Originally posted by: sashashyam
Folks,
Well, it should really be a Macedonian farce, but Helena calls herself and her fellow countrymen Greek, so Greek let it be!
This said, I am in two minds as to where to begin, though not with the famous Battle of the Hydaspes between Alexander and Porus aka Purushottam aka Parvateshwar, about which I have found some very interesting material that I will putting up as a separate post immediately below this one.
I am hesitating between beginning with the luminous scene, in two parts, between Chandragupta and Chanakya, or with all the rest, which oscillated between the purely ludicrous and the merely amusing. I think the latter; let us get this out of the way first. Then again, one always keeps the best for the last, does one not?
Helena: Dangerous obsessions: I was relieved to note, on closer and fuller inspection, that the young lady is not as nasally challenged as I had first assumed when I compared her to Nandini Jr. 😉Plus, being an Indian togged up in the flowing Greek robes, she speaks perfect and clear Hindi. I was so weary of trying to decipher what the (pseudo) Macedonians, especially Seleucus, were trying to articulate in our Devanagari that the moment Helena opened her mouth, I was ready to fall on her neck in sheer relief!
I also read somewhere that Helena was a lover of Indian culture even before she married Chandragupta. Maybe that is why her Hindi is so good!😉
She is also a woman of extremes. Her love is absolute, and she demands total reciprocity, whether from the khargosh or, later, from Malayaketu. The khargosh was left to die - and her Jo mera nahin, wo jiye ya mare, mujhe koyi faraq nahin padta! Chhoda use maine nahin, usne mujhe tha.. pretty much sums up her approach to a disloyal beloved, animal or human. Malayaketu, with his glad eye already wandering towards the wide-eyed Nandini, had better look out😉. Hell, the old saying has it, hath no fury like woman scorned. Or deluded.
This quality of hers will be her core in the upcoming episodes. This extreme obsession is dangerous and its her strength and weakness as well.
The encounter between Helena and the CG tiger - very poor when compared to our beloved Mohan in Jodha Akbar and the ones in Ashoka - was the first item in the Greek farce. 4th century BC women seem to specialize in hiding stilettos in their hairdo, or perhaps it was a Greek style that Nandini copies from her new BFF.😉 The only amusing part of the whole was the sight of Malayaketu, a hunk of well over 6 feet, cowering behind a girl as she took on the tiger.😆
🤢🤢🤢
Helena cannot be blamed for the easy insolence with which she puts down the sloe-eyed princess who carps about the importance being given to the Greeks. She was provoked, and she gave it back with a full measure of the arrogance of her race, currently the one to which Alexander the Great, the world conqueror, belonged, and later acknowledged even by the Romans as the fountainhead of European civilization.
And with full reason she shut the princess' mouth by humilliating her properly.
As I watched the twin duels, a question occurred to me. Why do women have to prove their strength only in warlike pursuits, in effect becoming like a man? This is a tendency that prevails even today in offices and boardrooms - a woman trying to become one of the boys to be accepted.
Be that as it may, the two duels were hardly such as to make one sit up and take notice. Of course our heroine cannot, by definition, lose, but then Helena is also slated to become her souten somewhere down the line, so it was shown as a draw, But not without a sideways, patriotic jab at the Greeks by showing Helena attacking Nandini when her back is turned.
I was honestly dumbfounded when the two then suddenly decided to become best friends. What this portends, especially for our poor Chandragupta - all too soon to be sandwiched between these two vixens, with Durdhara as his third headache - remains to be seen. If I was in his place, and was faced with this dire prospect, I would have taken sanyas and become a Jain monk 2 decades earlier!😉😉
😆I'm waiting anxiously for that!
As for the precap, I cannot imagine who would have had the intention, and even more so the guts, to kidnap this amazon of a Helena. Maybe Chandragupta had her kidnapped, and then came in, in the classic movie style, to rescue her as well, thus getting instantly into her good books, and being well on the way to learning the secrets of the Unani yuddha shaili.
