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IMAGINING A COMMUNITY, PRODUCING A NATION:
HISTORY AND THE PRESENT IN JODHA-AKBAR
PIYA CHAKRABORTY
M.Phil. 2nd Semester, CSSSC
Historical films have always been controversial in India. Every
time such a film releases, historians, journalists and laymen
pounce upon it and fight viciously over issues of historical
authenticity, facial likeness of the actors with the original
historical characters, historical truthfulness of the cinematic
narrative and so on. The case was no different for the Ashutosh
Gowariker production, Jodha-Akbar. As soon as the film released
in 2008, history books came out of the racks once again. The
greatest issue of controversy was the question as to whether
Jodha Bai was the wife or daughter-in-law of Akbar, the third
Mughal Badshah. However, the point to note here is that a movie
about any historical event or character has the right to be
considered as an independent form of narrating the past as well.
Only when the filmic text is considered to be and analysed as a
historical text in its own right, will it reveal the interesting ways
in which a visual text meant for mass-consumption recollects a
four and a half centuries-old past.
HISTORY AND NATION IN JODHA-AKBAR
No historical narrative can capture the past in its entirety.
Through the bits and pieces of material remains left behind by
the past, the historian merely tries to bring together a story
about something that he can never expect to know fully. In the
process of selection, analysis and interpolation of these remains
of the past lies the agency of the historian – everyone does it in
his own way, informed consciously or unconsciously by the
various factors modifying his own subjective position. Following
this idea of history-writing, one then observes that it is the
choice of the particular set of events of Akbar’s life by Gowariker
and the way he chooses to depict them on screen that defines the
politics of the movie at hand.
The first thing that struck me while watching the film was
the random use of the word Hindustan and the repeated
reference to Akbar as the Lord of Hindustan. Now, the
geographical category of Hindustan is Persian in origin and by
the first millenium AD was applied to the territories surrounding
the river Indus (Hindu signifying Sindhu [Indus], stan meaning
place in Persian). By the fifteenth century, its meaning changed
considerably and to the Mughals the category signified the entire
river basin stretching from Punjab in the west to Bihar in the
east. It was only in the twentieth century that the whole of the
Indian subcontinent came to be associated with it. The
increasing polarisation of Indian politics along religious lines
since the later decades of the nineteenth century robbed the
word of its previous geographical connotations. With the word
Hindu now coming to signify a religious community rather than a
people defined by its geographical location, Hindustan also now
came to mean the land of that particular religious community, as
opposed to Pakistan, the land of the Muslims. At present, the
process of saffronistation of history continues to change the word
even further by turning Hindustan into Hindusthan, thus
sanitising the word of its Persian/Islamic content, replacing stan
with the Sanskirt sthan, which has the same meaning – place. In
the movie, the word Hindustan has been used to signify the
whole of the modern nation of India, thereby instilling the
dialogues with a meaning that would have been entirely alien to
Akbar, had he heard them. The idea that Akbar was the Emperor
of a unified India is driven home through the song Marhaba. The
lyrics are blatant -- ‘Hindustan teri jaan/ Tu shan-e Hindustan’,
thus turning him into a patriot par excellence and a nation icon.
The whole sequence resembles the Republic Day parade, with
Akbar sitting on this throne and viewing the exhibition of antics
by people from different parts of his empire, not unlike the
President of India overseeing the parade from her elevated
position in more recent times.
The movie portrays Akbar as the ultimate just ruler and
embodiment of what obviously have been projected as the
universal values India, if anything of the sort was ever to exist.
He rebukes Adham Khan for looting property of commoners, rape
of women, enslaving and converting prisoners of war and
declares these vices to be against the principles of the Mughal
state. He feels for his subjects. The scene where he is measuring
himself against jewels and other valuables, which were to be
distributed among the poor eventually, has clearly been shown to
underlying the fact that Akbar’s heart beat for the poorer
sections of the population. The urgency to portray the secularist
aspect of Akbar’s nature has repeatedly taken centre-stage. His
decision of relieving the Hindus of the pilgrimage tax has been
shown for quite sometime. The scenes where inspite of being
urged by his guardian Bairam Khan, Akbar refuses to slay the
captive leader of his opponent serves the purpose of portraying
Akbar as a just and humane ruler. That these were precisely the
qualities that the Indian ruler was supposed to have probably
owes its origin to the nineteenth century Orientalist discourses
about India being a land of spirituality, kindness, tolerance, non-
violence and compassion, something that was eventually
ideologues of the Indian liberation movement appropriated and
played upon. In time, the historical heroes of India were also
invested with the same qualities, Ashoka and Akbar being the
two icons who seemed to fulfill their expectations just fine.
In the movie, Akbar represents the good Muslim and Jodha
the considerate Hindu. While Akbar incessantly fights the more
orthodox, violent and essentially villainous forces in the persons
of Bairam Khan, the ulama at his court, Adham Khan and
Sharafuddin, Jodha also braves similar forces in the form of Suja
Mal and the Rajas of Rajasthan and repeatedly urge them to be
tolerant of the other community. The union of Akbar and Jodha in
the end can be read as the union of the two major religious
communities of India producing a strong, unified, secular and
tolerant nation.
There is also a play of words regarding Jodha’s insistence
that having faced disfavor from Akbar, she would now return to
him only if he succeeded in winning her heart back. In the
eventual sequence, we see Akbar roaming the streets of Agra
looking for a way into the people’s hearts. He succeeds in this
eventually when he abolishes the pilgrimage tax on Hindus, who
comprised the majority of his population. Acknowledging this,
Jodha returns and says that Akbar had won her heart back. Thus,
there is a merging of the hearts of Jodha and the common
masses. One wonders whether Jodha is temporarily merged into
a Mother India-like figure here, who would willingly submit
herself to Akbar if he won over her heart by caring for her
people.
