Folks,
After the high octane goings on last week, what followed was, perhaps unavoidably, somewhat anticlimactic. For one thing, it set my teeth on edge when the samhaar turned suddenly into a damp squib. 😡
This apart, the way in which Padmanand was trying to compete with the cat and its nine lives became, after a point, acutely exasperating. So much so that I was strongly tempted to jump into the frame, shove Chanakya aside, grab Chandra's sword, and do the job myself!
Anyhow, as we cannot be too finicky and insist on nonstop excellence, let us take up this triptych, not ad seriatim, but as a series of issues. But before I begin, a disclaimer. Please do not be disappointed after comparing this post with my last one. For it is an immutable law of physics that a reflection cannot be brighter than the original object. Similarly, despite the very flattering assertions by many of you, my posts cannot be better than the material I have to work on.
Enuff said. Let us begin.
End game with hiccups: I finally understood the reason for the Mahabharata style trappings of a dharmayuddh, complete with a bugle to signal the end of the day's fighting. It was explicity designed so that:
-Padmanand can survive the first day's fighting,
-Nandini can chase after Chandra, throw a sword at his back in a most adharmic manner, and indulge in a bout of insane ranting directed at him. A tirade, demented even by her standards, about his alleged lack of purushatva because he would not (a) fight after the sunset bugle being blown and (b) will not fight a woman.*
Which tirade has consequences on Chandra's psyche that gladdened the hearts of many amateur psychologists here😉. And finally so that
-on the next day, Malayaketu can do a Nandini (what a perfectly matched pair they would have made ! I only wish we could tamper with the script and pull that off!😉) and attack Chandra from behind after the close of the hostilities for the day, wounding him seriously.
On the third day, the bugler was dispensed with, as all of Padmanand's army - his ashta putra ( the ninth appears to be mentally challenged and must have been left behind in the palace), his war minister Vakranaas and his senapati Bhadrashaal, and the remaining foot soldiers (some 20 odd, as the battle budget had been drastically pruned by now!😉) - after having cast a timorous look at Chandra's bloodthirsty face, voted with their feet. And Padmanand himself, after having carefully avoided confronting Chandra or even lifting his sword, made off post haste to his secret hideout.
*NB: I am afraid I cannot agree with the argument that Nandini's tirade is an attempt to destabilize Chandra psychologically.She is not trying anything so fancy, just being specially nasty, as she was when she landed up on Mura, only far more so this time.
For it is not like the psy war Padmanand tries out in the beginning, which made perfect sense and was quite effective to begin with till Chandra recovered his poise. Here, the insults are so nonsensical that any other man would have laughed at them and at her.
Chandra is somehow very thin-skinned where she is concerned, that is all. If he had not been so, he would have yelled after her that it was only the sun that saved her father today, but he would not let that happen tomorrow!
Revenge stymied: This sub-title is of course for Helena.
If she had asked me, I would have told her there was no way Malayaketu was going to die, at her hands or Chandra's, so soon, seeing that the inevitable death of Padmanand would leave a yawning gap in the ranks of the evildoers, and so the script could never allow such a solid presence in those ranks as Malayaketu's to be also wiped out.😉
In the event, he escapes, after Helena is fooled by the oldest trick in the world, a handful of earth flung in her face. What a pity they did not have spectacles in the 4th century BC! But even if they had been around, and Helena had been myopic, she would still have avoided wearing them on grounds of personal vanity. 😆
She presumably does not have a dagger tucked away in the fancy costume of hers (see how useful a solid back to that battle dress would have been? She could have had a special pouch for the dagger behind her neck!) , otherwise she could have done a Chandra on the fleeing Malayaketu .
By the way, the snippet showing Chandra taking aim at the fleeing Malayketu, and flinging his dagger at his retreating back so hard that it cuts straight thru his protective jerkin, was excellent, with Chandra's face looking exactly like that of a greyhound hot on the trail of its target.
It also showed that Chandra is no Yudhishtir, to be constantly hung up unilaterally on dharma, but can pay his enemy back in his own coin and attack him from the back.👏
Revenge achieved: This is for Chandragupta, and it comes in two stages.