It reminded me, in a curious fashion, of Bhuvan, Aamir's character in Lagaan, and the British Resident's sister who taught him all the secrets of cricket.
Nandini: Same old chulbulapan: There is one thing to be said for our leading lady: she is reliable, in the sense of being the same all the time. She kept up her girlish giggling and chulbulapan during these episodes, being helped by the presence at her side of her Tun Tun bhabhi. What the latter was doing jauntering across the country when the baby looked almost due is more than I could make out, but perhaps she is not expecting at all, and is "like that only".
Many here are complaining that Nandini does not walk with the easy grace of a princess. But last night, she proved that whatever she might lack in the royal graces, she has a good bit of regal arrogance. This was on full display when she stared unbelievingly at Dushyant aka Chandragupta when he proferred her paayal, smirked triumphantly as he had to go down on his knees to fasten it around her ankle, and finally looked across with patent pleasure at her father, who had been the one to force Chandragupta to do that.
Bullying one's social inferiors is not a pleasant trait, and I very much wished that all those bees had stung Nandini good and proper, making her face swell up like a football!
Others feel that Shweta is not intrepreting Nandini's character properly. But that would mean a lot of work, both for her and for the CVs, whereas being natkhat and naadaan and playing pranks are all very easy to do, and maybe they find favour with many viewers as well! The promo sequences are far, far away, and for now, she is happy imitating the 1970s heroines brigade to the T.
She is generally over-dressed, and those cork screw tresses and curls, even when she was doing Mayurbhanj Chhau moves with a sword around that bejaan putla (Sri complains about the BC gardens looking decidedly AD, but what I can't stand is so many Urdu words in the 4th century BC ), do nothing for her.
She looked her best in that masculine outfit, just when she had been exposed as a woman, and next best in her daasi get up, with her large eyes and the lines of her face showing to the best advantage when she is very simply dressed.
Acting wise, she was really good the other day when she was assuring her father that she wanted to be his greatest strength and fight his enemies. The closing shot of her face was striking.
Chandragupta: Irrepressible bravado ?: Having clobbered Chandragupta soundly two threads back for babbling his secret plans to a strange daasi, I am now impelled, and not just out of a purely humanitarian impulse, to defend his repeat performance in Alexander's tent.
Bareback rider: But before I get to that, let me dispose of the charge that the scenes of him riding to Parvathak territory to insinuate himself into Alexander's camp were not looking convincing, given that Rajat is a superb rider.
It looked horrible!
I have watched that segment carefully, and it seems to me that the difference noted is because Chandragupta is, as was the fashion in those days, riding without a saddle, ie bareback, except for the thin girths from which the stirrups are suspended. The same style of riding was shown in the 1990 Chanakya, which had been very thoroughly researched. The absence of a saddle makes a difference to the way in which the body of the rider moves.
Deliberate babbling: To revert, while Chandragupta is definitely showing off when he removes those two knives from his hair and his sandal and hands them over to the guards, once inside, his otherwise irresponsible sounding remarks might, just might, have been deliberate.
See, his goal is to find out as much as he can about Alexander's plans , his battle techniques, and his overall approach to the subcontinent of Bharatbhoomi. This cannot be done by functioning as a cook in Philip's kitchen. Nor can he ingratiate himself with Helena unless he finds some way of catching her attention by standing out from the other ordinary servants. At the same time, he has to be non-confrontational and non-threatening, for otherwise he will be summarily punished.
Seen in this light, all that he does makes sense. He manages to catch the attention of the Macedonians with his paean to Chandra as a great and patriotic warrior who is hostile to foreigners - for Alexander is interested in such insider feedback . At the same time, he deflects any punishment, that such pronouncements would otherwise have attracted, away from himself, by attributing them solely to Chandra, Chanakya's pupil in Takshashila.
