Folks,
Let us first dispose of what is not confusing!
For once, no Shivdutt: First and foremost, I sent up a small thank y ou to the CVs at 2030 hours last night for giving us, at long last, a Shivdutt-free episode, which is something to be profoundly Shivdutt's face?😡
Incidentally, that dagger seems to have vanished, along with the adorable Malay. Where has he gone? Is he still counting to one hundred??
Puru and his haathi: In a serial where they show bombs being tossed around with casual abandon in the 4th century BC, there is no point in quibbling that Puru is not, as he seems to think, the pioneer in using elephants in warfare in ancient India. Far from it, on impeccable historical evidence.
Even if you don't count the Mahabharata, which mentions the use of elephants in battle ( though secondary to the chariots which were the preferred vehicle of the warriors, especially the elite ones), there was King Bimbisara (c. 543 BC), who began the expansion of the Magadhan kingdom, and relied heavily on his war elephants. The Nandas of Magadha (mid-4th century BC - 321 BC) had about 3,000 elephants.
All this was before the period of our show. In fact, Porus himself, after the battle of the Hydaspes, when he is requested to brief Alexander about the military strength of Magadha, mentions these 3000 elephants, according to Greek sources.
Chalo chhodo. Let us get on with the capture of the wild elephant. I was expecting that just as he carted that huge pillar in Paurav Rashtra over to a new location, he was going to pick up the unsuspecting elephant and lug to wherever he wanted to tie it up.😉 Instead, he merely dragged it in a tame fashion, till the rope broke.
The CGI and wire work used to show him vaulting on to the back of the elephant were really poor. I think the Swastik budget is beginning to run out. If that was so, they should have taken a good look at Hrithik's Jalaluddin tackling a wild elephant in Jodhaa Akbar, or Rajat's Jalal climbing on to the back of an elephant in Jodha Akbar. That would surely have helped them improve the decidedly clumsy display last night.
Of course the training of the elephant still remains to be done. Regardless, tomorrow, expect to see Puru leading an arm y of 1000 elephants, all fully trained and equipped with mahouts, ready to drive Alexander away from Bharat khaali haath. Things move with the speed of light in our show, and uncomfortable questions are not allowed!😆
Confusion unlimited: So now we arrive at the part that makes the script look like London in the pea soup fogs of the 19th century. The Alexander-Chanakya tete a tete, and the precap, taken together, reduced my grey cells- whatever is left of them at my advanced age - to something resembling scrambled eggs (I am a strict vegetarian!)😉😉.
You have all seen their interaction, and the precap, I presume. So let us take that as a given, and focus on what is not clear, or is downright incomprehensible, in a form of a series of questions, and such answers as I have been able to glean from what we were shown. But first, the two interlocutors.
Chanakya: calm majesty: The Acharya outdoes Alexander from the beginning, with his serene, majestic persona, his calm, unmoving attitude even when faced with Alexander's arrogance and blatant disrespect towards himself, and his patient, diplomatic approach that forces even the impatient Alexander to invite him into the royal tent with, for once, a smiling welcome. Once there, he again trips Alexander up on the question of his secret agenda, and forces him to come into the open. The cold-bloodedness with which he proposes the vyapaar concerning Porus, and justifies it as not being niti viruddh, quite took my breath away. All the more so as I suspect that he was stringing Alexander along.
Total implausibility: I will not be going into the total implausibility of the real Alexander behaving in the arrogant, don't care manner that he displays in interacting with Chanakya.
As I had noted in my last post, Alexander had had the kind of education that could never have been replicated any time after that in the western world. For he was taught by Aristotle, who was the pupil of Plato, who was the pupil of Socrates, and Alexander thus was the inheritor of the entire western philosophical and intellectual tradition of thought. No wonder he loved libraries.
Alexander was also respectful of savants. and even of eccentric sages like the philosopher Diogenes, from whom he accepted a blatant insult without reacting,except to say " If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes!"
While he was in India, contemporary accounts indicate that he sought out such rishis as would meet him, as well as noted Brahmin scholars with whom he discussed the kind of philosophical issues that he had once studied under Aristotle.
Such a man would never have treated an aaleem like Chanakya with such disdain even after learning of his intellectual attainments.
Again, Alexander was receptive to other cultures that he encountered during his conquests, and even sought to assimilate some of them, mainly the Persian, with his own Macedonian civilisation. When he set out for Persia, a multitude of seekers after knowledge accompanied his army, to study the habits and customs of the different peoples in the lands he traversed, the flora, the fauna, the crops, and so on.
Such a man would never have noted, with brusque dismissiveness, to Chanakya that he was not interested in the customs of Bharat, but only in merging it with his vast Macedonian empire
The Sony Alexander: We thus have to bear in mind that this is the Sony Alexander, whose distance from the historical Alexander seems to be increasing by the episode.
And if this Sony Alexander says just once more that he is Devta Zeus ka beta..aaj ka khuda!, I shall jump into the TV and gag him.😡
OK, let us get on with the Q & A.