Stage 1: the elimination of all the available Nandputras, numbering about 8, as far as I could make out.
It was strange that they all let themselves be captured en masse, and did not, going by their appearance, seem to have put up a fight at all. Nor could I grasp why they all ran away from the battlefield on foot, whereas they all rode at Chandra on horses, and those must have been still around even after they had been unhorsed.
Be that as it may, Chandra disposes of all of them in one fell sweep, cutting their throats in a single curving motion of his sword, like Lord Rama shooting a single arrow thru 7 sal trees. They were all standing there like tailor's dummies, waiting to have their throats cut! It was most peculiar.
What with her beloved bhais abandoning the battle and their father, with the great warrior Dhananand heading the exodus😉, and then Malayaketu peaching on Padmanand's hideyhole to save his own life, it must have been a comprehensive wake up call for Nandini!😉
To revert, before he moves towards the Nandputra, as Padmanand pleads for his santaan to be spared, Chandra smiles a cold smile of savage amusement. As he calls to his enemy: Bas ab dekhte jaa!, his smile widens even further. It was a chilling sight.
Two clarifications are in order here, to respond to reservations about Chandra's actions against Nand's sons and against Nandini.
Justice is mine: One, what Chandra does to Nand's sons is an execution. It is not a killing of a foe in the battlefield. Yes, not all of them were directly involved in Nand's atrocities, but for Chandra they are all tarred with the same brush. And he is not wrong in feeling so, for they are all complicit in their father's crimes. They fully approve, for example, of his cutting the throat of an old man who is unable to pay the special tax Nand levies on the populace.
Chandra is thus the executioner, and his acharya is the judge who pronounces sentence. It is another matter that Chandra has a personal motive for his vengeance that is overpowering.
Contrary to some criticism seen here, I do not see any indication in the script that the cowardice of Nand's sons was attributed to their low social origin on their father's side. Why, if this was so, Padmanand. who was nothing but a barber himself, while his sons were at least half of royal blood, should have been shown as the biggest poltroon of the lot,but he is recognised as a great warrior! The sons are always shown as weak, bar Dhananand, and Nand keeps insisting that Nandini is worth more than all of them put together. They have no guts and Nandini has plenty, which seems to me to be a plug for nari shakti, and nothing else! 😉
To revert, Chandra would have killed the sons on the battlefield if they had not all run away. But they do run away, and so he kills them here. Surely one does not expect him to set them all loose and run after them, like a chicken herder!😉
As Nandini rushes to lament over the dead bodies of her brothers, Chandra's smile is frightening in the pure pleasure it radiates. He is a living illustration of what he tells Durdhara that morning: Jab ghrina seema laang jaati hai, to manushya ko andar hi andar jalaati hai, and it is clear that he is still on fire inside.
Two, what Chandra does to Nandini when he removes her dupatta is the direct pratiuttar to what she screams at him the day before, that he he was a coward and lacked purushatva, and this after he had downed all her brothers and was within an instant of killing her father after besting him in single combat!
He could have dealt with her easily now, for his first move is a shove that sends her reeling backwards. So what he does is in retaliation for that insult of hers, by showing her that she is a woman, and has all the weak points of a woman after all. If she had been a pure warrior, why should losing the dupatta have bothered her at all? She should have continued fighting.
She asked for what she got, and though I am a feminist to the core, I also believe that a woman who behaves in the ugly manner that Nandini did at the end of the battle deserves what happened to her.
And what was it anyway? She was not disrobed like Draupadi, was she? Whereas what she said to him the evening before was the ultimate insult for a man, and that festers in his mind like poison. As you sow, so do you reap.
Another odd point. As Mishti (mishtidoi) has pointed out, one fails to understand why Nandini discarded her samurai style battle jerkin for her regulation chakmak when she arrives at Nand's hideout. She is listening when Malayaketu betrays its location to Chandra and Helena, and she should have immediately guessed that Chandra would track her father down there. Surely then retaining the protective jerkin would have made more sense?
