Jodha Akbar 1: Sound
and Fury
Folks,
Here I am again, right at the beginning
of a series that I had promised myself I would not touch again. Famous
last words!😉 But Episodes 1-9 did not feature in the earlier list of (almost)
daily analyses that I had done between June 30, 2013 and April 2014, so these
will be, in that sense, new for me and for you too.
I have seen the charming posts on Episode
1 made, later on this thread (I had
reserved this place as soon as Mandy opened this thread!), by Mandy and Khushi, but my take on it will be somewhat different.
I must confess that when I watched it on June 18, 2013, Om Puri and his Jalal =
Jallad ranting got on my nerves so much that I detested the whole episode. Why
No.1, I detested No.2 as well, and almost dropped out then itself. However, I
thought I should wait at least till the end of the week, which was only of 4
days as the show opened on a Tuesday. By then, I was fascinated by this young man and his
Jalal, especially after the searing bitterness he brought to his scene with his
estranged mother Hamida Bano, and I stayed. '
Which was a great piece of luck for
me, for I would not have missed Rajat's Jalal for anything. Or the very large number
of delightful friends I have made in this forum!
Anyway, enough of all this, and here
goes!
Roohon
ki baatein: The voices
were softer than at any other time in such scenes shown later, and Jalal's
was almost unrecognizably gentle. His Jodha,
without the Begum, pleased me inordinately,
as also that, in a charming contrast
with his irritating habit later, he does not add Jodha
Begum in every sentence he utters,
as if he was in danger of forgetting her name!😉
Now where do you suppose this scene in Hamara maqbara ,as Jodha puts it, is
situated? The opening line, by Jalal, is Tum
yahan kya kar rahi ho, Jodha?, and she responds Aapko
dekhne aayi hoon! Which would put it
at Sikandra, Akbar's mausoleum, which seems to be in remarkably good shape, and
not in Jodha's 1 km or so away.
There is a lovely, throwaway line from
Jalal next, Tum to khudh ko aaine mein
dekh rahi ho! It has deep, romantic
implications, for she has come to see him, but now she looks in her mirror.
Where she sees, not herself, but him, for he is part of her, indeed more. He is
woven into the warp and woof of her being, and as Harry Potter when he looks
into the Mirror of Erised, Jodha looks into
her aaina, and she sees her heart's deepest desire,
Jalal. It is an intensely moving line, but I wonder how many who watched it really
grasped its true significance.
By the end of the scene, however, the magic
faded away, and my teeth were set on edge
as Jalal intoned: Wo Jalal jo ek hi rang
jaanta tha, ek hi rang samajhta tha, ek hi rang bahata tha, khoon ka rang. As
if every young conqueror, from Alexander to Napoleon and all those in between, with Asoka the Great in the first place, did not do exactly the same thing!
Bharat
ka itihaas a la Balaji: I did not expect the
natakiya rupantar to begin with
historical dates, no matter what they did to Chittor (the last quasi-historical
track taken up by Ekta's CVs) later.
What does the Balaji equivalent of a PPT say?
-66 years ago*: 1947: Independence (*in 2013, of course)
- 156 years ago: 1857: The
first war of independence
- 256 years ago: 1757: East
India Company
-333 years ago: 1680: Veer Shivaji
-456 years ago: 1557: What seems to be
the Second Battle of Panipat, though there is no Hemu, and the man Jalal
executes (with entire justification, seeing that after the recumbent foe
has chosen zindagi, he rises and makes a cowardly attack on Jalal
from the back) is only a subordinate, seeing that Jalal sends a fierce
warning to his king.
As far as the history I have studied
goes, the Second Battle of Panipat was fought in 1556, on November 5, 1556 to
be precise, between Jalal/Bairam Khan
and Hemu, more than 30 years after the
First Battle of Panipat, on April 21, 1526, between Babur and Ibrahim Lodi.
So what would you say this battle of 1557
was supposed to be?
I would say that it is due to an obsession with the number 6,
possibly for numerological reasons. Thus 66/156/256/456 (they would not have
dared to tamper with Shivaji Maharaj, otherwise he would have been shifted to
1683, 336 years ago!)! No one seems to have
told this 6-obsessed Ekta that in Christian belief, 666 is the sign of Satan!😉
There are other very curious things about
this battle. In the opening shots, the
soldiers on the left seem to be ambling along rather than rushing into battle.
