Friends, today's episode was almost 90% about Jodha for me because the precap seemed like a milestone point to the steady progress she's been making on her journey towards "love of Jalal". (I am not analysing Jalal's love journey in such detail today, because today was Jodha's day, for me ... but I will surely trace Jalal's journey on another day!)
Before they undertook the Amer journey there were many stages of hate Jodha had to go through, till very gradually that hatred became slightly mitigated by circumstances at Ajmer and Agra, during and after the tiger fight and the woundedness ... but even with the intensity of hatred slightly erased, Jodha began the Amer trip with quite a bit of rancour in her heart for Jalal, and with a self-protective shell that was always anticipating his sarcasm and was pre-empting it on several occasions with biting words thrown at him before he could throw some taunt at her.
The Amer trip is of significance to me, personally, for three reasons: one, because I like the space and freedom it has afforded for both Jalal and Jodha to examine their feelings for each other through the proximity they have been thrown into; two, because I see both of them have now grown less and less antagonistic and more and more mutually understanding and appreciative of each other's position; and three, because I personally like tracing the path of love in any love story, and I am enjoying seeing the love journey that Jodha has taken at Amer, step by step, towards the point at which she in today's episode's precap.
Okay, before I start, I also want to explain why I am taking for granted that Jodha is making this journey towards "love" (and is not in the throes of some other emotion). Ekta has clarified ad nauseum that this is a story about the "epic love" between Jodha and Akbar and she has signalled via huge ad spends in the media and via press conferences that the Ajmer track and the subsequent Amer track are clearly the inflexion points at which the "love track" is starting. If Ekta has said its "love" then I take it that it is "love" that Jodha and Jalal are beginning to feel and are moving towards. I see no point in daily debate saying: "What Jodha feels is not yet "love", its XYZ!". If it isn't love already, it's getting there, and nowhere else!
The stages of "evolving love" that Jodha has gone through at Amer:
1. STEP ONE: Jodha's hatred was first purged in big and small lots
If I was to pick the moment when I thought Jodha began suddenly speeding up on her journey towards love of Jalal, it was the moment in the Kali temple when she suddenly found the voice to tell him that she had prayed to offer his severed head at the temple. She then went on like an opened tap to tell him also about the temple loot and the barbarism of his soldiers at war, and she poured out all that was boiling inside of her for months. While this purge itself must have been healing, when Jalal then bowed his head before Kali, any major remnants of that intense hatred in her must have fizzled out. Smaller bits of hatred that were still left came out later in scenes like the Prithiviraj Chauhan portrait scene when she couldn't help but mention the Mughals again to vent what was left inside her. The purging of hatred and pain I see as the first of Jodha's steps in the evolution of her love for Jalal at Amer. The heart was vacated of negative emotions, leaving space to notice any other new feelings.
2. STEP TWO: "Self-protection" then became a necessity and a preoccupation
After the hatred purge, some small frissons of "feeling attracted towards Jalal" must have started entering Jodha's consciousness, especially with the bedroom-sharing they were doing and the need there was to put up a front before her family of them being a "congenial married couple". Jodha seemed to go through a fairly extended stage of finding "self-protective" mechanisms to handle this growing feeling. She appeared unready to show out hher feelings or to acknowledge them, and she seemed to adopt a three-pronged strategy to try and keep a deliberate distance from Jalal.
a. At every opportunity when she seemed to betray that she cared what happened to him, she reverted quickly, bluntly, abruptly and even rudely into an explanation that she was more concerned for her family than for him. I especially noticed that she never spontaneously started talking of caring for her family in the first instance in any dialogue. It would always come second, as a cover up, for after first blurting out some concerns for his safety. It was thus a clear case of cover-up as a secondary thought.
b. Whenever she found him trying to get "closer or kinder to her" she would immediately try tana maro-ing to avoid that closeness (e.g. he complimented her on her archery, swordmanship and other talents, and she return-complimented him for his sarcasm, "haq jathao-ing" and "aadesh-giving".)
c. During her "awful speech" two days ago (when she asked him to leave Amer for the sake of her family) she conveniently converted her fast- vanishing "ghrna" into a another form of distance-making called "pity". She seemed to need something else to create distance for her when that "ghrna" was no longer as sharp as it used to be.
It seemed to me to be sure signs of "new feelings for Jalal" inside her that caused her to try and be "self-protective" in as many different ways as she could find. It was definitely "feelings for Jalal" because she did not behave that way with anyone else.
