This content was originally posted by: sashashyam
Folks,
At the
outset, my usual statutory warning. This one, my first in 2 weeks, is NOT going to be about Jodha Akbar over these 15
days, nor even about the Friday episode as a whole.
Waise even I am realising the need for disclaimers and statutory warnings, what with every opinion being called to the carpet!!!
Folly beyond comprehension: It is not going to be, if I can help it, about the asinine
script, especially about the idiotic and patently dangerous vachan Jodha is forced to renew by her Sujamal Bhaisa who clearly
tops her in obstinate and illogical folly .
The English used to build their follies in their gardens - this brother sister duo is building theirs in Agra - the English must have got the inspiration here perhaps!!!
Or about the
Keystone Kops sequence of
Dilawar-Sujamal running away from the Agra palace soldiery, with his khwaja
sera costume coming apart, piece by piece, in a kind of bizarre strip tease😉, while he flails
about with his talwar like a farmer
scything hay, laying low one unfortunate Mughal soldier with each sweep.
Ahhh... I am enjoying this turn of phrase for the swordsmanship of this Sujamal - After Jalal's fencing, this did seem pedestrian - and there are paeans being sung for it!!!
Or about the
bizarre precap, clearly intended to make Sujamal seem to be
one up on Jalal, since the bodies of the soldiers - presumably despatched by
him while escaping from the prison (thus
adding himself to the roll of honour of Agra Palace prison escapees, up there
with Abul Mali) - had been deliberately
stacked up to look a taller pile than the similar one shown when Jalal was
attacked by Suryabhan's soldiers when he was escaping from Amer with the badly
wounded Abdul.
Well, TE's act was at once subtle yet bold, this one seems full of pride and loud. Wonder why????
The precap,
complete with Jalal sporting his usual furious
look, coupled with the total ineffectiveness of his whole band of
courtiers, succeeded in bringing the image of the Mughals down to rock bottom. It also, with obvious
intent, simultaneously sought to elevate Sujamal to near mythic status as the
swordsman No. 1 in all of Hindustan.
Perhaps this was the deal with the Karni Sena - to show the Mughals as jokers and the Ameris elevated to mythical status!!!
When he
finally dies, after having saved Jalal's
life (this privilege is by now reserved for Jodha's family - first Bhagwandas,
in that incredibly inept encounter with bandits
at Sujanpur, next Jodha herself, and now Sujamal😉) he will surely be decorated with a nice 24 carat halo, only a
bit smaller than his sister's will be after the Grand Reconciliation next week.
As Sandhya points, the halo for Sujamal in many threads can give competition to Jodha's halo!!!
Of course,
in this process , Sujamal's having compounded the idiocy of his reckless khwaja sera charade (how on earth did he
think he was going to unearth the conspirator?By eavesdropping on harem
gossip?) by the worse folly of exposing his sister to the
deepest disgrace, and punishment, by not releasing her from the vachan even when Jalal had found them together
in her hoojra, will be totally forgotten.
Ofcourse all will be forgiven and forgotten!!! even the fact that it was Sujamal who got Jodha in this situation in the first place!!! I wish Mainavati comes and puts some sense into Jodha over this Vachan scenario!!!
I am not
going to follow the standard practice here and issue the usual disclaimer for
having, however inadvertently, hurt anyone's feeling by this take on Sujamal.
Those who admire him unconditionally are free to do so. As for me, his bidding
farewell to Jodha with a long, soulful look(which must have stoked Jalal's fury
by another 100 degrees), and then letting
her face the music from her
murderously angry husband, was enough to negate any admiration of his
eventual sacrifice. If he had told Jalal,
even at the last minute, when the soldiers had got hold of him, who he was, and
why he had embarked on this charade, so much anguish and suffering would have
been spared for his beloved sister, and there would not have been any need for
him to die to save Jalal either. A man
who is awash with pigheaded nobility, but cannot think straight, is a walking menace, no matter how brave he
might be.
It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions - how apt for this situation!!!