INDIAN NATIONALISM AND THE CULT OF AKBAR
Like every community, the emerging nation state of India
needed its own heroes. For the Congress, who represented the
political centre in more senses than one, its heroes needed to
embody the moral and ethical values and principles that they
seemingly wanted to base their nation upon. By the early-
twentieth century, these values undoubtedly featured non-
violence, secularism, patriotism, discipline, justice and so on.
Akbar seemed to serve the purpose just fine. The evaluation of
Akbar by the future Congress Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
might seem relevant at this point. Nehru describes Akbar in the
following words:
Daring and reckless, an able general, and yet gentle
and full of compassion, an idealist and a dreamer, but
also a man of action and a leader of men who roused
the passionate loyalty of his followers. As a warrior he
conquered large parts of India, but his eyes were set
on another and more enduring conquest, the conquest
of the minds and hearts of the people... In him the old
dream of a united India again took shape, united not
only politically in one state but organically fused into
one people.
This encapsulates liberal centre’s opinion of Akbar,
counterpoised against Aurangzeb, who according to Nehru and
the political position he represented, put the clock backwards by
reversed Akbar’s liberal, tolerant and essentially secularist
policies. Following this lead, nationalist and Marxist-nationalist
historians began to research more and more on Akbar and
valorise him as against the more shrewd and religious minded
Aurangzeb. He was made out to be a original Father of the
Nation, a man who had produced a unified, secular, tolerant,
multicultural India and worked for the well-being of the common
masses. M. Athar Ali writes, ‘[T]hat Akbar formulated a religious
policy for the Mughal Empire that can in some ways claim to be a
forerunner of the secular aspects of modern Indian polity, is now
almost a historical cliche...’ # Just like the divisive and
communally aligned politics of the mid-twentieth century had
made Congress find its hero in Akbar, the increasing rise of the
Hindu right wing forces in Indian politics since the 1980s led
Marxist-nationalist historians to resurrect the same hero once
again. Consequently, in 1992, one year after the Babri Masjid
demolition by the political right wing, we had nation-wide
celebration of Akbar’s 450th birth aniversary. The present need
of defending the secular multicultural and united nation
reinvigorated the necessity of tracing the roots of India’s
nationhood way into the past. Thus we have Irfan Habib claiming
that ‘The first firm evidence of the “idea of India” is, perhaps, no
older than Gautam Buddha’s time, some two thousand five
hundred years ago (c. 500 B.C.)...’ # He continues, ‘[T]his
conception of India and its distinct composite culture reached its
high tide under Akbar, the great Mughal emperor (1556-1605).’
# Underlying AKbar’s compassion for the suffering masses, he
writes elsewhere, ‘[H]e could not accept the inequities that he
felt were built into the traditions of Hinduism and Islam, notably
in the treatment of women (child marriage, sati, unequal
inheritence) and slaves (especially, slave trade). Moreover, the
influence of tradition (taqlid) was too strong, and this he
thoroughly disapproved. He therefore even tried to frame a
secular and scientific syllabus for education in both Persian and
Sanskrit. Such groping towards a combination of patriotism with
reform seems to anticipate strikingly the core or the 19th
century Renaissance that was to spread out from Bengal.’ #
THE INDIAN NATION IN THE CINEMA OF ASHUTOSH GOWARIKER
All of Ashutosh Gowariker’s movies that have done well in
the box office -- Lagaan (2001), Swades (2004) and Khelein Hum
Jee Jaan Sey (2010) -- have a heavy patriotic overtone. In the first
two among these, we have a patriotic self-sacrificing hero,
fighting for the cause of the Indian nation and a heroine who in
course of the film falls for him, obviously charmed by his selfless
courage and leadership qualities. In Lagaan, Bhuvan wins over
Gauri by his patriotic speeches, brave leadership on the cricket
field and defending the rights of the marginalised people of his
village. In Swades, Mohan Bhargav impresses Gita through
working for the benefit of the rural poor. In this sense, Jodha-
Akbar is no different. When Akbar (Hritthik Roshan) tries to win
back the heart of Jodha Bai (Aishwarya Rai-Bachchan), whom he
had sent back to her maternal home by mistake, Jodha tells her
husband that to rule her heart, he needed to connect with her
belief, her pains and happiness; only then will he be able to reign
over her heart. The dialogues are wonderfully rhetorical.
Eventually we see an enthusiastic Akbar taking measures to
relive the pain of his subjects by listening to their grievances,
relieving them of the pilgrim tax and thus connecting himself
with the common masses, ‘the heart of India’.. In happy approval
of these actions, Jodha returns to Akbar and says, “Humhe ana hi
padha. Apne hamara dil jo jeet liya.” Thus the trope of the
compassionate, patriotic hero winning over his girl his actions is
something that pervades all of Gowariker’s patriotic movies.
The imagination of the Indian nation in Jodha-Akbar, as in
Gowariker’s other films, is that of an unitary, multicultural,
secular nation. the real India lived in villages, among the poor
peasant communities. This is the central idea in Swades, where
Mohan Bhargav, the wealthy NRI, comes and settles down in his
native village to work for its upliftment and development, with
the belief that although his India with all its social vices,
exploitative traditions might not be the greatest of all nations,
she certainly has the potential to become so one day, provided
that its people worked their heart out to this end. Through
Lagaan, Gowariker imagines a similarly inclusivist nation by
including the Muslim potter Ismail, the Sikh sepoy Deva and the
untouchable Kachra in the cricket team that eventually beats the
British.