Let us get over the bad bits first.
There is Jodha who, having made me (I am used to it by now!) and very many others, I am sure, fall flat on our faces, by turning down both the kasam on her patidev's head, and his wacky plan to announce what would nowadays be called a virtual heir to the Mughal empire, is now going into retro mode.
With that , my hopes of seeing some sensible interactions between the two of them during the long evenings and nights they would have had to spend together pretending to be lovey dovey, sharing their very different experiences and ideas, perhaps even laughing together, playing chess, and so on, have been reduced to dust and ashes. Instead of a higher level of mutual understanding, from which their love story could have taken off, we are clearly to be reduced to the usual, tiresome pattern of one-upmanship, with Jodha imitating a ramrod and Jalal trying to outsmart her , the whole moving at a glacial pace.
Jodha is now again seen sulking in front of her long-suffering Kanha, making faces at the prospect of letting that ghruna ka paatra character anywhere near her. If she does not beware, she will wake up one day to find that not just the bansuri, but the whole moorti has vanished, thanks to Kanha's kaan having been pakaofied to excess by her eternal complaints about Jalal, and his having decided to go back to Brindavan to escape this daily torture😉.
There is Ruqaiya, back in the vamp mode after raising our hopes about her becoming almost human, only to dash them the very next day. She first laughs like a hyena about the Jodha-Jalal prophecy. Next, once she learns that she is expecting, she makes it abundantly clear that she is not interested in the joys of motherhood, but only in becoming the Mariam-uz-Zamani by producing the heir to the Mughal sultanate. One shudders to think of how she would behave if the baby were to turn out to be a daughter. Farm her out to the highest bidder from the harem , very likely, poor mite!
In this context, I was standing up and clapping for Jalal when he declares that even if they have a girl, they would raise the little princess with the same love and pride as if they had had a son. It was wonderful to see an emperor, on pins for a male heir, nonetheless ready to love a daughter every bit as much as a son. The Enlightened Sixteenth Century Man Award is hereby conferred on Shahenshah Jalaluddin Mohammed!👏
Rajat was extremely convincing as the expectant father, wonder and delight pouring out of him as his voice catches in his throat in his breathless eagerness. His bubbling joy as he issues instructions for the glad event to be celebrated all over the empire might seem excessive, and more important, premature, but the very excess shows how much this child of his means to him.
It is thus a given that he would promise Ruqaiya a gift of her choice, which she salts away, like a chipmunk ( her two centre front teeth do make look a bit like one, come to think of it!), for after the arrival of the anticipated heir.
I wondered why she did not grab something while the going was good, but the real reason comes out soon enough. She wants to oust Mahaam Anga from the position and the powers of the Wazir-e-Aaliya,and take her place.
Since doors, windows and, in a historical serial, huge billowing curtains, exist for the sole purpose of facilitating the work of eavesdroppers😉, the news of Begum Ruqaiya's ambitions reaches Mahaam Anga's ears almost as soon as her words have been uttered.
With that, the fate of the poor little baby is sealed. Mahaam Anga will ensure, by means subtle, effective, and undetectable, that it never sees the light of day. Jalal will be devastated, for it is he who loves his unborn child with all his heart, and yearns to lavish all his pent up affection on it. Hamida Banu will once again start packing her bags, and her walking jootis, for Ajmer Sharif.
And Jodha, back in the hot seat wrt her Ammijaan's pligrimage, will also see at first hand what bitter grief can do even to an emperor. How she copes with all this, above all how she handles a Jalal in acute depression, will tell us a lot about how much of the right stuff she has in her.
The cultural gap: the Aarti Yes, yes, I know that 90% of the forum did not look beyond those 3 minutes 10 seconds, and could not care less what was there, or not there,in the other 17 minutes 31 seconds😉. I loved it too: it was so sensuous and delicate, so mischievous, so graceful and tantalizing.
At least Jalal made it so, with minimal help from Jodha. She is so busy patronizing him mentally for not knowing how to accept the aarti (though how she expects him to know that is a mystery) that she does not cotton on to the fact that he singes his right hand quite deliberately over the flame. He knows that she will then do it for him and raise her hand, which he can then promptly grasp in his.
What follows is a superb display of delicate flirting a la Jalal. His eyes, lambent with a hidden emotion, tender and teasing at once, never leave her face, while she keeps hers lowered till almost the very end. His hand slides down, never letting go of hers, till he shifts it to cup the flame. He then cheekily makes it clear, by taking the aarti in due and proper form, that he was fooling her all along. It was exactly like the fake hand injury trick on the road to Agra, only it is gentler and free of any intent to ridicule. What is remarkable, and admirable, is that he obviously bears no grudge against Jodha for having turned him down the day before.
It is only at the end,when he has finished with the aarti, that she raises her eyes, grave and questioning, and more than a little shy, to his. What they might have said to each other remains unknown, for the messenger from Ruqaiya comes up just then, and the unsure and embarrassed Jodha seizes the opening and makes good her escape. (I bet the CVs did not know what to write in here for them, and took the easy way out!)
This apart, the whole conception of the scene, especially Jodha's script, was illogical and faulty. Here she is, offering the aarti to her Muslim husband, who naturally has no idea what he is supposed to do with it. Jalal, who obviously has an excellent memory for detail, goes by what Mynavati did while welcoming her javaisa, and does his best to cope with the cultural gap, lowering his forehead for the tilak. Why the two of them have to do a Barfi act and cannot speak up is incomprehensible. Even more incomprehensible is Jodha repeating aarti, aarti like a stubborn parrot, instead of explaining the procedure right at the beginning, as Aishwarya had done in the film.
The scene was apparently played for laughs, but in the process, the opportunity for a charming and gentle reaching out to each other was lost. Nonetheless, the execution, mostly from Jalal's side, was so impeccable that by the end, as he rubs his sooty and slightly singed right hand thru his hair, eyes crinkled in his private thoughts, even I did not mind that this scene, which promised so much in the precap, was actually left dangling like a kite bereft of a wind, rudderless and directionless.
Almost the only positive note I could extract from it is this. Why does Jodha ( now totally at home in her harem rooms, with a lush tusli plant in a proper tulsi mandap to boot), want to give Jalal the aarti at all? She has just asserted to her Kanha (who must by now have procured a pair of good earplugs for himself!😉) that she has itni ghruna for him. He is a good distance away and he is engaged in working out with weights. He is not, bar an initial glance, looking at her. Why does she, after having offered the aarti to all her maids, not quietly take the aarti thali and go back to her suite?
But that is what she does not do. Instead, muttering under her breath that she does not want to go in front of him at all, she proceeds to do precisely that, rationalizing her action to herself by arguing that it is bhagwan ki aarti. She goes right up to him and proffers the thali, gesturing mutely to him with her eyes.
I do not know what you folks feel about it., but if I had as much ghruna towards anyone as Jodha professes to feel for Jalal, I would stay a good 500 yards away from him whenever possible. Not just that, Jodha makes no move to pull her hand away when Jalal grasps it, as she did even with Suryabhan, and she must have caught a glimpse of his Rudolf Valentino look as well as he was taking the aarti, for he never moved his gaze from her face. She is one devious wench, folks, make no mistake!
Shyamala B.Cowsik
Tum Se Tum Tak
Ganesh Kartikeya
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