Shakespearian heights: This post, folks, will be almost entirely an ode to the 11
minutes and 56 seconds of Rajat's epic Shakespearan performance that we were
privileged to witness on Friday. A performance that truly deserved that mostly misused adjective, "epic".
Now for the meat of the post!!! Yes it was truly epic!!!
OTT? Of course!: And before we go any further, let me dispose of the carping
remarks that Jalal was over the top on
Friday. Of course he was over the top! He had to be. So was King Lear raging on the heath, or
Shylock raving against the injustice of the system he lived under, and so would
Othello have been had he confronted his beloved Desdemona, instead of strangling her in her sleep for
being, as he believed, unfaithful to him. At such times, the actor has to go over the top to
convey the depths of what he wants to get across.
Those who are calling this OTT have not seen Nagesh in Server Sundaram, Smita Patil in Mirch Masala, Naseeruddin Shah in the same movie, Kamal in Moondram Pirai, Heith Ledger as Joker, Anupam Kher in Saaraansh, they have not seen the performances of Lakshmi, Sheila, Dilip Kumar, Shivaji and many others. And they definitely have not taken in truly great stage performances!!!
Those carping
about him for being OTT would have been delighted with Jodha, who was decidedly
UTT (under the top).
Well I have been restraining myself but no more - Jodha was a log of wood for 90% of the 11 minutes and 56 seconds. The remaining 10%, the response was not in sync with the need of the situation. I may sound harsh but I have been spoilt by RT's virtuoso performance and as a paying audience (yes we all are paying audience) I have a right to expect good performances, if not excellence.
Symbiotic suffering:To revert, this was a performance
that, more than ever before with Rajat as Jalal, erased the dividing line between
the actor and the character, but far more difficult and thus far rarer, between
the character and the viewers as well. He drew us in with him into the
vortex of agony, of despair, of bitter self-contempt, of the searing hurt of
the worst betrayal he could ever have suffered,
that had him in its grip. And this for nearly 12 straight minutes of
screen time. Which, in cinema, is an eternity.
Yes!!! He erased the line between the character and the viewer!!! He sucked me into the scene and I was as much a part of TE's suffering as TE himself - for 12 minutes I was a part of it, helpless and for 24 hours after, I was reeling with the impact!!! I now really want to see him on stage - as Othello, as King Lear, as Marc Anthony!!!
As Rajat's Jalal turns himself inside out, as he flagellates himself to the pitch of
frenzy, bleeding inside from a thousand lacerating whiplashes on his zehen, we feel his agony as our own. We suffer with him as he mocks himself, again and
again, pounding his chest with bitter mirthless laughter, Kitne nasamjh the hum, kitne bewakoof!
Can I say my hands had fisted themselves, with my nails digging into my palms as I was witness to this agonizing self - flagellation?!?!?!
We too hold
our breath as he almost begs Jodha Begum, citing the faith he had had that she
could do no wrong, the almost unbelievable
patience he had shown, hoping that one day, she would come to him, trust
him and tell him the truth. Humein
yakeen tha ki aap kuch galat nahin kar saktin, humein yakeen tha ki shayad koyi
majboori rahi hogi jiski wjah se aap yeh raaz humse chupa rahi hain..Hum har
roz yeh sochte the ki shayad aap ab wo baat humein batayengi, par aap har raat
jhoot bolkar is shaks se chori chupe milti rahin? Hum ne bahut koshish ki aap humein yeh baat batadein, par
aapne har baar is raaz par parda dala.Kya aapko hum par itna bhi yakeen nahin
tha, Jodha Begum, ki aap humein apne dil ki baat bata sakein?
Can I add that I was mentally shaking her to say 1 word, to let him know he was not wrong in keeping faith?!?!?!
Could there
be any appeal more full of pain, of
pathos, of a helpless emotional
dependence that overwhelmed all else that a standard issue husband would have
felt? Which man, not to speak of a 16th century emperor, would bend so far to coax a wife - whom he had seen consorting with a
strange man outside the palace in the middle of the night, and who was now
meeting the same man right in her
rooms in the palace, into which he had sneaked thru a disgraceful
trick - to trust him, to trust in
his faith in her integrity ? Not one
in a million. Not then, and not even now.
