Folks,
Yesterday, after doing my last Wuthering Depths dissertation' on Jalal's psyche, his corrosive grief, and his even more corrosive fury, washing like lava over the Amer sextet (Mansingh does not count for me, but if you want him in, why then, a septet), I sat thru episode 59.
I watched the Grand Confrontation between Jalal and Jodha, though it would be stretching the meaning of the word to breaking point to call it that. It was grand all right, as Jalal raged in a bass timbre and Jodha wept and pleaded. Emotions ran riot , mostly vengeful and sadistic glee on his side and helpless despair on hers, for she seemed too broken to even feel any anger.
It was quite an exercise in emoting, especially the one time when Jalal's anguish surfaces, raw as ever, from under the deliberate fury. Tumne yeh kyon kiya, Jodha? That Why? Why? Why? is still haunting him, and that, as I wrote yesterday, is a hurt as deep as the death of his child. To hide that hurt, the pitch of his anger has to be raised each time, and stoked afresh to white hot rage.
Yet, even as he taunts and threatens her by turns, there is no Jodha Begum, but only a long drawn out Jodhaaa... with a curious underlying note that caresses the name even as he utters it. Just like his finger, delicately picking a tear drop off her cheek, in a gesture that could, under different circumstances, have been that of a lover consoling his beloved.
But as for the rest, I could not recognize this Jodha at all, and as for Jalal, I felt I had got on to a time machine and been suddenly transported back to Episode 1 & 2 (which had nearly driven me away altogether. What a loss that would have been for me, and what a piece of luck for you, my dear, long-suffering readers!😉).
By episode end, as Jodha was back in her Jalal the Jallad default setting (I do hope, dear Couch_Potato, that you are not going to sock me with a copyright suit for thus appropriating this choice term!), I felt weary and worn out. I suppose that is what the CVs must have aimed at, and it irritated me that I had duly obliged them.
Then, I chanced upon a kaleidoscope, and after shaking it and looking at the changed patterns a couple of times, I rewatched episode 59. Lo and behold! I was gurgling with laughter almost right thru. It is all a question of perspective. If you looked for the ridiculous, you could find it in abundance yesternight, masquerading as high emotion.
First, Jalal. Poor Rajat must , after so many close ups of him snarling at his begum from about six inches away, with all the ferocity of a Siberian tiger and all the assiduity of a model showing off his batteesi in a toothpaste ad, have felt like a prime candidate for lockjaw😉.
His lines about giving her maut ke baddthar zindagi and itni takleef doonga ki maut bhi sasti lagegi were exactly the same as those of the accusation scene in her bedroom the other day, the boudoir scene when he breaks her bangles... you can stretch the list at will. Rajat looks as if he could recite the lines in his sleep, and he was, in effect, sleepwalking thru the whole scene: he must by now have got every sneering, terrifying smile, lips drawn back in false merriment, every hate-filled look in the over-bright, narrowed eyes , down pat thru constant repetition.
The problem is that we have got them down pat as well, and they seem dismally familiar or familiarly dismal, or both.
The silken menace behind Jalal's faux reasonable argument to Bharmal for the attack on Sujanpur was, well, silken, but one can have too much of a good thing. Besides, having to repeatedly watch that array of wooden Amer princes, faces set in eternal blankness whether they are being informed that they are going to be barbecued in public or to be despatched to a battle😉, strains one's patience.
Next Jodha. Our fiery Amazon-cum -chess grandmaster has been transmuted overnight into a weak, whimpering watering pot (Aha! Neat alliteration, that!) . The Jhansi ki Rani (with apologies for the anachronism ) has turned into a Niobe, drowning herself, and us, in a flood of tears. Paridhi must be wondering about when the studio supply of glycerine would run out, leaving her to fend for herself.
She must also be contemplating the possibility - a very faint one, of course! - of suing Balaji for inflicting on her the cruel and unusual punishment of constantly having to mouth lines that would win a Razzie for the Most Inane Dialogue any day😉.
As Jalal promises her that Tum gidgidaogi, maut ki bheek mangogi, and parrots other equally ridiculous lines, Jodha looks at him with large tear-filled eyes in an utterly woebegone face, and pleads that only she should be punished, even with death, and not her family, as he chortles with glee. When I was not laughing at this throwback to the worst of the villain's den scenes in the 1970s films, I felt like shaking Jodha till her teeth rattled, and hitting Jalal with something nice and hard, like a belan.
As an antidote to the stuff onscreen, I thought up lines for the old Jodha. She is in a terrible fix, true, but the last thing she should do now is to show Jalal any weakness or fear, and the old Jodha would have known that instinctively.
She would have retorted: Kitne baar ek hi vaakya ko dohrayenge aap, Shahenshah? Kuch toh naya sochiye! Main yahi vishay sunsunke thak gayi hoon.
Aur aap to mujhe sab ke saamne jalane waale the? Uska kya hua? Agra mein lakdi ka aabhav to nahin ho gaya hai? Hum aapke ke liye Amer se lakdi mangwa dein?
