Folks,
You might feel that this title is way off right now, with 95% of the forum up in arms against their favourite punching bags, in that order - Jalal and Ruqaiya - for having apparently revealed, to the courtiers present in the Diwan-e-Khas, that Jalal and Jodha had not had what is delicately described as normal marital relations.
Just a bit of patience, my gentle readers!
An open secret: It is another matter altogether that months ago, after Jodha ran out of the tent after finding Jalal caressing her cheek, and half froze in the cold, and even more so after the Bakshi Banu affair, this must have been the worst kept secret in the palace and the court. Neither Jodha nor Jalal seemed particularly bothered by it being public knowledge either.
If it had not been for The Letter and The Shove, which now form a seamless whole in Jalal's zehen, things would have stayed comfortably as they were, with Jodha secretly chuffed up about having been nominated as a khaas Begum, and Jalal indulging her to the top of her bent, hoping that one day soon, she would come to care for him.
So, it is not as though what was said yesterday was any deep, dark secret that Jalal & Ruqaiya exposed disgracefully.
Why in public?: You would also remember that the day before, in the Diwan-e-Khas, when Benazir had managed to come out clean, Jalal did not, unlike Mahaam and Ruqaiya, berate Jodha in public. He waited till they were alone. Yesterday too, if Jodha had not made that interjection about Jalal being her pati, and that she would not allow his life to be endangered, what is now being lamented would never have happened.
Jalal can hardly be expected to forget that till a fortnight ago, the same Jodha Begum was labelling him the SKLL (stree ke liye lalasa) specialist. Most recently, he told her clearly that since she did not consider him her husband, why the dhakoslabaazi of a Mahashivaratri vrat? She had no answer to that, and in fact appeared to endorse his jibe at least in part.
But now that she has decided to save his life (which he does not know is in danger from Benazir), she suddenly parades her pativrata dharma and expects the man she accused of SKLL to believe her. Why should he, especially when the one possible test of the truth of her accusations against Benazir, the milk test, which is quite a plausible one, falls flat?
Not just the marital relations angle: There are two other points to be kept in mind here. One, there seems to be a general, and unwarranted assumption across the forum that what Ruqaiya and Jalal said HAD to refer only to the absence of marital relations betwen Jalal and Jodha ( which has in any case, as noted above, been public knowledge at least since the Bakshi Banu affair). There is really no need for such a single point focus. It seems that it is not just Jodha who is obsessed with the physical side of their marriage!😉
In fact, Jodha can be blamed for wifely derelictions over a wide range, from the kind of repeated, public rudeness to her imperial husband that was totally against the prescribed code of behaviour for a medieval queen, to taking Jalal completely for granted while barging ahead with the Shivani-Mirza marriage.
Lid on Ruqaiya: Yesternight, Jalal, as distinct from Ruqaiya, deliberately cites 2 such examples, of the Shivani fiasco and now Jodha's unproven charge against Benazir . This seem aimed at diluting any single point focus on the absence of marital relations between him and Jodha, while also putting a much needed lid on Ruqaiya's tirade, which was gathering steam, and might have degene rated into a very unseemly, no holds barred cat fight.
Plus, he calls Jodha his Begum, not his biwi, the term Ruqaiya uses, and the distinction is important, for he thus underlines and protects her royal status and prestige (this last point is courtesy Adiana).
Hidden bitterness:The second point: Jalal underlines a fact I have often cited in the past. He says Aap kis haq se hamari Begum hone ki duhayi de rahi hain? Jodha cannot enjoy the privileges of being a Shahi Begum, while shirking the responsibilities that go with those privileges. Not just the physical side, though that is a vital part of a strong and happy marriage, but the caring and the desire to please the other. Not a penchant for scoring points and indulging in sarcastic jibes that produce like reactions and sour the relationship even further.
His statement, that began with Ruqaiya Begum bajah farmati hain, Jodha Begum, and ends with Aapne to farz nahin nibhaya, par hum aapki gustakhiyon ki keemat zaroor chukayenge, reveals a wealth of hidden bitterness.
In short, for Jodha, her chickens of the past few months came home to roost all at once. Or, as Meghana put it in her excellent and very fair analysis of last night , it was payback time for her. The irony of it was that this happened just when she was shifting tack vis a vis Jalal. But then, as JFK famously noted, Who said that life is fair?
Matters of the heart: We now come to the rationale for my title, which is not as far off the mark as you might think. This "epic" love story is now poised at a very interesting and promising juncture, and there is at least a slight chance that it might begin to deserve that adjective, which has seems a bad joke thus far.
Differently flawed: Both Jalal and Jodha are flawed characters. The problem is not that they are flawed, but that they are not flawed in an interesting and consistent manner, especially Jalal.