And this was where I just started imagining the time when he would know the truth and I totally shattered with the implications!!! If my spouse ever betrayed me with another and I confronted him with it - I would be hurt beyond measure - But if I accused my spouse of said betrayal where there was none and he kept quiet and let me believe so - I would be shattered on knowing the facts - that he thought so less of me to let me continue in my belief and agony - I would then actually start thinking that he wants me to be so ashamed of myself that I am unable to even meet my own eyes and hence let me continue with my accusations - this for me would be a greater betrayal that an actual betrayal!!!
Why, any
king of those days, Rajvanshi or Mughal, would have first killed the supposed
paramour right in front of his wife as soon as he saw them both together, and saw
the lingering look of farewell with which the stranger regarded his wife as he was dragged away. And seeing his wife looking guilty enough to invite
capital punishment, he would have decapitated her as well with one sweep of his
sword. That is how blind rage and jealousy work in an absolute ruler. But not
with this Shahenshah-e-Hind.
I dont think anyone needs to go beyond Shakespeare's Othello to know what would happen - and here we have an Oriental Absolute Monarch who showed 'Patience'!!!
He
loves Jodha Begum beyond all reason, and
the one desperate desire of his heart is to somehow, anyhow, convince himself, despite all appearances to
the contrary, that she is as he had
believed her to be, paaksaaf, not
an adulteress who would invite her lover
to her own rooms a few steps away from where her husband was, under the same
roof.
Yes he does and that is why her silence has made her the guilty one in this situation!!! There are times when the lips need to be sealed - this was not it!!!
Bitter love: He does not even hesitate, so
desperate is he, to expose the deepest,the most sensitive secret of his heart:
his love for her. This is not the stumbling, shy, gentle confession of the
night of the dhakka. That was from a young man new to love, who wanted to share the wonder, the
sheer loveliness of his unfamiliar jazbaat with his beloved.
This is
distilled gall, the corrosive self-contempt
of a man deeply ashamed of his weakness for a Delilah, who, he now believes, had entered
his life only to destroy him by
condemning him to a lifetime of agony: Aap yahan aayi thin hum par vaar karne k
liye, humse badla lene ke liye. Aapne sab ke saamne imaandaar banne ka dikhawa
kiya aur zeher pi liya. Aap jaanti thin ki Benazir ka zeher humein ek pal mein
maar dega, par aap chahti thin ki hum har din, har pal, roz marte rahein aapke
dhoke se!
Kitne nasamajh the hum ki humne apna
dil aapke saamne rakha! Yeh bhi nahin dekha ki aap use todne aayi hain. Kitne
nasamajh the hum ki humein laga ki aapke dil mein hamare liye koyi jagah hai...
Had I been in her place I would have stopped him here with my tears and by falling at his feet for the agony I caused him with my 'Lie by omission' - This was no longer a tentative love - this was total capitulation of his heart - and to be at the receiving end of such love is a blessing that only few receive!!!
As his
bitter laughter reechoes thru the room: Kitne
nasamajh the hum, hazaron begumat ke malik, Mughal sultanat ke Shahenshah, jise
Zille-Ilahi kehte hain, izzat uske saamne jhukti hai, aur wo jhuka bhi to aapke
saamne, usne izzat bakshi bhi to aapko! Aut aapne usi ko dhoka dediya?
Jalal's face
is rigid with grief and disgust. Humara
nikaah hua hai aapse, phir bhi humne
aapki izaazat ke bina aapko chua nahin.Aur aapne hamari isi sharafat ka fayda
uthaya?
And
Rajat pours this gall all over not just
Jodha, but us as well. I for one knew full well that nothing
of what Jalal raged against was true,
that Jodha was innocent, if incredibly foolish and self-centred. But as I
listened to Rajat's Jalal lacerate himself
again and again with such bitter self-contempt, such was the mesmerizing power of his performance
that I felt as if a much loved child
had fallen and hurt himself beyond recall. That I needed, somehow,
anyhow, to pick him up and make him well again.