Stage 2: This comes after Chanakya stymies Chandra's second attempt to dispose of Padmanand, and instead sets him free to depart with his daughter dearest in tow. I could fully share Chandra's angry exasperation at this latest quirk of his mentor, and I gritted my teeth. He must have done the same, but Rajat has an excellent set of pearly whites, and I suppose they could stand the damage!😉
I could not understand why Padmanand, who must surely have had his sword with him when he fled from the battlefield, does not put up even a token fight against Chandra when he sees him at the door of the hut. Instead, he looks at him as though paralysed, and lets himself be dragged out and flung to the ground like a sack of potatoes. And once there, he keeps staring up at Chandra's vengeful face with scared eyes.
The only possible explanation for his bizarre behaviour is that he has completely lost his nerve. Probably Nemesis, the vengeful goddess, on his trail for long, had got to him at long last!
NB: The real explanation for the above was revealed in tonight's precap. I think the one whom Chandra killed was a doppelganger, a double,which was why he could not fight with Chandra, either on the battlefield or in the hut, which was something that, as noted above, puzzled me a lot. The substitution must have taken place before the fighting began on the third day. The first day, Padmanand was the original, so he is ready to fight, and able too.
But how does this tie in with Sunanda's talk of a major secret that she was keeping from (the original) Padmanand? I can't guess.
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To revert, it turned out that old man Chanakya knew what he was doing after all, and our two Cs got at Padmanand and his ill-gotten loot as well. And it was poetic justice that Padmanand was killed not by beheading, but by being slashed by Chandra's sword the same number of times as he had whipped Chandra at the swayamvar.
Nandini needs a crash course in doing pralaap. Her vocal laments sounded horrible, with a pitamaharaj or two thrown into each wail. Chandra watches her with silent satisfaction.
Icy fulfillment: Often, especially in the battle scenes, I have noted Rajat's flair for projecting extreme rage and hate without going over the top. Here too, the prize in this category should go to the delighted smile with which he greets Chanakya's pronouncement that Ab is khuli shikha ko baand loonga.
But the still, icy gleam in Chanakya's eyes, as he looks down at the drops of Padmanand's blood that spatter his shikha, tops even Chandra's savage hilarity. As does the eagerness with which he eggs Chandra to get on with the business of Nand ke vansh ka vinash by killing all his sons. He is truly a terrible old man, is Chanakya.
Urgency for the uttaradhikari: I would go with Ashwinee's superb and psychologically plausible explanation for the whole thing, which goes as follows:
Chanakya was not suddenly worried about Chandra's uttaradhikari but he sent Chandra to Durdhara to undo any residual effects that Nandini's comments might have left on Chandra's psyche. I would bet on this guru knowing his shishya that well and also on his cunning in trying to keep Chandra's thoughts from revisiting Nandini's speech by keeping him otherwise engaged.Cynical but not impossible since it also has the added advantage of nudging Chandra in a direction which he otherwise would not take given his 'bal bramhachari' niyat. As you said, pure politics - of a very layered kind!
I must confess that this particular layer did not occur to me at all, but she is absolutely right. The old man knows how Nandini's taunts would affect his boy, whence this attempt at diverting his mind. And since everyone in the cast has the eyes of an eagle and the hearing of a lynx, Chanakya would have heard all that Nandini spat out right from his hilltop position! 😉
Slavish obedience? : Chandra has been criticized for accepting his guru's fiat in the matter of the uttaradhikari and Durdhara without much protest, and branded a puppet of his mentor's. To these criticisms , I would say just this.
Chanakya is Chandra's Acharya. He is the man who has made him what he is, and but for him, what would Chandra have been? A skinny, undernourished brat, beaten black and blue daily by his drunkard of a foster father, while his foster mother bleated in the background about her abiding prem for her husband. For that inestimable favour that Chanakya did him, Chandra owes him at least total obedience.
In any case, Chanakya has bought him from his foster father, and he makes it clear right at the beginning that he expects implicit obedience from Chandra in all things. It is another matter that over the years, he comes to love Chandra like a son,but that alters nothing in the context of the obedience he demands of his shishya.
If Chanakya had been Chandra's father, and Chandra had obeyed him in the same way, would the criticism be the same? I don't think so. But Chanakya is the only father figure Chandra has ever known, and even in Chakravartin Ashoka Samrat, Bindusara tells his eldest son Sushim that his father, the great Chandragupta Maurya, would not take a single step without his guru's explicit approval. Was that found strange? No. Is it seen as strange that Lord Rama obeyed his father, who was clearly in the wrong, so implicitly? No.