Q1. Does Alexander know who Porus is, ie the (now exiled) crown prince of Paurav Rashtra?
A1.There has been nothing thus far to indicate that he does know this.
Q2.Does Alexander know that Porus is presently in Takshashila, and also about the rocky relations between Takshashila and Paurav Rashtra?
A2.Again, there is no indication that he knows about either. He visualizes Porus as being somewhere in Bharat, that is all, for I don't suppose Barsine has given him a briefing!😉 He must thus have learnt of the former only from Chanakya's sudden announcement that Takshashila would, in return for friendship from Alexander, be ready to hand over Porus.
Q3. If this is so, what does Alexander mean when he tells Chanakya that there is a special reason why he is seeking an alliance with Takshashila, instead of attacking it directly the query Chanakya poses to him and that Chanakya would get to know of it in due course?
A3.I cannot guess what the answer to this is. I am not even sure that when Chanakya promptly mentions Porus as the reason Alexander came to Bharat*, and Alexander immediately accepts it, he is telling the truth.
Maybe, and maybe not, though the balance would be in favour of his meaning it. That would mean that he seeks the assistance of a Bharatiya ally to locate Porus in Bharat. Otherwise, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
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*Which is true only in a small part, the real impetus being the dream of conquering the land where the sun rises, as they thought in Macedonia, which was instilled in him from his childhood by his mother, and then the desire to take revenge for what Puru did to Alexander's assets in Persia.
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Q4. Is Alexander playing a game with Chanakya and Ambhi? Is all that he says and does during his meeting with Chanakya just a charade, as it was in the case of Bessus of Bactria, to cover his real intentions?
A4. The Sony Alexander has shown, during the Bactria segment, that he hates treason and the betrayal of an ally. This is exactly what Ambhiraj is doing. Then Alexander should want to teach him a lesson, as he did with Bessus, no matter that the one Ambhiraj seeks to betray is Porus, Alexander's sworn enemy. So I would have expected him to attack Takshashila and possibly kill Ambhiraj, as punishment for such despicable behaviour. If Alexander were to do this, I would cheer. But then would the CVs go against the clear historical narrative just in order to preserve Alexander's principled nature?
All the more so when they have, quite apart from the earlier instances of demonizing the Sony Alexander that I have brought out in my posts, been accelerating this process ever since Puru landed in Persia, and standing every good thing that was earlier shown about this Alexander on its head? He has been made to look like a Nero rather than an Augustus Caesar.
Given this track record of the CVs, especially of late, I cannot, much as I would like it to be so, believe that Alexander will, in effect, rescue Porus from the Takshashila gang. A great pity!!
Q5. If there is to be just this handing over of Porus to Alexander, and no battle between Takshashila and Alexander, why is Alexander setting out with his battle helmet on, snarling to Roxanne that he will bring her a gift she would accept: Porus' head?
A5. I have no idea. Do you? Incidentally, to how many women is Alexander going to gift Porus' one and only head? 😆Already there are two in line for it: Barsine and Roxanne.
Q6. Does Chanakya really endorse Ambhiraj's plan to hand Porus over to Alexander in return for peace and friendship?
That Ambhiraj has decided to do this was shown in the precap, and one can believe it. Historically, Ambhiraj was an ally of Alexander's from before the battle of the Hydaspes, and the Sony Ambhiraj is the mirror image of Shivdutt, and hates the Paurav Rashtra folks, including Puru, with an unquenchable hatred.
But Chanakya was also shown standing next to Ambhiraj while he was declaring his intenions re: Puru. Does he go along with this?
A4.I cannot believe this, and the moment I saw that, and even earlier, when I heard him confirm this despicable deal to Alexander, I smelt a rat.
For Chanakya and Puru seem, even on so short an acquaintance, to be soulmates when it comes to Akhanda Bharat. Chanakya does not of course visualize Puru as the samrat of the eventual Akhanda Bharat -- that he reserves for Chandragupta Maurya ---but he wants Puru to block Alexander from going deeper into India. This being the case, why would he allow Puru to be destroyed at the hands of Alexander?
So there is something else cooking in Chanakya's dynamo of a brain, which he will not reveal to Ambhiraj, and perhaps not even to Puru. But I expect that he will warn Puru in time about the danger he faces now from his so-called allies, so that he can escape Alexander's clutches.
I shall stop here, as a preventive measure to ensure that your brains too don't turn into scrambled eggs.😉
I doubt if all of the issues I have flagged above will be resolved tonight or even by tomorrow. Nahin to suspense kahan se aayega? In fact, I fully expect Shivdutt to reappear, and take up over half of tonight's episode. I really pity the actor playing him!
And yes, if you survived this in good shape, please don't forget the Like button!
Shyamala Aunty/Di
PS: Anyone interested can look up a fascinating article by a reputable scholar on the use of war elephants in ancient India at
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1241/elephants-in-ancient-indian-warfare/
Hindi TV Shows
Veer Hanuman