Yes Rajat's Jalal made me forget that this was a stupid silly EK serial - and my heart bled for him and with him!!!
So I hung in
there with him as he raged on against Jodha's
obstinate silence, her refusal, even when she saw what her silence was doing to
the husband who, by his own confession, loves her to the point of obsession, to
give him the answer to his one question Who
is this man and what is he to you?
As he tears into her Rajvanshi guroor, junoon, jazbe, usool, which he had always respected but
which now lay in tatters. As he demands to know what it was about her that had
drawn this shaks , in defiance of all
those Rajvanshi mores, to his death: her love for him and/or her hatred of her
husband?
This - her love for the stranger / her hatred for her husband - had me gasping - since I was already seeing the heartbreak the knowledge of the truth would bring for him - and though there may not be love for another, how does one get over the feeling of possible hatred for self from the beloved?!?!?!
Death from a thousand cuts: As he finally accuses her openly of
being an adulteress, who had not
let him, her legally wedded husband, come near her, touch her, establish a
relationship with her, love her, and had pushed him away with a dhakkabut had invited a gair
mard into her rooms. Sharm aati hai,
Jodha Begum? Ek gair mard ke saath naajayaz rishta banana mein aapko sharm
nahin aayi, par use qubool karne mein sharm aati hai?
Mujhe aayi sharm - aur mera sir abb bhi sharm se jhuka hai - iss baat par ki Jodha ne uss ka apmaan kiya jiska gunaah sirf itna hai ki usne usse mohabbat ki aur uss par yakeen kiya- lekin woh uske yakken ko iss baat se nahin tod rahi ki uska kisi gair mard se koi najaayaz rishta hai - par iss baat se tod rahi hai ki woh usse sach se mehroom rakh kar khud ke nazar mei gira degi!!!
Coelho says that saying No or being selfish when needed or taking is not always a vice and saying yes or being selfless or constantly giving is not always a virtue - can someone tell this woman that!!!
I could see
that in all this, it was not Jodha who was suffering the most, for despite the horrendous shock of the
accusation, she was sustained by the
certitude of her innocence. It was Jalal, who was being subjected to death from a thousand
cuts, self-inflicted, true, but deepening and bleeding all the more with every
instant of Jodha's silence that could,
to him, mean only one thing, her black
guilt.
Oh his agony has only just begun!!! As I have pointed when he gets to know the facts - I dont want to see him shatter with the thought that she could do this to him!!!
It was as if
a kaleidoscope had been turned upside down in his mind. Jodha's
image there, as the paaksaaf,
loyal, infinitely courageous hunar ki
khaan he had come to love, was reversed in an instant. Now everything she
had ever done, per se and for him,
was seen as if thru a distorting mirror, and the image was ugly, very ugly.
..Kab se chal raha hai yeh, humare
nikaah se pehle as us se bhi pehle?..Bataayiye, jab aap humse nikaah kar rahi
thin, to kya wohi shaks aapke zehen mein tha? Jab aapne humein dhakka diya, toh
uski wajah kya is shaks ke liye mohabbat thi? Hum aaj tak sochte aaye ki jab
aapne zeher piya aur maut se ladkar wapas lautin to hamare liye, par ab humein
samajh aaya ki aap is shaks ke mohabbat ki khatir wapas lautin...
And then the
same bitter refrain: Kitne nasamajh the
hum, kitne bewakoof the hum! Aur aap kitni shatir!
As his
laments, for that is what they were,
laments for a lost love that had been
tainted and soiled even befor e it had blossomed, gather strength and fury, I
was consumed with a sense of helplessness. And a sense of inchoate rage against the folly of the woman who sat there
watching all this, seeing her lion of a
husband being reduced to a self-hating
wreck, with his soul poisoned by the conviction that he had given his heart at
long last, but to whom? To, as her silence forced him to believe, a traitress of
the worst, most deceitful, most shameless kind.
Imagine his laments when he realises that she was never so and she knew she was innocent yet let him believe her to be all that he called her with her silence and his cry that had he gone ahead and killed that brother of hers, believing the worst due to the very same silence - imagine his dasha - I am dying a thousand deaths just imagining that!!!!
