Friends, yesterday's episode seemed on the face of it an interesting cocktail of a homely shaadi going on amidst the rumbling undercurrents of a war. In the final scene, the two strands of the episode seemed to collide, when the fight broke out into the open between the Sasurji and Jalal.
I must say, though, that I thought the director and the writer lost a good chance to do something greater with the screenplay. Instead of just showing bits of the war at the beginning and end of the episode with the shaadi in between, they could have done what some international serials and movies do ... they could have juxtaposed the shaadi scenes against the war scenes throughout the episode to highlight the contrast between the unsuspecting bonhomie on one side against the impending bloodshed on the other side. The sweetness of the shaadi scenes would then have been constantly tinged with the suspense of war - and the episode would have had us on edge more!
Khair, that's just a creative idea that the writers didn't run with ... but anyway the episode itself seemed to go at a very fast clip, so it kept us gripped reasonably well. In fact, as some people had cleverly predicted, we were treated to two weeks of pre-shaadi Amer events, after which the actual shaadi, and the war, were all over in just one single episode - and the impending SBS snowstorm track (which we thought would come next week) is slated for tomorrow's episode itself!
Here is my take on the scenes we saw yesterday ...
The marriage was less about Sukanya-Wajinder and more about Jodha-Jalal
(I'll come back to the dulha and his Dad and the Sultanpur Fort business in the next section of this post)
It was a cute scene but not out-of-the-way grand or anything. Dadisa was seen hankering after the need for Jodha to thank Jalal. But before she could oblige (reluctantly) the priest called the behen-behenoi to the mandap and the opportunity to thank seemed to recede ... till Jodha's sister kept sending desperate eye and hand signals to Jodha that Jalal intercepted and interpreted as a need to tell Jodha to tell him something. Thereupon Jodha thanked him for his role in this shaadi, first in a brusque manner ... but when he reminded her that polish did not seem to be among her talents, she tried harder to sound sweeter with the thanks! Rather a silly nok-jhok, Creatives! Did you perhaps want us to think that Jalal is back to being naughty and Jodha demurring? We got that! And it was no great shakes, either! Poor job!
b. Jalal and the dulhas jhootis: why make a silly idea so secret?
Was Jalal supposed to be reminded of his own "lost jhootis" in his shaadi when the little saalis co-opted him to help them rob the shoes of the new dulha? There were no cute flashbacks to the old episode, so we were left with Jalal just talking of remembering the old event , and then murmuring a secret strategy into the ears of his small saalis on the best way to get the new dulha's shoes ... while Jodha is shown as supposedly fuming at being left out of the goings on. Jalal tana maro-es that he is helping because of the "reciprocal-izzat-maintenance-strategy" now in force between him and Jodha. Eventually the shoe-robbbing idea was so stupid, that I wish Jalal were not the author if it! The saalis took the wrong pair of shoes to the dulha to make him declare which was his right pair ... which they then used to extract cash from him! Jalal you could have had a better idea, my dear! Creatives, you could have made Jalal look less silly, my dears!
c. Jalal holds tight Jodha's hand: the priest keeps it going!
Another rather expected piece of nok-jhok was the hand-holding. Everybody I am sure expected this during the shaadi rasams. When the hand-holding scene eventually came, I think there must have been sighs of "okay, it's here at last" and not sighs of "oh how wonderful it was". The only fun part was the way Jalal tried to get the priest to give him the full low-down on what the mantras meant so that he could keep holding onto Jodha's hand all the while! He gave us his self-talks on how he enjoyed teasing Jodha more than than he enjoyed the fruits of many wars, while Jodha gave us her self-talks on how she had (cleverly?) deciphered his strategy to keep holding her hand by keeping the priest eloquent! We enjoyed the moment, Creatives, but pardon us for asking ... did you not think we knew what was going on till we heard the self-talks?! Really, you must think us very stupid!
d. The pheras end nicely ... and the doli hits a speed bump
Okay in the end, with a bit of drowning background music the varmala and the pheras got over amidst more shots of Jodha and Jalal throwing flowers at the bride and groom. Finally we go to see the real bride and groom at some length instead of the sister and brother-in-law hogging the limelight! But the climactic moment came when the doli was ready to be moved, when the Sasurji, newly told of his "Fort loss" declared in filmi style: "Put the doli down. It is going nowhere ..." and then the drama took a different turn as all the watching happy, smiling faces were shown one by one turning aghast! Thus ended the Amer ki shaadi!
