A young member was lamenting here about having fallen in love with Jalandhar, for now she was not sure how she was going to cope with his inevitable destruction.
I want to tell her, and all those who feel as she does, "You fell in love with him because he is not a villain. He is a tormented, twisted, tragic soul, whom no one helped when he needed it "
For that is the plain truth. There is much that many of the protagonists - Shukracharya above all, Narada, Lakshmi and even Mahadev - could have done to prevent Jalandhar from turning to this self-destructive path, and threatening to take everyone and everything down with him. But none of them did anything. Instead, each of them seems to have made matters much worse.
Jalandhar is a basically a tragic figure, as vulnerable emotionally as he is invulnerable on the battlefield. Right now, he is being eaten up from inside by, as Nikhila pointed out correctly, insecurity. But not insecurity vis a vis himself, for he is fearless, as Mahadev himself notes. Rather insecurity vis a vis his loved ones, once his mother and now Vrinda.
Plus he has a sense of having been profoundly humiliated in front of his subjects by Mahadev, when he announces that Jalandhar is his ansh, and thus inferior to him (or so Jalandhar sees it, not without reason). It is this which drives him now to declare war on the Tridev, with the aim of regaining the respect of his subjects.
The same sense of humiliation makes him act extra brash and arrogant vis a vis Mahadev, whom he sees, wrongly but unwaveringly, as the fountainhead of the inequality between the devas and the asuras that has always prevailed. As Shukracharya has by now lost all credibility with him, Jalandhar pays no heed to his guru's praise of Mahadev's sense of fairplay vis a vis the asuras.
So he marches up to the Brahmalok, and confronts Mahadev like an angry teenager spewing contempt for the world of grown ups. He taunts Mahadev in a manner that seems more childish than anything else, and his continuous advance in defiance of Mahadev's warnings is a typical, brash dare.
One has also to remember that Jalandhar seems to have come straight from the age of 8 to adulthood, without the interim years of slow growth, mentally and emotionally, which leads a child thru the troubled teens to maturity. He is thus like an artificially ripened fruit, with all the defects inherent in such a product.
Thus, the disastrous outcome of this first encounter with Mahadev does not sober Jalandhar any more than a rough encounter with the law would have sobered James Dean. It only makes things worse, and stokes a burning desire to get his own back.
Now much of this could have been prevented, in the first place, by Shukracharya. A guru has the duty to guide, correct and protect his shishya even when he is misguided. Shukracharya should have told Jalandhar all about the Tridev and explained the essence of Mahadev a long time before he finally comes clean a week ago. He should also have simultaneously assured Jalandhar that he cared for him like a son, and that he would stop him from going on the wrong path. Then things could have been very different.
The trust deficit produced in Jalandhar by the sudden revelation that his guru is a Mahadev bhakt is like a child suddenly learning that it has been adopted. There is a double anger and fear that surface then - anger at what he sees as abandonment by the birth parents, and fear that the adoptive ones do not love him as much as if he had been their own child. Jalandhar now feels betrayed by the guru he had totally trusted all his life, and this pushes him to even worse follies. The blame for this is as much Shukaracharya's as Jalandhar's, if not more, for the guru is wiser and has to be more responsible than his pupil.
Even when things are going from bad to worse and Jalandhar approaches him for his advice, Shukracharya does not tell him that he will come to the court provided Jalandhar promises to respect his advice and follow it. That just might have worked, and the march on Brahmalok prevented.
Instead, Shukracharya turns his back on Jalandhar at the moment when he is needed the most, and when he could have exerted a moderating influence. He was treated with total contempt by most of the asuras earlier, but now when he has the shishya he had waited for all his life, it is he who fails him.
Vrinda alone feels for her beloved husband and tries her best to calm him down by gentle and reassuring persuasion. She does manage to some extent, but as he will not turn to her for advice on strategy or tactics, he is left without any worthwhile support at the most crucial juncture. Moreover, his resentment at her having pleaded with Mahadev to spare him rankles deeply, and undercuts her influence over him.