She could
have turned the kaleidoscope back with
an anguished protest: Hum paaksaaf hain, Shahenshah, aap hum par
vishwas karein. Ek aakhri baar vishwas karein!Humne aapse koyi vishwasghaat nahin kiya. Hum abhi vachan ke
bandhe hain, Shahenshah, par hum aapko kabhi dhoka nahin de sakte!
She could
have grabbed his hand and held on to it
no matter what he did to try and shake her off. She could have wept and raved
and ranted about her innocence, and fallen at his feet in a paroxysm of
self-exculpation. She could have abandoned her ego to save her love, for now
she knows that he loves her, and it is her silence that is killing that love,
and she knows that she loves him too.
Yes she could have - and it is only becoz the Universe is with him that her brother escaped in time from that death sentence - the Universe did not want his hands to be bloodied for Jodha's folly - all thanks to the fact that he had the courage to face his fears and no thanks to this woman's fears that she is incapable of facing yet!!! Love?!?! What Love are we talking of that she feels for him?!?!?! She does not even know the meaning of that word!!! She has no clue how painful this feeling is!!!! She is in Romance not in Love - not yet - Wonder if she will ever get there now?!?!?!?!
And then
which woman would let herself be accused of adultery - the worst insult
imaginable, and that too from her own husband - without saying a word in her
own defence? Surely this mistress of sophistry could have found some way out, some trick of language to keep her idiotic vachan and still prevent her husband from slipping into this morass
of bitter anguish?
And this will kill him even more!!!!
But she does nothing, and continues to stare at him with
wide eyes that say nothing. I felt, even more than Jalal, like shaking her till
her teeth rattled and the truth was forced out of her. Not so much for her -
she had, to a large extent, brought her
fate on herself - but for him. I could not bear to see him chatpatate huye like a soul in torment, hiding his suffering behind
a smokescreen of rage.
And I wanted to shake it out of her to spare him the worser heartache that I am now anticipating!!!
So he
threatens her with the most cruel death possible for the man he takes to be her paramour, and that too in front of her ; his face alight with near hatred as he asserts Humein yakeen hai ki aap royengi, aapko dard hoga. The savagery of
the threat being lost in the almost pleading demand that followed Isliye keh rahein hai, jawaab dijiye
humein!JAWAAB DIJIYE!!!
But it does
not work, and his hand is cut as he smashes it agains the wall in rage,
and it bleeds. She reaches instinctively for the bleeding hand, but he
now cannot even bear her to touch him,
for her very touch is as if it was acid searing his skin. So he shoves her away to the other corner of the
room in a spasm of violent rejection.
It was more an act of protecting her from his rage than an act of rejection and also an act of desperation - to reject her perfidy if he can.
The last roll of the dice: He has by now nearly exhausted every
trick he could think of to get her to
tell him that no, she had not betrayed
him, that she had not committed zinakari,
that she had not done all this, or any of this, to take revenge on
him and satiate her hatred of the man
who had married her against her will.
But he has not yet quite given up. He tries once more,
hoping against hope that she would, even at this late stage, throw him a lifeline, and drag him out of this
whirlpool into which he is sinking. Khuda ki kasam, Jodha Begum, aap batayengi
to hum sunenge! He boxes her in with
kasams on all those she held dear - Kanha, Kaali Maa,
her parents. It is a strange echo of his earlier appeal:Agar aap mein insaniyat baaki hai, toh sach batayiye!
All he wanted was 1 word - that his yakeen was not false, that his heart was not wrong - why o why could she not have given him that?!?!?!?!
The very
strangeness of his first question shows the extent of his desperate need
to see her redeem herself, any which
way. For what sense does it make for him to ask her whether she knew the man
she had been meeting outside the palace at the dead of night, and now in her
own rooms? He just wants her to say No, I do not know him!, however
incredible that might sound. And when she does not oblige him and confesses
that yes, she knows him, Jalal cannot even bring himself to do what 99 men out
of a 100 would have done, hit her.
And they call him abusive - and they are all 'Honorable women'!!!