Or, when he refers to her father not having been executed or imprisoned, but instead suffering even in the lap of luxury because of what his children were being subjected to, Jodha could well have attempted a snappy comeback:
Toh aapne hamare Babasa to kaal kotri mein nahin daala? . Kyon nahin kiya aapne, Shahenshah? Hum to yeh soch kar prasanna ho rahe the ki agar aap aise karte, aur unhe kuch din daal roti par rakhte, to unki sehat ke liye kitna achcha hota! Maasa kitne hi varshon se nakaam prayas kar rahi hain unka vazan ghatane ka, aur yahan aapke prayas se ho hi jaata!
And right at the beginning, as he stomps in with a predictable Tum jaanti ho ki hamein sabse zyaada sukoon kis se aata hai? Dushman ki aankhon me aansoo dekh kar, she might well have tucked a paan casually into her mouth, with the comment: Waise to hamein Amer ke pakhwan hi bhaate hain, apitu Shahenshah, aapke Agra ke paan to atyant swadisht hain, adding, Aap kuch keh rahe the? , while raising her big dark, tear free eyes to his.
I can bet anything that looking down into their depths, Jalal would have lost all sense of where he was and what he had wanted to do!
Finally, when her patidev was still raging at her in the tightest of close ups, and promising her a fate worse than death, the old Jodha would have enquired, while regarding him with an expression of polite interest:
Achcha, hum bhi to sunein, kya naya socha hai aapne abhi? Ab tak to hum aapki soch ki durbalta se atyant niraash huye hein, Shahenshah! Ab to prateet hota hai, ki hamein hi aapke liye kuch sochke, aapko likhke de dena chahiye. Aap padh lijiye ga. Agli baar kaam aayega.
That would have sent him out hotfoot, unwilling to confess that he would not be able to read her draft for him!
Instead, this changeling of a Jodha says Yeh uchit nahin hai, in a quavering treble.
Uchit?!? No wonder I almost collapsed in giggles. It reminded me of her old, equally ROFL mantra Aapko yeh karne ka adhikar nahin hai, when he was breaking her bangles and threatening worse. Or alternatively, her other favourite line, Aap aise bal prayog nahi kar sakte! , like someone trying to halt a bulldozer by waving the Traffic Rules booklet at it.
Worse. when Jalal accuses her, for the umpteenth time, of the murder, this Jodha seems suddenly possessed by the unquiet spirit of a 16th century kaala coat( lawyer). For instead of shouting as loudly as she can, Maine yeh ghinouna aparadh NAHIN kiya hai! NAHIN! NAHIN! NAHIN!, what does she do? She offers a convoluted legal argument about innocent until proved guilty. And finally, in the precap, the sole change in her old mantra is that now the ghruna ka patra is not Jalal but herself, as Jalal, what else, sneers and looks away in satisfaction.
All in all, it was a most unintentionally comical display, and I am pretty sure the unfortunate actors felt the same. They of course get paid for giving us a headache. We simply get the headache.
The comedy track does not end with Jalal stalking off, having run out of even stale threats. It continues with Mahaam Anga trying to do a Miss Marple in the harem. She is undoubtedly rattled by Ruqaiya Begum's pointed silence when Mahaam remarks that she too is in the shaque ka daayra.
Mahaam is in fact entirely unlike her usual commanding, controlled self, behaving like a headless chicken, slapping a baandi and roaring at all and sundry, including Resham . The way in which she goes about looking for a pukhta saboot, by rifling thru the contents of a chest in the same disorderly and violent manner in which Amitabh Bachchan used to search for documents in his 1970s-80s superhits, seems guaranteed to destroy any such saboot as might have been there. The underlying note of panic is crystal clear. The redoubtable Mahaam Anga is afraid.
The other curious point is that both Ruqaiya and Mahaam specifically mention the possibility of Jodha being innocent. What each makes of this remains to be seen.
Well, to cut a long story short, while the changeling Jodha got on my nerves big time, and Jalal only a wee bit less, I found that seeing the high pitched proceedings from a comic track angle did help. At the end of the rewatching, I felt almost lighthearted, and ready to face the profusion of OTT stuff sure to hit us all come Monday. One has to survive from day to day, it is pointless to think too far ahead.
Questions of the day:
1) The complainants at the Diwan-e-Aam say they come from a village in Rajputana, right inside the border of the Mughal empire. The old man's son was murdered the day before. How then did the whole lot of them get to Agra the next day? They did not look as if they could afford a relay of horses. Did they apparate in a la Harry Potter?
2) The Shahenshah is supposed to be doing the tafteesh into the poisoning case over the next 10 days (the beginning of these 10 days seems indefinite; they have all been talking of 10 days for the last 2 days at least) . Instead he is now haring off to Sujanpur at the head of an army. What happens to the tafteesh?
Shyamala B.Cowsik
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