The end result is all that he could have wished for, as he gets the opportunity to get as close as can be managed to Helena, with opportunities ahead for capitalizing on this opening.
I really liked this scene. The whole speech of exposing himself as a patriotic ideology of his upcoming future in order to catch both Alexander and Helena's eye was good enough so that the man behind the facade(Chandra)can accomplish his mission without being noticed.
Imperfect parallels: I can practically hear a chorus that the parallels to Jodha Akbar are multiplying, what with the paayal and now with our hero carrying the palkhi. There is, however, a major difference in both cases. The paayal here does not symbolize a nascent possessiveness as Jodha's does for Jalal. It is merely one more point that stokes Chandragupta's anger at Nandini, this time deservedly given the way she behaves. Similarly, the palkhi here is not a way of satisfying his growing curiosity about the registan ka gulab. It is a means of fulfilling his guru's aadesh.
Chandragupta-Chanakya
Bhay aur bhavana: Now we finally come to the piece de resistance, the marvellous scenes between Chandragupta and his mentor. I have watched them three times back to back, and they are entrancing each time.
Part I-: Target Magadha: This segment was truly fabulous- both for the splendid lines, and for the actions and reactions of the two protagonists. It would be impossible to say, as both Chanakya and Chandragupta demonstrated anew the unique strength and the symbiotic nature of their bond, which of the two came out on top.
Their scenes, in fact the chemistry between them is the soul of the serial.😃I was struck by Chanakya's almost casual order to Chandragupta: Apne sainikon ko tayyar karo.. shastra tez karo! It thus seems that they already have some sort of army available to them, possibly drawn from the many disaffected deshbhakt sainik from both Ambhi's kingdom of Takshashila and Porus' satrapy ( after his defeat) of Kekeya, who detest the foreign suzerainty over their lands.
In fact, in the 1990 Chanakya, it was shown that even many of the Indian mercenary soldiers, whose loyalty was only to their paymaster, were so disgusted by the wanton cruelty of the foreign soldiers towards the common people of the lands they had overrun that they quit and joined the rebel forces being constituted by Chandragupta and his associates.
It would have been useful if they had shown a map of Alexander's present Indian possessions, both directly conquered or ruled under him as satrapies, with the borders of the Mahajanapadh of Magadha also marked. But of course they did not, and so we have to manage as best as we can by ourselves.
Anyhow, all concerned - except Maha Padmanand himself and the brainless Malayaketu - seem to agree that Alexander's next target, given that Ambhi and Porus have caved in, along with, probably, a number of smaller kingdoms, would be Magadha. It is the likely collapse of Magadha that makes even the imperturbable Chanakya show, for the first time ever, fear of what might lie ahead.
Chanakya is a human, after all. He enacted his feeling perfectly.
As he answers Chandragupta's surprised query as to why he has contradicted his own teachings - Aapne mujhe hamesha bhavanaon ko harana sikhaya, parantu aaj aap swayam bhavanaon se haar gaye? , Chanakya's face, turned towards the fire, seems frozen, as if he could see, in the dancing flames, the dark future of his beloved Mathrubhoomi under the heel of the foreign conqueror.
As he turns to answer Chandragupta, his voice is soft, almost like a plea for understanding: Bhay ko harane ke liye bhavanaon ka bal aavashyak hota hai, Chandra! Prashna keval Takshashila ya Magadh ka nahin hai, prashna hai sampoorna Bharatbhoomi ki raksha ka. ... Is bhay se mujhe aur hamari mathrubhoomi ko mukt karna, yahi ab tumhara jeevan lakshya hai, Chandra.
I like this contradiction, for Chanakya's answer makes perfect sense. In order to save their motherland, feelings must be put on the right direction, and the feeling of freedom takes prestige above the rest of them.
His voice becomes more urgent, more demanding: Vachan do, Chandra, ki hamari mathrubhoomi ki mitti ke maan ki raksha karne ke liye, yadi isme milna bhi pade to bhi tumhein sweekar hai!