Nor is Mahadev free of blame for what Jalandhar has become. Having let Indra off for the cold blooded murder of Trishira, an ascetic engaged in tapas, it is Mahadev who gives birth to Jalandhar, so to speak. Why then does he not take any responsibility for his offspring? Why does he not punish Indra for murdering Jalandhar's mother? What does he mean when he declares that he will be responsible for all of Jalandhar's actions, good or bad? One does not see him doing anything to demonstrate this sense of responsibility.
Not that this comes as a surprise, for when it comes to parenting, Mahadev is clearly of the Victorian school of sternness and rigid rules. If it had not been for Parvati's intervention after Kartikeya leaves Kailash in a huff about Ganesha have been declared the pratampoojya, Mahadev would have left him to get back home or not as he chose. Again when, after Parvati has lost her memory, Kartikeya argues with his father demanding that Mahadev bring his mother back, he is dismissed curtly, with little understanding for his anguish. But later, the same plea from Ganesha meets with a far more indulgent response and Mahadev gets set on the ashtanga yoga path to help Parvati regain her memory.
Jalandhar, if one considers him as a sort of child of Mahadev's, clearly falls into the Kartikeya category, or perhaps into that of the very arrogant and difficult original Ganesha. No wonder he is going to end up decapitated as well!
To revert, why does Devi Lakshmi not announce her kinship with Jalandhar to him as soon as she stops Narayan from using the sudharshan chakra on him, as requested by Indra? If she had done that, it would have made a huge difference to his blind hatred of the devas.
Why does Narada go to Jalandhar's coronation as King of the Asuras and provoke him with barbed remarks?
Instead of doing anything to give Jalandhar a sense of emotional security and proper guidance,and thus try to avert the looming disaster that threatens, all of these personages seem to be waiting for an excuse to justify killing him.
It was not Jalandhar's fault that Mahadev accepted Brahaspati's fraudulent arguments in favour of his charge, Indra, and did not annihilate him for the murder of Trishira. If Mahadev had not gone soft at that juncture, there would have been no Jalandhar, and none of the present crisis.
Now Jalandhar is caught up in a vortex of paranoia, and not even Vrinda can reach him and pull him out of the darkness into which he is slipping deeper and deeper. Consumed by a raging desire to get even with Mahadev, he is losing the sense of right and wrong, the very nobility that prevented him from attacking the unarmed Kartikeya after Indra murders Vritrasura by treachery.
So he will have to be destroyed, in an awful and avoidable waste of such a tremendous potential for good, of so much courage and so much energy.
And if the Vrinda story is going to develop as in the puranas, Narayan's deceit would be the worst of all. It is no use excusing it saying that he was defending dharma. Mahatma Gandhi would have been categoric on this; one cannot defend dharma thru adharmic actions, and what Vishnu is said to have done with Vrinda is inexcusable.
In the end, after Vrinda has been deceived and Jalandhar satisfactorily disposed of, the Tridev will of course reinstate the sleazy Indra, with the blood of two innocents on his hands, as if that did not matter at all. And when he commits his next crime, Brahaspati will plead again on his behalf, and Mahadev will let him off again, after another lecture on the role of a guru that Indra will not even have been listening to. Guru?? I have never before seen as weak and as contemptible a character as Brahaspati.
No wonder the asuras harbour such a deepseated resentment against this favouritism shown towards the devas by the Tridev.
I dare say many of you might not agree with much of the above, but I hope you will at at least find a contrary take of some interest.
But I am sure you will all agree that it is Mohit Raina's superb, layered and subtle take on Jalandhar that has made this track so very special. Mohit has always been a master of facial nuance, but as Jalandhar, he has surpassed himself.
Finally, it is remarkable how much time is being devoted to this track, much, much more than even for the Samudramanthan track. And I love it.
Shyamala B.Cowsik
Kabhi Neem Neem Kabhi Shahad Shahad
Debate Mansion