Worse, Jalal is shown riding all alone in full battle gear, a risky and unheard
of manoeuvre. His intense participation
in the fighting is in blatant contradiction of the historical
fact that Jalal, born on October 15,
1542, was only 14 years old at the time of the Second Battle of Panipat, and that Bairam Khan did not let him participate in the fighting. Why, in Ekta's version, it seems to be a Jalal solo
show, with Bairam Khan nowhere in evidence! The film did this part
far more credibly and with greater historical accuracy.
The Jalal as Jallad ranting: But then Jalal has to be shown cutting down foes
right and left instead of embracing them with daya aur prem. For Om Puri is here bent on asserting that
Jalal is a beraham yoddha, a bloodthirsty zaalim aur vaishi ( the CVs apparently forgot to add darinda!😉) and that his shamsheer ne khoon ka swaad chaka, as though the shamsheers of all the
warriors seen in Hindustan till then
were raised on a milk diet. 😡
Even after that magnificent scene
between Bairam Khan and Jalal, when the shamsheer
is ceremonially handed over
to the boy, Om Puri is at it again, with his lament about the zeher that he accuses Bairam Khan of
having bharofied into the young Jalal's ragein, ki uski soch mein insaniyat ki koyi keemat nahin thi. And
then he begins to talk of Jalal nahin
Jallad, jiski waqt ke saath kroorta badne lagi thi... By this time, I was
close to gnashing my teeth, and I could
see why I could not stand this episode on June 18, 2013. 😡
However, since at this point the brooding young
Murad-to-be, perched on a huge pedestal in
the middle of nowhere like a
statue, had been replaced by apna
Rajat, with his handsome face and
arrogant sneer, no one, at least none of the ladies, would have lent an ear to
what Puri was babbling😆. Which would have
been all for the best!😉
Bairam Khan: Naved Aslam
is an excellent actor, whether as DK in Pavitra
Rishta,as Peter, Sultan Mirza's
right hand man in Once upon a time in Mumbai, or now. His Bairam Khan is as much, or
more, a triumph of casting as of acting. He looks the role, and in comparison, the one in the film (blessedly very soon disposed of) was
ludicrous. As he intones:
Tum soorma ho
Jalal.. Fateh karna tumhara mazhab... Yeh shamsheer tumhari baandi.. Sultanat
tumhari chahat...Beraham khauff tumhari shoharat..Fateh kar lo is mulq ko! ,
he
almost gave me goose pimples. Even the yoddha
ke seene mein dil nahin hota mantra,which makes its debut here, could not irritate me! Bairam Khan's narrow face, with its deep-set,
lambent eyes, is imbued with one fierce
and unwavering obsession, Mughal rule over all of Hindustan, thru fear and force. He is wrong,
of course, for no land this vast can be ruled for long by fear and force, but
if it was a failing, it was in its way a magnificent one!
And the young Jalal matches him well,
which is no easy feat, especially in the scene where his Khan Baba blotches the map of Rajasthan
with his blood. Obviously they had no fear of septicaemia in those days!😉
Kabootar
aa, aa, aa: This part was as ludicrous
the second time around as it was at the
first showing. But how on earth does Jodha, who is clearly a female, 16th century version of
Usain Bolt, follow the fall trajectory of the
wounded pigeon? And then, when she releases it, it takes off as if it
was not in the least hurt!😉
Sujamal scores: Of the
Jodha-Sukanya spatting, the less said the better. But I liked the tulabhar scene, and
the subtle, double significance of Sujamal's gift. Firstly, Saraswati
trumped Lakshmi, and secondly, Sujamal trumped all the rest!
Mandir ki loot:
I was again
exasperated by the Ameri soldier asserting Jab
se yeh Mughal aaye hain, tabse humare mandiron ki dharohar loot rahe hain, as if this had not been done time and again by
any number of conquerors from Muhammad Ghazni downwards.😡
But with that, and on top of that, the
second assertion that Mughal sainikon ka
ek hi sardar hai, Badshah Jalaluddin Muhammad (as if the Shahenshah would be at all aware of 80%
of what is being done in his name), Jodha's fuse is well and properly lit. And not without reason, for the buck
stops with the Shahenshah, and he is responsible for all the acts of his
subordinates, whether he knows about them or not, whether he had ordered them
or not.
Not that Jalaluddin Muhammad, with his trademark half sneer, seems at
all bothered by such matters right now!
Oh Lord, see how, long this has become!
Bye for now, folks!
Shyamala/Aunty/Akka/Di
Edited by sashashyam - 8 years ago
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