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.