It’s not a new story, not an old one, but a story that seems to
recur with ugly frequency. A young man and woman, neighbours who have fallen in
love, elope from home. They run away for two years. When they return the woman’s
family tries to get her to go back home. A peacemaker from the boy’s side is
killed and one more inter-religious marriage finds itself spattered in blood.
If you read this alongside the Jodhaa Akbar controversy,
the reasons for the outrage on the part of the Rajput community clear up a
little. The film has a Hindu woman marrying a Muslim man. This does not seem to
have been about religious pride though it does figure somewhere. This was about
the operations of the patriarchy.
In all patriarchal societies, for which one might read in all
societies, it is the control of the womb that is of central importance. The
woman is thus reduced to her capacity to bear children. And once she has borne
those children her importance is effaced again because it is the religious
identity of the children that comes into focus. This brings into play another of
India’s recurring demons: demography.
Who has how many children and what religious identity these
children will have is a question that has traumatised us each time the census
figures are released. Since these figures do not tell us patterns of land
ownership, since they do not tell us about the religious or caste identities of
the owners of the nation’s wealth, since they are prone to misinterpretation of
the most unscientific kind, no census is released without someone ‘reading’ the
figures to indicate that India is rapidly turning into a Muslim nation. Or that
the Christians are taking over.
(Recent developments in Orissa show that the clumsy nature of
the religious Right’s desire to demonise minorities continues. The church is now
to be associated with the Naxalite. That there is no credible evidence for this
is another matter. That the chief secretary of Orissa says that there have been
no forced conversions there does not matter. Hatred is not an emotion that
allows for rationality.)
But why Jodhaa Akbar? After all, Mughal-e-Azam had
already played out the scenario of Emperor Akbar, the Muslim, and Jodha Bai, the
Rajput mother of Prince Salim, some time earlier. There is a scene in K. Asif’s
classic film in which Akbar is shown participating in Janmashtami, a Hindu
festival: he is pulling the palna (cradle) on which the infant Lord
Krishna is seated.
No one seems to have objected to the film at all. No one seems
to have questioned whether Jodha Bai was a real figure or an imaginary one. One
could put this down to the palmy days of the 1950s when there was still a
widespread faith in the ability of the republic of India to provide for all its
citizens, when inclusivity was an automatic response rather than the exception
to be treasured but this seems to me to tread dangerously close to a nostalgic
reinterpretation of the past. (The Other, we have always had with us. It is only
our response to the Other that has grown more crude.) And this also does not
explain why the film’s coloured version, released a few months before Jodhaa
Akbar, should not have evoked the same level of rage.
The DVD version of Jodhaa Akbar contains a series of
disclaimers. Before the film begins titles run to background music:
"Historians agree that the 16th century marriage of alliance
between the Mughal Emperor Akbar and the daughter of King Bharmal of Amer (Jaipur)
was a recorded chapter in history…
"But there is speculation till today that her name was not
Jodhaa…
"Some historians say her name was Harkha Bai, others call her
Hira Kunwar and yet others say Jiya Rani, Maanmati and Shahi Bai…
"But over centuries her name reached the common man as Jodhaa
Bai. This is just one version of historical events. There could be other
versions and viewpoints to it (sic)."
DVD 3 contains a bonus feature: "Historical References". The
disclaimer is repeated here and 12 books are offered, including, surprisingly,
the novel Gulbadan by "Ruman Goden" by which presumably the compiler of
this list meant Rumer Godden.
But that’s history. We have never been terribly worried about
historical truth. Sohrab Modi’s Jhansi Ki Rani established the image of a
brave and valiant queen fighting for her land, her people and only incidentally,
her right to choose an heir. Her actual role in history has been ignored.
But then Modi was offering us a Hindu heroine. Gowariker is
offering us a Muslim hero. His Akbar (played rather capably by Hrithik Roshan)
is given to short justice but he is also the kind of person who grants a woman
an audience, listens to her requests that she remain a Hindu and have a temple
built inside her apartments, agrees and then falls in love with her.
None of this seems offensive to either side and it is a sad
thing that such a question would still have sides determined by religion. Akbar
himself was slightly more complex a character. His hunger for religious
instruction meant that all ‘holy men’ were welcome at his court. And though they
fought for the soul of Hindustan through the throne of the grand Mughal, Akbar
seems to have managed a diplomatic way out of the mess of Muslim clerics and
Hindu sages and Jesuit envoys: he invented his own short-lived religion. At
Fatehpur Sikri you see the quarters for his wives and all the guides tell you
about Jodha Bai and the Catholic wife from Goa, the Turkish wife and so on. The
memory that remains with me is the small church, built exactly as if the
architect had seen a child’s drawing of a church.
That may well be why no one strives for truth in cinema; reality
is simply too complex for good storytelling.