The rest follows, as the night follows the day, as Jodha
confesses that yes, she had known that shaks
since her childhood (why not add
three words, you foolish woman, mere
bhaisa hain? ), that she loves him. And so, finally, the curtain falls on this act of a Greek
tragedy.
And what a tragedy it is - all self inflicted by Jodha on herself and on TE, thus making it self inflicted even for him!!!
Jalal is a creature of
extremes, and his emotions are all
kingsize. So he roars full throatedly in
his agony, as he did when his Khan Baba
was no more, and takes his rage out, not
on the woman who was its cause, but on the inanimate objects in the room.
And they call him abusive - and they are all 'Honorable Women'!!!
Noble closure: Someone had written the other day, in
all seriousness, that Jalal is an abuser
who hits Jodha. I wonder which serial that person had been watching (there are plenty of hitters
and slappers scattered across the other
soaps on Zee). On Friday, any abusive husband would have pummelled his
wife black and blue. And any king of those days, faced with such a situation,
would most likely have killed her on the spot.
I was proud of Jalal, who, despite his black fury and terrible
sense of betrayal, managed to contain his rage and did not take it out on
Jodha.
He restrained himself thrice - yet they call him abusive - and they are all 'Honorable Women'!!!
Instead, he turns to his only refuge, bitter, self-mocking
laughter at his having made himself so sharmsaar,
and the Mughal sultanate as well. I have
rarely seen anything as heartbreaking as the smile on his face as he
tells Jodha that, and adds, Bahut hunar
hain na aapme..lekin yeh badla lene ka aapka yeh hunar sabse niraala hai!
But the helplessness, the crippling sense of loss in love,
wells forth again:Humein aapse mohabbat ho
gayi thi , Jodha Begum.. Hum aapme ek
mohabbat ki roshni dekhne lage the..Aur
aapne apni zinakari se us roshni ko naapaak kar diya..
He is by now at the end of his tether, and all he wants is to
get away from her presence, to escape the searing pain the very sight of her gives him. So he formally
releases her from the bond of marriage with him, and tells her to leave Agra. As Jalal turns and walks out of her room, all that he
feels can be seen in his body language,
in the stoop of his shoulders, in the weariness of his stride.
In his defeat, he was victorious - he picked up the shattered pieces of his soul and started putting them back again - becoz he is not just a lover - he is a son to a mother, a husband to his wives, a father to his Khan Baba's son, a brother to his siblings, but most of all he is the Emperor who is the one and only light of benevolence for his subjects.
In the closure he chooses, Jalal is being merciful far beyond the norms of
those days.He does not imprison Jodha, or shame her publicly in the
Diwan-e-Khas, as he might well have
done. He probably feels that to do so
would be a tauheen of his love for
her, however soiled and betrayed that emotion might be.
There can be no greater love than this, which can forgive
even the worst betrayal and stay true to itself, retaining its dignity and its depth.
Yes, he is being merciful but most of all he is being courageous and he has let go the need to possess - the ultimate act of the lover - one who truly loves and understands love!!!
Coup de Maitre:I do not how far I have
been able to do justice to Rajat's coup
de matre, a turn so masterly and so dazzling that it left me, for once,
bereft of words, and I had to cast about to find them. Perhaps not too well, for it needed the Bard of Avon himself
to describe this Shakespearian
performance.
No words can ever do justice to such performances, Shyamala - we will always fall short in our reviews. But the fact that all who watched it were affected by it is proof of its impact!!!
Rajat must have
done it at one take; having worked himself up to that pitch, he could not have
interrupted it to do the scene in parts. I am not over fond of the CVs, but I
must say that for once, the script gave Rajat all that he could have asked for
as a performer.
Yes and now I know why Paridhi was upset!!!😉😆
What would I
not have given to see him live, on the stage, in this scene! He could never
have got such a 11 minutes and 56 seconds all
to himself - seeing that his heroine was mostly passive,
like a prop - in any film, only in the
theatre. Or in Othello, where he could
have let himself go even more, seeing that his Desdemona would have been
angelically asleep! Now this is something that I am dying to see him do!!!
