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Jodhaa Akbar is not about romantic fineries but Mughal realpolitik

What no one is willing to admit is that Ashutosh Gowariker’s Jodhaa Akbar is a political film, and it is not only because of the protests it is evoking in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and some places in Haryana.

Gowariker has made a mainstream, commercial film which deals with weighty matters like the Hindu-Muslim encounter in the form of a marriage alliance — as close as it gets — on the one hand, and the tussle between a king conscious of political imperatives and orthodox Muslim clerics of the day who resented the changing contours of the power equations between the two communities. These are issues that many of the putative art-house directors are incapable of dealing with because they are too self-conscious and timid for their own good.

Gowariker has not turned out an opulent spectacle of a Mughal romance which has been the staple of many of the earlier Mughal era films like Mughal-E-Azam, Taj Mahal and Noorjahan. This is not a film that the maudlin sentimentalists of the
so-called ‘Ganga-Jumni tehzeeb’ can wax eloquent about. There are no high-flown Urdu dialogues and no silly court etiquette. (Of course, our Mughal era connoisseurs ignore the fact that Mughals did not speak Urdu.)

It is about a key political issue that the youthful Akbar faced at the time — how to make India a permanent haven for the descendants of Babar, the parvenu prince and the fugitive from little Farghana in far-off Central Asia. Akbar showed the instincts of the descendant of an immigrant who wanted to meld with the society of the country which he wanted to rule. This could be the reason that professional protestors of the principles of freedom of expression have decided to stay away in the face of several sectarian protests.

There is more history in Jodhaa Akbar than is to be found in Shekhar Kapur’s two films on Elizabeth I, and there is less pretension in dealing with a serious topic than is to be felt in films made by the likes of Deepa Mehta and Mira Nair. Gowariker goes about his work in an unselfconscious manner. He is keen to probe young
Akbar’s interesting political decisions

And in quite a few scenes, he stays close to historical detail. The decapitation of Hemu so that Akbar could claim the title of Ghazi — a Muslim ruler killing a kafir — is a fact. According to one version, Bairam Khan forced teenager Akbar to cut off the head of Hemu. But Gowariker chose another version where Bairam does the act on behalf of the king.

Then the palace intrigues of his foster-mother Maham Anga and her son, Adham Khan. It is also a fact that Adham Khan was thrown from the upper storey of the harem when he walked impudently. According to one tradition, it was Akbar himself who threw down Adham Khan in a fit of rage when he came in a drunken state. In the film, Adham Khan is show walking into the harem with a blood-stained sword after killing one of Akbar’s trusted officials, and Akbar has his guards throw Adham Khan over the walls.

It can be argued that there is no historical evidence for Jodhaa, but few can dispute the fact that Akbar had entered into matrimonial alliances with many Rajput kings. The focus of Gowariker’s film is on the marriage alliance driven by political calculation. He does not show Akbar as a fake secular idealist of contemporary India. It is power and politics that rightly obsess the king.

Gowariker does not also weave a fairy-tale love bond between Jodhaa and Akbar which he could have easily done because he has the poetic licence to do so in a full-fledged commercial film. What is remarkable about the film is that the love
between the emperor and the queen is kept on a leash. Neither Akbar nor Jodhaa are allowed to forget the complex politics of their conjugal
relationship.

There is also the subtle directorial portrayal of Akbar as a man with mystical leanings. He prays to Moinuddim Chshti at Chisti before deciding on the marriage with Jodhaa. Then he joins the dance of dervishes — followers of the great Jalaluddin Rumi — at the Chishti shrine. This is certainly an instance of poetic freedom, but it makes the point about

Akbar’s mystical leanings. And he seems to slip into a partial trance when Jodhaa sings the matins for her god, Krishna. But Akbar never lost his senses. He was alert as a king and as a military commander.

It is not surprising that no one has dared to make a film about Akbar which looks at the man’s political vision based on a simple desire to strengthen Mughal rule in India. Gowariker might have erred on
details, but he has caught on to the big idea of Akbar’s life and reign in a beguiling film.