Then the final exhortation, the mantra by which Chanakya lives, and by which he wants his best shishya too to live and, if need be, die. Sabse pehle Mathrubhoomi hogi! Bharat maata sabse upar hogi!!
And as Chandragupta, seemingly lost in a trance of his own, does not respond, a half pleading , half disturbed appeal: Kya hua, Chandra? It is only when Chandragupta comes out of that strange reverie and murmurs: Mujhe aisa bhan hua ki main yeh sab pehle bhi sun chukha hoon.. that Chanakya's face and eyes relax in exultant relief: Iska arth hai ki maine tumhein chunkar koyi bhool nahin ki!..
It is a compliment from the CVs to the viewers that they did not, at this point, insert a flashback to the patriotic perorations of Shishunaag and Suryagupta that Chandra, then still in his mother's womb, had heard and soaked up, Abhimanyu fashion.
Huge mercies from them!
So the plan takes shape, to identify and attack not Padmanand's strength, but his greatest weakness. The identity of this greatest weakness is not mentioned between the guru and the shishya, but no prizes for guessing, right!😉
Then comes the grand definition of what Chanakya, and their Mathrubhoomi, both want from Chandragupta.
Magadh aur Bharat ko ek aisa raja chahiye jiski na koyi durbalta ho, aur jise na koyi bhay ho.. With a protective, affectionate arm around his protege's shoulders, Wo raja tum banoge, Chandra, kyonki tumhare pas khone ke liye kuch bhi nahin, aur paane ke liye sab kuch hai!
Time alone will tell if Nandini, now so intent on becoming her father's sabse badi shakti, will one day become the same for Chandragupta or, as Padmanand says of himself, his one and only durbalta.
Part II: Target Alexander: One has to note that Chanakya never overreaches himself; he has his feet always firmly planted on the ground of reality. So he does not dream of defeating and destroying Alexander, only of dissuading him for going deeper and deeper into Bharatvarsh, and instead deciding to go back home to Greece. For this, humein uski vijay yatra ko rokhna hoga.
Excellent point. He knows deep inside him that even with whole Bharat united is not enough to defeat a constantly moving empire as Alexander's, whose army was the biggest and the strongest one of that time.
To achieve this goal, Chanakya intones to his attentive pupil, they have to learn about both Sikandar's strengths and his weaknesses, uske daav pech, uski soch, uski ran neeti, and for this, tumhein uski shivir mein jaana hoga. .. Uski shivir se tumhari wapasi hi Sikandar ki waapse sunischit karegi!
Chandragupta's response is a proud affirmation of his confidence in himself, and in his ability to meet his guru's expectations: Main avashya lautoonga! Aur Sikandar ko bhi lautna hoga!
And the depth of affection and faith that Chanakya has in his shishya seeps thru in his parting blessing : Safal hokar lautna, Chandra!
NB: There is one version of pre-Mauryan history where Chandragupta actually goes to Alexander's camp to invite him to attack Magadha. He is dismissed and barely escapes being executed, the real Alexander not being anything like as benign as this one, and subject to drunken rages. The Greek historians called Chandragupta Sandrocottos.
It is not for nothing that I wrote, in my last thread, that as of now, the only worthwhile scenes in Chandra Nandini are those between Chandragupta and Chanakya. Episode 11 proved this anew, and in spades.
OK, folks, this is it for the main episode analysis. Please do not forget to hit the Like button if you think that is warranted.
I will be posting below, a little later today, a separate and highly interesting account of the Battle of the Hydaspes (the Greek name for the Jhelum river) between Alexander and Porus. This reveals some new material that reshapes our whole understanding of the outcome of the battle, and of why Alexander decided, soon thereafter, to return to Greece instead of plunging further into India. Please do not miss this one!
See you all again on Saturday.
Shyamala/Aunty/Akka/Di