Jodha: Unbearable silence: There is nothing much I have to say about
Jodha, except that I wish the script had let her go at least halfway to match
the depth, the power and the fury of
Jalal. As she was shown, Jodha was pathetically lacking in resourcefulness, her
trademark loquaciousness, in emotion and
in depth.
There should
have been a helpless agony in her face and her eyes, black despair as she sees her relationship
with the man she claims to love in tatters, terror at the awful fate that
awaits the brother whose life she seeks to protect by adhering to the vachan he has forced on her. There
should have been terrible anguish at
what she was putting her husband through, the hell of the betrayal of his
innermost feelings into which he has been thrown and from which only she can rescue him.
There was
nothing of any of this, bar a few shots of a pleading look in her lovely, tear-filled
eyes.
In fact, I do not know how much Jodha understood of the
soul-searing agony her husband was going
thru. Not much, judging from her
reactions. This is not surprising, for as
I described her once, she is like a clear, burbling brook,
transparent and without any dark nooks and corners, but shallow, simple, and uncomprehending of deep passions. Her
face yesterday did not indicate much grasp of what this betrayal (as he was
bound to see it) by the wife he had come to love does to Jalal.
If I had been in her place, it would have been
what I was doing to this husband who loves me that would have mattered the
most.
Besides, was that not the most sacred of
the vachans she had ever taken, her
marriage vow that for her, her husband ,
jis se hi uska soubhagya hai, would
come above all else? How is it that she has either forgotten that vachan, or ranks it below the one now
forced on her by her Bhaisa? Strange and totally incomprehensible.
Most of all,
Jodha should have had something substantive, telling, convincing, and appealing
to say in her own defence, and to try
and rescue Jalal from his raging
depression. This is, after all, the bhashan
ki malika, the woman who could, by a
clever play on words that defied logic but sounded convincing, managed to get the besotted Jalal time and again to do
what he was dead against - about Bakshi Banu, about Sharifuddin, about Tasleem.
It seems that this hunar too has
failed her at the most crucial moment,
just as Karna, in the heat of the battle against Arjuna at Kurukshetra,
could not remember the mantra for the Brahmastra.
The editing of Jodha's
shots was also bewildering at times. When Jalal is declaiming about the hazaar
begumaat in his harem, and lists the various reasons for which he married
them, ending with bachpan ki dost, ie Ruqaiya, Jodha stares at him
with shock and fear in her eyes. Why on earth would she look afraid at that point?
Then again, when he says, at the very end, Humein aapse mohabbat ho gayi thi, Jodha
Begum, she is completely out of sync, still nodding her head in negation from the
previous shots, and they retained that!
Apart from her
pretty much solo emotion shots throughout, the way she cries at the very end,
after Jalal has left, is very odd. Here
was an occasion which called for grand tragedy, for stormy wailing and
lamentations, and Jodha sounds, with her Aanh..aanh..aanh,
for all the world, to quote my young
friend Anne (AJSharma79), as if she had failed in her mid-term exams!
Paridhi should
take the CVs and the director to task for having shortchanged her so badly in
such a major, climactic, demanding scene. She would not have been able to match
Rajat at his superb best, true, but with a good script, she would have done
vastly better than she was allowed to do on Friday.
I will not comment on Jodha - it will give me ulcers - just for Paridhi's performance - she maybe otherwise good but in those 12 minutes she was way below par in performance - and though she is otherwise a capable actress she needs to realise that she is facing brilliance - and in such company, capable and good are just not good enough.
The Great Vachan Factor: There has been a lot written about Jodha's helplessness
because of the vachan she had given
Sujamal. Leaving aside the overriding loyalty she should have had to her marriage vows, as noted above, let us see
the logic of what Jodha does.
She was forced to take that vachan on
her brother's head, and the reason she clings to it is because he will, she
believes, die if she breaks it. It is this belief that underlies the
weight attached to a vachan/kasam.
What was
Sujamal's original reason, tenuous as it was, for the vachan he had made Jodha take? That Jodha should not get
into trouble by being seen to meet an enemy of the Mughal sultanate. Now, that vachan has been renewed, her hand on his
head, for exactly the same reason , unhe tum par sandeh ho jayega.