The fact is that such critics are importing contemporary sensibilities into a 4th century BC story. No one can expect anything different from a shishya in that age. In the 1990 Chanakya too, Chandragupta was shown as a completely obedient shishya, for that is the historical truth. I do not see why the script should stand this paddhati on its head to please those with 21st century ideas.
Superb renditions: For me, the most striking aspect of the whole uttaradhikari sequence is that Rajat's performance during the whole, from the time he approaches Durdhara to the morning after, is quite simply outstanding, even by his standards.
It was a very difficult set of scenes to tackle: the awkwardness, the reluctance amounting to distaste for having any such physical intimacy with his best friend - whether he is right or wrong here is not the point, the point is that he does so feel - the thinking back to Nandini's mad, hateful tirade, the shamefaced reaction the next morning.
Every single bit of it was near perfect. I cannot think of many actors, even those in films,who could have pulled that off.
Saanvi's Durdhara complemented Chandra to perfection. She was gently, calmly supportive of Chandra all thru, understanding his reluctance and his hesitation with clear-eyed wisdom, and helping him over the emotional roadblock that seems to stymie him at first. For apart from his idea of the maryada towards a very dear friend, there is also a deep seated aversion in him towards any act of physical intimacy with a woman, which has to do with his bal brahmachari bent of mind, which is still deeply ingrained in him.
It is the same the next morning, when she sees that Chandra is on a fresh guilt trip, blaming himself for having, as he sees it,forced her to a level of intimacy that he somehow sees as violative of their deep friendship. I am sure she does not share these views of his, but she does not argue the point with him. Instead, she frames it all in the context of their having done their duty as a potentiual king and queen, proposes that they should just forget it, and stresses that he should focus on the war ahead.
Chandra is truly very lucky to have Durdhara as his helpmeet - a caring, non-judgemental wife and a dear, loyal friend in one. For she loves him , though she does not show it. As for him, I think he himself does not understand what it is that he feels for her. Be that as it may, when she dies, it will be a terrible, emotionally crippling blow for poor Chandra.
Emotional high: I do not have anything much to say about the milan between Mura and Chandragupta. It was something to be viewed, not to be analysed.
Chandra was superb in his overflowing love and grief, and the tremendous sense of relief at having fulfilled his duty to his parents. It was all there in the hoarse cadences of his voice as he asserts, again and again: Main aa gaya, maa! Maine pratishodh le liya hai! Apne pita ki hatya aur aapke apamaan ka pratishodh le liya hai!
I loved it when he took in his foster mother too into the all embracing circle of his love and sense of belonging. But I did not like it when he forgave his now snivelling, grovelling foster father so easily. What happened to the count that the young Chandra was keeping of the number of blows he had taken from this man? He should have been kept at a certain distance, and not embraced with such easy warmth. I am almost sure that this character will be a source of trouble for Chandra in the future.
All this said and done, I think this grand, high octane reunion of the long suffering mother and her long lost son should have appealed greatly to the TRP audience. And about time!
Now we can look forward to further TRPs boosters in the shape of the Chandra-Nandini hostilities and the problems that Nandini will face from the women in Chandra's household.
Pot pourri:
-Malayaketu should avoid these topless displays. He looks like a WWF contestant.
-Chanakya's vrushchika vyuha in movement was great fun, especially since it was shown in an overhead shot. Though it was difficult to understand how it actually worked.
- Nandini's mind-boggling VFX jump from the ground to the back of her horse would have given even an agile frog an inferiority complex.😆
-Avantika shows Sunanda what queenliness means when she moves resolutely to open the door to the soldiers before it is broken down.
-For all his ominous comment To Nand ka rakt abhi jeevit hai!, as he shoves Nandini aside and grabs the last of the Nandputra, I do not think Chandra, once he realises that the boy is mentally challenged, will kill him as well.
Well, folks, bye for now. Please do not forget to hit the Like button if you think that is warranted. See you again over the weekend.
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