Jodha: In my opinion, Jodha is more flawed than Jalal, for he at least is ready to learn from his mistakes, and to apologise publicly, as after the Laki Mahaam double track. She does not learn anything from her mistakes, nor does she ever introspect and wonder if she has been wrong The only 2 exceptions to this that I can remember - in the Green Jodha-Yellow Jodha scene, and after the Bakshi Banu fiasco - were swiftly buried and forgotten.
Till very recently, Jodha has mostly been pretty consistent : self-righteous, almost always disdainful of Jalal for SKLL and other real and imaginary sins, and full of bhashanbaazi.
Plus she appeared to be as implacably hostile to Jalal as she was in love with no one but herself and her Ameri heritage. The latter is not a bad thing per se, for her Rajvanshi heritage is a proud and noble one, and if you do not love yourself, you cannot love another. But here it seemed to go to extremes, as did the hostility towards Jalal, which created a distorting lens thru which she regarded every generous move of his.
Jalal: Jalal, on the other hand, oscillated wildly from one extreme to the other. To take just the most recent examples of his sine curve, the whole "make Jodha jealous with Benazir" idea was, as I wrote then, puerile beyond belief.
He proclaimed that he would take revenge on Jodha for The Shove, and did nothing of the kind.
Now he has retreated into barring himself behind a wall of standoffishness, but the old hurts about The Letter & The Shove, which have been left as nasoors in his zehen, seep thru that wall at the first opportunity.
But even his stupid oscillations are those of tactics, not of the fundamentals. The one core fundamental for him has always been that inexplicable pull at the very sound of her name that drove him to that dangerous journey to Amer just to catch a glimpse of her, and once there, to burn his hand to pull her payal out of the fire. *
Jalal is thus handicapped by an untamable obsession for a disdainful wife, which now makes him angry with himself more even than with her. For he sees it as a shameful weakness that will bring him, to borrow Mirza's unfortunate and ill-timed line, to his knees. This has backed him into a cold, unyielding aloofness, which masks his craving , NOT that she should let him make love to her, but that she should care for him and what happens to him. It has always been like that.
Jodha today: Jodha, on the other hand, is still kachchi in matters of the heart. It is only very recently that she has begun to even glimpse the restlessness, the craving for acceptance, the sense of abandonment when that is not forthcoming, the hurtful emotional dependence on another, and the gnawing pain that eats away at one's heart when one loses what one has had but not valued, and now it seems as though one cannot get it back.
She still does not understand love, much less accept it, while he resents it and hides it
I once wrote that love is not always a bed of roses. That when it comes, it is often not cock a hoop with fine feathers, but slowly, dragging itself on bleeding feet. A young friend here was disturbed by this take on the divine passion.
But now, this is coming true for these two.
In this last week, as Jodha's sense of loss and of exclusion have been intensified, and her fears for Jalal's life have mounted and are now raging high within her, her feet, already bruised, are beginning to bleed.
As his have been for quite a while now.
This is the real meaning of that line of mine that upset you, Bobby. Both of them are stuck, each in a cul de sac, and the walls on either side seem too high to climb.
The one sure way out: As Lashy said the other day, with the calm wisdom that is not the privilege of age alone, the time for a balancing of accounts between Jalal and Jodha is long gone. I am convinced that what is now needed is a drastic role reversal that will, at one stroke, wipe out all the baggage of humiliation and the festering hurt that breeds, which poisons their relationship far more than a vishkanya ever could.
What Jodha should now do, once she has somehow personally managed to save Jalal from the vishkanya, would be this. She should run straight to him, embrace him tightly, and weep all over him, babbling incoherently You are safe, Shahenshah, you are safe, you are safe, you are safe!!!!
With that one move of hers, the cul de sac will fall apart. The walls between them will come down in one go. Their bleeding feet will be miraculously healed, and their hearts (yes, both!) made whole again. There will be no need for apologies or a casting of accounts between them, The Letter and The Shove will be consigned to the dustbin, and we will have a real love story at long last, if not the epic one we were promised.
This, however, is what I want. Not what is most likely to happen, which is the kind of thing that the CVs and Ekta's target audience both love. Another round of aloof chilliness, this time from Jodha, to hosannas from Hamida and her coterie, while Jalal abases him himself even worse. I am quite prepared for that, though it is going to make me feel distinctly queasy.
For those who are so upset by these kinds of goings on that ulcers seem to be on the way, my advice, for whatever it is worth, would be this. Do not fret so much over this serial and the onscreen absurdities, but try and just go with the flow. Disasters on Jodha Akbar are not the end of the world. Yes, it might seem so at times, but trust me, it is not really so. We will all survive!
Shyamala B.Cowsik
*NB: If you have the time and the inclination, please take a look at my first ever post in this forum, of June 30, 2013, where this angle comes up.
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