But once Jalal has seen the fake khwaja sera in Jodha's rooms, all this
went automatically out of the window, and there
was no longer any rationale for this vachan
. Sujamal, who is presumably not a dunce, should have realised at once what
Jalal was bound to think as soon he saw them together, if he was not told that Sujamal was her
brother. Why, if Bharmal has seen a strange man in his daughter's rooms, he
would have executed both the daughter and the intruder. Remember his reaction
to Jodha's moonlight boatride with Suryabhan, her fiance? He wanted to strangle
her.
Anyone, Rajvanshi or not, would know what any husband would think of his wife
under such circumstances if the
situation was not clarified at once. So why does Sujamal not release Jodha from the vachan at once? Instead, he departs after a long, soulful look at
Jodha that, as noted above, must have
raised Jalal's fury by 100 degrees.
Let us for a moment leave aside
Sujamal's unbelievable folly in leaving
her to face the music from a murderously angry husband. Let us stick to Jodha
alone. Why does she not ask Sujamal to release her from the vachan, since the situation was bound to
be fatal for him if she
stayed silent?
For if she keeps quiet, she is
condemning the very brother whose life she wants desperately to save - which is
why she will not break the vachan - not just to certain death, but
to the most horrendously painful death that Jalal can think up, and this
in front of her.
Whereas, if she confesses that he is her brother and also why he came into the
palace as a khwaja sera, all will be well. Maybe Sujamal will get a token
punishment, but his life will be saved, not to speak of Jodha's honour and her
nascent relationship with Jalal.
So how does what Jodha is doing make any sense? I am here leaving out entirely
the terrible anguish she is inflicting on the husband who, she now knows from
his own mouth , loves her. Anguish that is tearing him apart, and will do
so for the rest of his life unless he learns the truth somehow.
As noted above, Jalal might well have killed her on the spot as an adulteress. Most kings of that
ear, Mughal or Rajvanshi, would have done precisely that.
Now, how much time would it have taken her to say Woh mere
Sujamal Bhaisa hain aur woh mujhe batane aaye the ki mahal ke andar hi koyi
aapki jaan lena chahta hai.? 10 seconds? She is never at
a loss for long, edifying, convoluted speeches. Why not blurt out this one
single line and save her Bhaisa's life and her own honour? Instead, she behaves
exactly like the worst kind of 1960s Hindi film heroine.
Ahhh...the vachan. All I can say is, TE has Madame Universe in his corner - that she ensured Sujamal did not die by his hands - warna I shudder over what TE's agony would be if he had given that sure shot death to Suja bhaisa and then got to know the facts!!!
What lies ahead: I simply do
not care, I am afraid. The last part of
the Friday episode was back to the old
format, with Jalal pacing furiously up and down the Diwan-e-Khas, and then
running to dispatch Sujamal, looking exactly like the Energiser bunny. The last
shot of his glaring eyes as he contemplates that pile of corpses, so
artistically arranged, was hardly
edifying.
I preferred to
go back of the 11:56 minutes of the previous segment, harrowing as
it was. I hope The Great Reconciliation
Scene is not too mawkish, and that Jodha is given something substantial to
do there at least. I have grown fond of her from her Kajri days, and I want that girl back!
There is a new TT spoiler that Jodha too apologises for hiding the facts about Suja Bhaisa - if this does happen I for one will be happy for small mercies - what will still gall would be that TE kneels and Jodha does not - so here is my hope that she too kneels with him.
The New Promo: One pertinent point,
especially for those waiting with bated
breath for The Kiss. If Jalal is going
to kiss Jodha, he is going to have to figure out in advance how to deal with
her cartwheel of a nose ring. I do not see how anyone could kiss a woman
sporting that thing.😉
And in the final Grand Embrace scene in the promo, Jalal, who is only as tall as Jodha , looks to be a
good half a head taller. This is
probably what is meant by her helping his all round growth!😉
Shyamala B. Cowsik
comment:
p_commentcount