Folks,
I had hoped not to post tonight, for all our sakes, but no such luck for you or for me, it seems😉.
Jodha Akbar 33 was like a ball of wool with which a kitten has been having some fun, a cat's cradle of tangled skeins. One could not really disentangle any of them, but one learnt a good bit while trying to do so. Let us take them one by one, in no particular order.
Jalal: His two scenes today - the first with the banjara troupe, and the other with the would be assassin - were both extremely interesting and revealing.
A month ago, in my first ever post in this forum, Ekta's Emperor Jalaluddin Mohammed: an assessment (https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/jodha-akbar/3647623/ektas-emperor-jalaluddin-mohammed-an-assessment), I had noted, with reference to the payal incident, that it showed not his love for Jodha but his possessiveness towards her, which is not at all the same thing.
He does not kiss the payal as any ordinary lover would. It would be not be like the Shahenshah at all. He tosses it up in the air, but he always catches it, and when it falls into the fire, he burns his hand to retrieve it. This is not so much, as some have thought, a sign of passion for Jodha. He is not yet aware that he is falling in love with her, he does not know what love means. It is rather the possessiveness towards her that, as the line has it, uske parvaan chad gaya tha. For him, the payal symbolizes Jodha, and he will not let go of it or her, even if he has to burn his fingers to secure it.
It was exactly the same today. When he listens to the banjaras' ballad in praise of Jodha's manifold beauties - of face and figure, of her eyes, her lips, her hair, her gait -he goes back in time and sees her again as he had beheld her on the streets of Amer, and he smiles to himself involuntarily.
But immediately, his raw possessiveness towards this girl who is soon to be his begum, his and his alone, rears its head like an angry, hissing cobra. No one, but no one, can be permitted to hear this song and then imagine his Jodha as an object of desire. The cold menace in his eyes and voice as he warns the banjaras - after having rewarded them for this performance - against ever repeating it, is truly frightening, and those poor folk must not have stopped shivering for days!
An aside: Lagta hai ki Sharifuddin ki toh khair nahin. His folly, or impertinence, or both, in dragging his feet about bringing the Amer princes to the Shahenshah as instructed, is sure to cost him dearly, Bakshi Banu or no Bakshi Banu. Note how Chughtai Khan, now a trusted and valued go between with the Amer royal family and thus part of Jalal's inner circle, who dislikes Sharifuddin, neatly does chugli to Jalal about Sharifuddin not having done hukum ki taameel without delay!😉
The averted assassination attempt is even more revealing. Firstly, the Mughal security system seems to be dismal, seeing that a stranger armed with a khanjar managed to get into the Shahenshah's personal tent unnoticed, and that too to within 3 feet of him!
Next, Jalal is far more alert to potential danger than his entourage. He not only spots the khanjar but manages to remove it unnoticed by the bearer of the weapon. But it is when he deals with the man that we get the true measure of a great ruler in the making, with an unerring grasp of human psychology.
By daring the man to cut his throat, Jalal confuses him and puts him at a mental and psychological disadvantage. That man will never again be able to see Jalal as the devil incarnate, especially after he is pardoned and allowed to leave unscathed. Here we see, in Jalal, the seeds of the future Akbar, for it was thru such gestures and such calculated magnanimity, multiplied a thousand fold, that Akbar won over much of hostile Hindustan.
Ruquaiya: My erstwhile favourite is going down the tubes, and fast. What sort of intelligence network does she have that she is still in the dark about Jalal's latest matrimonial venture? Instead, she sits there doing exactly what she ridicules the other begums for doing, accumulating jewellery (note the subtle but unmistakable boost for Rajasthani kaarigari in jewellery!)😉.
I could not understand how it was that Mahaam Anga had not dropped in, or her way to Amer with Jalal for the wedding, to bring Ruqaiya up to speed on this momentous development, and amplify on her earlier warning to her about the need to hold her husband tight and not let him stray. One would have thought that Mahaam would never have passed up such a godsent opportunity to stick a knife into Ruqaiya - who had once reminded her, with true Timurid arrogance, that she was only a dasi - and then twist it with glee. We have missed a classic encounter, alas!
One odd point, why has Ruqaiya suddenly demoted herself from the Malika-e-Hind to merely the Malika-e-Khaas?
Bharmal & Spouse: They are an odd couple.
She is the antithesis of the traditional, strong Rajasthani (now replaced onscreen by a bizarre mutation, Rajvanshi, a rootless entity that could be from anywhere from Kamrup {today's Assam } to Kerala) matriarch. She is eternally in a flood of tears these days, and takes to her bed, exactly like Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice after her favourite daughter elopes with a good for nothing young man. Where Mynavati should be there as a lightning rod and a safety net for Jodha, she instead imposes an additional emotional burden on her with her unexplained wailing and weeping.
He is square of both face and body, undistinguished and uninspiring, and of late he is also a man hounded by unfamiliar demons - ostracism and public humiliation among his own class, fear of what the future holds. He takes the easy way out, grasping at the escape route Jodha offers him when she refuses to let him tell her whom she would be marrying. It was his responsibility to tell her, so that she would be spared the shock and dismay of either learning it from an outsider, or worst of all, only at the ceremony itself. But he chickens out, and is now babbling of Jodha's niyati revealing the truth to her somehow, and then giving her the strength to bear it. Some father, this!
Jodha: She remains curiously unaffected by the evident and unusual emotional turmoil around her ' whether it is her mother, Motibai, or Sukanya. The tongue cutting incident was a very grave and shocking one, and it is strange that though she is then distracted from probing the kaali zubaan comment, Jodha does not revert to it later. She explains away curious points ' the odd comment about Motibai's 'marriage' let fall by young Mansingh, Motibai's tears, or the hasty departure of Kunwar Pratap's delegation - to herself without showing the least urge to probe them, an urge that would have been expected in such an intelligent young princess. None of this is convincing.
It is even less credible that when the whole of Amer knows about the Mughal Shahenshah being Jodha's bridegroom, she has not learnt of it from someone by now.
By the way, what was it with that gaggle of female servants at the confidential meeting where Bharmal reveals the truth about Jodha's marriage, whereas his 3 daughters are all kept out of it? He could just as well have hired the town crier to announce it to the populace😉!
It is also clear that thanks to Bharmal's pusillanimity, Jodha is now in for a very bad shock at her wedding. She is obviously under the impression that her bridegroom is a Rajput king, who she assumes has taken on the Mughals to help Amer out. Not only this, she is actually expecting this new savior to complete the task the unfortunate Suryabhan had sworn to achieve! The only saving grace today was that the Jalal ka sar mantra was not trotted out, but it was hanging over the scene nonetheless, like a ghostly presence.
Given all this, it is difficult to stop oneself from (virtually) clobbering the First Couple of Amer for their folly and cowardice in keeping Jodha in the dark till the end.
Jokes of the day: The Amer Ministers, who seem to competing among themselves for the first prize for stupidity, suggesting that their King palm Jalal off with Motibai instead of Jodha. I was in stitches imagining Jalal's face when he raises the ghunghat😉! Riyya, my poor girl, you are apparently stuck with Motibai, for she is surely going to Agra with Jodha!
The choice of an Ekta regular, Anurag Sharma, who plays minor roles in her other soaps and who looks about 40, to play the fiery, 20 year old Kunwar Pratap.
This apart, the tone and tenor of his tirade against Bharmal in the latter's own audience hall was so harsh that one would have expected Bharmal or Bhagwan Das to call the visitor to order and have him ejected. Instead, father and son stand there like dummies while Pratap lets them have it with both barrels. Not that I was surprised!
Shyamala B.Cowsik
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