhakt and her inlaws worshipped only Durga - and differences between Shaivites and Vaishnavites could be very serious indeed - she would have to change her aaradhya. If she was a vegetarian and they were confirmed meat-eaters, she would have to cook meat dishes even if she did not eat them. Not everyone could be like Meerabai! And she was married into another Rajput royal family!
There would be most definitely be no question of holding her husband at arm's length as this Jodha does. On the contrary, if she was not able to have a child within a few years, she would be dubbed a baanjh, and shelved, and her husband - who would already have several other wives - would get married again to someone else who could.
Now, as for this Jodha, she does not have to change her way of life, her way of worship, or her food habits even though she has married outside her religion and her community. She is able to create a Rajput cocoon inside her hoojra and snuggle into it. An Assamese queen mother, even though Hindu, might not have allowed Jodha any of this, seeing it as her bahu's refusal to accept their way of life.
Plus, Jodha has, in Hamida Bano, an unbelievably affectionate saas, of the kind seen only in one's dreams, and a very kind co-wife in Salima. Not just they, but Jalal too go out of the way to accommodate Jodha's religious practices , and even participate in them. Which other Muslim 16th century Muslim husband would have accepted the aarti and the prasad from her? None. Not many would do it even in these far more broad-minded times. Why, a Christian couple living in our building would not take the aarti during the Ganapati festival.
So, as far as Jodha is concerned, I cannot see where these insuperable adjustment problems come from. Of course it would have been easier for her mentally if she had married a Rajput king, but would it have been preferable just because of cultural similarities if he was unpleasant and demanding, and her saas was nasty and overbearing and railed against her bahu all the time, like Meerabai's nanad Oudha? It would have been far, far worse for her. Not all Rajput husbands were like Suryabhan and not all Rajput saases like his mother!
Nor was Jodha's was the first marriage of its kind., Allauddin Khilji had two Hindu wives, and there were many other such cases even before the Mughals came to India. In the case of Khilji's wives, neither of them bore him his heir, so they remained anonymous. Jodha is well known because she bore the heir to the throne, and because she was the spearhead of Akbar's path-breaking political strategy of co-opting the Rajputs and making them the pillars of the Mughal sultanate.
To revert, if she can be perfectly happy with her Muslim in laws, it is clear that for this Jodha, these religious, racial and cultural barriers do not exist, because she is allowed her own way in all these things. It means that Jodha has no insuperable mental block against associating with Mughals, living with them, and developing real affection for them - for Hamida, Salima. Rahim and so on.
Then why should she jib only at her husband just because he is a Muslim and a Mughal? It does not make any sense at all.
As for your other argument that Jodha is so close all the time to falling head over heels in love with Jalal that she has to hold herself back by main force, and she is ungrateful and rude to him as a defence mechanism, I have two questions for you about this undoubtedly alluring thesis.
When does your Jodha, subconciously or otherwise, get to within a whisker of falling so hard in love with Jalal? And why?
I do not think anyone can offer the love at first sight explanation in this case. So I presume that this would be only after he has started being accommodating and protective of her and generous towards her family. If so, why should she hold back because of racial. religious and cultural differences, when the selfsame differences do not bother her at all when it comes to Hamida & Co.?
To sum up, I think the other explanation - that Jodha is afraid of being discarded once Jalal has had his fill of her and has got bored with her - is the only plausible one. This is the ugly message that Ruqaiya at first, and later Maham, right down to Episode 99, have dinned into her, and it could well have sunk deep down. In fact, Jodha cites this very point - the fear of being ignored and discarded by a royal husband - as a very unfair burden on royal wives in general, when she is talking to Jalal just before their suhaag raat.
Now the thing about this particular mental block is that there is no way Jalal can remove it, no matter how hard he tries. For how can he prove a negative, viz that he will not tire of her once they have had normal marital relations?
So, against this background, for Jodha to accept Jalal would need a leap of faith on her part. Or the realisation that she cannot live without him, which would spur her on to taking this risk regardless.
We never get to hear any of these presumed internal debates inside Jodha's mind and heart. So someone like me is left to figure out a Jodha to fit in with what we are shown, and this is a dratted, obstinate, self-righteous female who does not have a civil word for her endlessly indulgent husband no matter what he does for her and hers!
Even at the end, Jodha is shown only as comfortable being loved by Jalal, and loving him back in a conventional fashion. There is no deewangee to be seen in her right up to the finis. I do not hold this against her, for that is the way she is made. But she is not one for le grand amour.
Lord, how long this has become! See how seriously I take your thesis, young Gargi!😉
Shyamala Aunty
Cricket
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