3. STEP THREE: She slowly gets more comfortable with reciprocity
Even as self-protection became less and less necessary (as Jalal started getting less biting and more naughty but in a non-antagonistic way) Jodha's seemed to relax her guard a bit and allow some measure of reciprocity to enter her actions. Three things again revealed to me that she was at this stage as recently as last week:
a. Jalal gifted her the green sari that her first instinct was to not wear as she hates green (and may even have had a suspicion that he was forcing it on her from sarcasm). But her mother's timely reminder that she wear the gift she was given helped. (Or in other words, Jodha was ready enough emotionally to heed her mother's words and get comfortable with reciprocity).
b. The push-ups scene in the bedroom was clearly one of reciprocity and not one of running away (which is what Jodha should have done if she was still unready for closer distances with Jalal). I particularly noticed that she was "playing along" with his antics, even if it looked outwardly like she was demurring!
c. The baaratiyon ka swagat eye-signals scene was one of still more reciprocity. They - both Jodha and Jalal - seemed to be in their own little world of eye-to-eye communications. She was learning fast how to feel ultra-comfortable with "flirtatious" behaviour and the beginnings of bonding.
By the time she had reached this stage of readiness for reciprocity, the animosity seemed gone totally from their relationship. In fact, even their private moments of "bickering" lost that look of "fighting" and started sounding more like "husband and wife irritability".
4. STEP FOUR: She gets spurred to give Jalal high prority
This fourth step of the "evolving love" in Jodha's heart seemed to be about making room in her life for Jalal to become her highest priority. This stage of her evolution, evidenced nicely in the precap (hamari pathi, hamara parivaar), seemed to get new impetus in today's episode from three different quarters.
a. When she overheard Adam-Sharif guffawing about the success of their plan to separate the Ameris and Mughals and then Jodha and Jalal also, she suddenly got an insight into the vulnerabilities of Jalal to familial conspiracies. She realised the need to give Jalal more of her attention and support in his fights against conspirators. Earlier she said she had pitied him for having no genuine friends. Now she found she needed to always have him on her radar and to become his "lookout", because she realised how alone he really was, with treachery all around him.
b. The dialogue with Sukanya today also helped seal the inclination that Jodha was having for Jalal in this whole Sultanpur Fort issue. She had already voiced her support of Jalal to her family, but Sukanya showed her how to act in support of that voiced prioritisation of Jalal. Sukanya made her swear never to say a harsh word ever to Jalal nor to ever sacrifice her own marriage for the one Sukanya hadn't even entered yet. If Jodha needed someone to tell her to stick to Jalal and make her marriage to him the number one priority, Sukanya was there to do it.
c. The dialogue with Bakshi Bano then further cemented Jodha's new prioritisation of Jalal as the centre of her life. Bakshi gave her a different reason from the one Sukanya had given. While Sukanya told Jodha to give Jalal the highest importance in her life, Bakshi cautioned Jodha on the perils of not valuing Jalal enough (as only she, a woman who had married wrong and perenially suffered would know). Bakshi taught Jodha to value Jalal because he was worthy of such value and therefore a rare man.
This is as far as Jodha's seems to have come in this Amer trip so far, but there's still more Amer trip time to go yet as the shaadi is still not over. Jodha seems to have gone, according to my analysis of her, from purging her hatred, to finding self-protective mechanisms against her growing attraction for Jalal, to allowing room in her life for reciprocity and to actually prioritising Jalal high in her scheme of things.
As I started out saying on this post, the question can always be asked: "Is this all "love"? Can all this defined as Jodha starting to feel "love"?"
My answer to that is that it all depends on what you choose to call "love". To me love begins where hate ends, so I would see love as having started for Jodha right from the moment hatred vacated Jodha's heart. Some one else may see love as the climactic moment when it is openly admitted either to oneself or to the other ... and so there would be question marks on whether Jodha knows she is in love or not yet and whether she is ready to admit it at least to herself if not to him.
The fun part of watching a serial like this one is that none of us viewers know what "love" really means to all the others on this forum. We all have our own perceptions of what is love, whether it is already there, whether the protagonists are feeling it or not etc etc.
Nor do I like to decry other viewers for what they believe is "love". I also enjoy how viewers interpret "love" differently.
All I can say is: To me love in this serial is what Ekta says it is. She is the author of this love story, this version of it. If she says love is already on its way during this Amer trip, then its already there, its going along nicely, and its heading in the right direction.
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