The warfront scenes and the build up and blast off of the war - and its aftermath
The impending war for the recapture of the Sultanpur Fort by Jalal was the other half of the episode. We've had long discussions via various posts on the Forum about whether the Sasurji had a point about his feeling cheated of a promise made by the representative of the Mughals - or whether the Sasurji was greedy in expecting to get a Fort that belonged to Jalal.
Just for the record I favour the point of view given by Maharana Pratap (even if I wished him to change his green dress!). It was his point that despite being offered the Fort as temptation, the Sasurji should not have shown avarice to get something that belonged to the marriage-mediator (the Mughals) and had the right only to ask for things that belonged to the Amer family. As for the need for the Fort, he should have opted to win it by war and not by a samjhauta or a sauda! This "Pratap position" was also fully imbibed by Wajinder himself, who did not want to marry a Fort, he wanted to marry Sukanya! But his father, alas, had only one thing on his mind, so here's what happened ...
a. The Sasurji didn't let Wajinder get to the shaadi without the Fort
What a calculative man this Sasurji was ... he wouldn't let Wajinder get fully ready for the shaadi till he'd heard that the Mughals had vacated the Fort and his own flag was now hoisted atop of it. (What he did not calculate, however, is whether he had enough soldiers to hold the Fort in possession!). Wajinder put up a last-minute defence against the Fort-greed, but was silenced by a father congratulating him twice - once for the dulhan and once for the "political success" of the Fort acquisition! Throughout this scene, there was a bit of eye-ball popping of the Sasurji that did not go down well with me. We were supposed to believe that it was his avarice showing, but the acting skills were not great, so it looked like he was having early conjunctivitis rather than looking all gleamy-eyed and calculative! Wajinder looked like a sad wimp under a sera!
b. The Mughal soldiers closed in on the Fort, waiting for orders
Okay, this was a standard-issue war readiness scene where hordes of Mughal soldiers obeyed the orders of the commander to surround the fort. Amidst the sounds of horses hooves we saw them menacingly close in on the Fort, ready for the moment when they would storm into the Fort and ensure capture in the swiftest time possible. The sanket of all this happenning at the orders of Atga Khan came as he nodded in the affirmative when Jalal asked him if he was "going to get everything I wanted". So Jalal was ever-poised for news of the war action all through the shaadi, and by watching Jalal's anticipatory narrow-eyed looks now and then the audience too was given a sense of anticipation of events on the war front.
c. The priest declared shaadi over, while the Mughals declared war over
Hardly had the priest declared the shaadi over and congratulations were being enacted all round, the war broke and ended too ... and a henchman of the Sasur ran in to apprise the Sasur that he had held possession of the Fort for barely two hours and had now thoroughly lost it as well. The Sasur did some even more alarming eyeball-popping, with a strangely angled head that reminded me of a chicken in the moments before its head gets twisted before slaughter! Jalal meanwhile looked like he knew the script by heart ... he knew what the henchman had come to say, he knew all hell would now break loose, but he also knew that he had done a fait accompli on the shaadi and there were no consequences to fear from his recapture of the Fort. Jalal looked like one satisfied man waiting for the Sasur to take him on - and his dialogues to give back in return were at the tips of his lips!
d. The Jalal-Sasurji face-off descended rapidly into sword-unsheathing mode
1. The Sasur was no exalted Rajvanshi if he could try to do a samjhauta instead of a shaadi
3. The shaadi was now over, so if the Sasur and his son so much as hurt a hair on Sukanya's head, he, Jalal would personally dismember them (notably Wajinder)
The Sasur, beaten as he was, then went to the extent of beginning a near-fatal sentence with "You Mughals ...". That was it! Jalal unsheathed his sword annd uttered a war cry! Jodha, stunned by all this (while Maham-Adham-Sharif seemed gala!) interrupted Jalal at the very "nth moment" from bringing the sword down, leaving us wondering what would happen tomorrow:
Will Jalal stop because he does not want to hurt Jodha - and her family? Will Jodha actually surprise us all by saying Jalal was right but he should not soil his hands with the blood of the unworthy? Will Jalal himself see reason and stop over-reacting as he has the Fort and the shaadi done and dusted? Will Bharmal & Co. intervene before Jodha does? Let's keep guessing.
Meanwhile the precap scene tantalises ... not just because it promises bedside romance (especially adorable was that part where Jalal carries Jodha in his arms!) but because the scene itself seems very "pretty" with all the snowfall and the low lighting being very nicely done. The romantic flavour of the scene seems good in the picturisation of ambience, so I hope the ensuing romantic scenes themselves between Jodha and Jalal will match that initial precap's indication of soft ethereal quality. Hope there are less words to spoil to the effect and more tenderness of actions to make the mood poignant!
Udne Ki Aasha
Kumkum Bhagya
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