Originally posted by: sashashyam
Well, Mansi, this is as meticulous and beautifully argued as anything you so, but I have basic differences with 2 key points.
First, I do NOT buy your "you have helped convert a small man into a great one in your one spectacular moment of personal grief-shedding!".
Jalal was never a small man. Not when he almost killed Adham in Malwa for atrocities against the common people there, and insists that as soon as region has been conquered and forms part of the Mughal empire, all its residents are entitled to equal protectio thru Mughal justice.
Not when he went against Bairam Khan to get justice for Raja Takhatmal, Not when he freed the parents of that little Hindu boy out of sheer compassion.
It was not a small man who knelt in front of an alien goddess, saw his Allah is that ugra kapalakundala Devi Maa, and risked the charge of butparasti (idol worship) not only to try and bring closure to Jodha's evident agony of soul over her failed sankalp, but also because, as I wrote in my Gordian Knot post of yesterday,
"In Jodha's troubled and angry gaze, he sees not just the woman whose acceptance he craves, even if only subconsciously as yet, whose barely veiled hostility hurts him like nothing ever before.
He sees the whole of the Hindustan that he wishes to unite under his rule, not by brute force,but thru willing acceptance. Na ki shamsheer ki dhar se, par rishton ke reshmi dhagon me piroke.To win the heart of this Hindustan, he knows now what he has to do. For them to accept him, he has first to accept them.
Jalal already has the breadth of spiritual vision, the inner clarity, that lets him see his Allah in the Devi. Not many even today, anywhere in the world, are able to do that, for all the current politically correct patter about accepting all religions. And in the 16th century, when Protestants and Catholics were massacring each other and burning each other at the stake all over Europe and in England, for the Emperor Jalaluddin Mohammed to demonstrate such purity of thought, such innate humanisn, was nothing short of a miracle"
He is no small man who needs one woman's grief to make him great. The only thing Jodha did there was to let him know that this outrage had been committed, something he did not know. If he had known of it, he would have acted immediately to set it right.
He does not react now because the sense of outrage is Jodha's. He would have done the same if it was that little Hindu boy again who briefed him about the temple looting. So how is it a unique contribution of Jodha's? She just acts a public grievance system.
Secondly, let us dissect Jodha's diatribe. It falls into 2 parts, one the despoilation of the Kali temple, and second the killing of the Ameri soldiers.
What I could
not understand was her behaving as if this kind of outrage was unknown in her knowledge of history and thus so uniquely traumatic. In fact it was the opposite. I live in Pune, and I have read original documents in the archives here about how much looting and pillaging used to go on all around even before the Mughals. Not all the Rajvanshi rulers were like Maharana Pratap or his father Maharana Udai Singh or, later, Shivaji Maharaj. Some of them were pretty low specimens of humanity (a courtesy term when used for them) and they used to inflict these outrages on
their own subjects.
Jodha would surely have heard some of these stories, unless her auditory apparatus has a filter set to cut off anything that does not have the word Jalal in it, like the trigger word activating an intelligency agency wiretap!😉
I am not surprised that she also assumes that Jalal must have personally authorised the raid on the temple. Moti once tried to point out to her, long before he came into the picture with his secret descent on Amer, that he might have known nothing about such things done in his name.Jodha dismissed the idea out of hand then, and obviously would do the same now. As I noted elsewhere, imagination and perceptiveness are not her strong points
Next, her claim that the Kali mandir attack was unexpected, and the Ameri soldiers having been caught unawares and thus killed. If this was so, why the the escort at all? In those day, real safety was only within your fortress walls, and there could have been dacoits, like those patronised by Sujanpur, even if there had been no Mughals. So why was Jodha's escort unprepared? That is something for which they should have been punished for slackness, as I did see any number of Ameri survivors after the Mughal raiders had been beaten off and Motibai rescued. Not lamented over as Jodha seems to be doing.
Actually, Jodha was not referring to that incident when she was talking about the burning pyres. She was referring to the battle with Sharifuddin, where the Amer army was defeated, for she clearly mentions their desire of Amer to retain its independence. Now here again, there are 2 points.
One, as her wonderful Dadisa points out, Amer was constantly coveted by a number of her more powerful Rajvanshi neighbours. If one of them had overrun and captured it, what about that? Would Jodha have felt better if her beloved Amer had been annexed by a Rajvanshi and not by a Mughal? Perhaps.
Two, assuming that it is the Mughal attack that alone is being considered, Jodha's rant about the burning pyres of the dead Ameri soldiers made no sense at all. Most of the Amer army was taken prisoner by Sharifuddin, not killed.
And if she is talking of the soldiers Jalal killed while he was escaping from Amer with the injured Abdul (whom I miss more than I can say!) if he had not killed them all, he could never have got away. So that part was nonsense.
So, my point is that
Jodha's carrying on as if Jalal had authorised and presided over some uniquely outrageous attack against the Kali mandir is as unwarranted as her ranting about Jalal having crushed Amer's desire for independence. She is talking, as usual, thru her hat, or rather her pallav. If she had been married to the villainous Raja of Bundi, she would have found out at first hand what a king could inflict on his own people, and his wives.
The CVs may trot out the
Jodha ne Jalal ko haivaan se kaise banaya insaan mantra, but let us not fall into that highly misleading pit along with them.
Jalal was never a small man. He always had greatness in him, and once he was freed of his Khan Baba's harsh maxims, he came into his own, of which his descent on Malwa to eend Adham's atrocities was a prime example. That had nothing to do with Jodha.
He does not defend himself to Jodha now not because it was some uniquely horrible incident, but rather because,
even if he did not know about it, much less authorise it, the buck stops with him as the Shahenshah, and he is morally responsible for anything wrong done by his soldiers. He does not fudge that responsibility.
Shyamala
Bade Acche Lagte Hai 3
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