Alal and Jodha have a certain lilt, certain chemistry. They’re Hrithik and Aishwarya after all. Not so, Akbar and Heera Kanwar, Jodha, Harka Bai, Maryam Zamani….or any other name. It’s a Bollywood movie, for Chris sakes, not a docu-drama. So, directors have a generous artistic licence. That’s why there never was any protest at the historicity of the K-serial-like royal household presented in K Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam with grandee father and mother (Akbar and ‘Jodhabai’), feckless son (Salim, aka Jehangir) and misunderstood angel (Anarkali) etc.
We happily accepted the mummy-daddy characters played by the portly Durga Khote and Prithviraj Kapoor, but now want poor Ashutosh Gowarikar to prove the authenticity of the smoldering protagonists of the eponymous film Jodhaa-Akbar. Do we think real romancing couples actually warble their love or anxiety to the accompanied of background music? Of course not; that only happens in Bollywood. Well, so does the Jalal and Jodha love duet. Unfortunately, the truth for those interested in knowing it - is vague and therefore open to interpretations. So there are enough historians -like statistics to prove or disprove anything. The best bet, then, is to take the movie at (pretty) face value and enjoy it for the costumes (by Neeta Lulla, modem cocktail versions now on sale too) and the jewellery (by Tanishq, also pan of the merchandising blitz) and maybe for the cinematography. As for history, naah, don’t both- , because you’ll emerge more confused.
But if you insist….
Let’s get the bare facts straight first. Jodha, Harka, Maryam, whatever, wasn’t Akbar’s first wife. That honour went to his first cousin, Ruqaiya, the daughter of his uncle Hindal. She never had children but Akbar obviously held her in high regard as she was entrusted later with the upbringing of his infant grandson Khurram, later Emperor Shahjehan. Jodha, Harka, Maryam, (and again) whatever, wasn’t even Akbar’s second wife: that was Salima Sultan, the beauteous widow of his disgraced mentor Bairam Khan, and mother of Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan.
The royal Kachwaha annals do record that a princess of Amer or what is now Jaipur, was married off to Akbar. That’s Queen Number Three. The question is whether her name was Jodh (no ‘a’ at the end, never mind ‘aa’!) or Harka or Maryam and, of course, whatever.
Well, once officially one of Akbar’s queens, she lost her identity in the harem as was the norm, so even if she was Jodh Bai, she eventually became Maryam Zamani - an honorific similar to her mother in law Hamida Bano Begum’s title of Maryam Makani.
The name Maryam had once excited some historians to conjecture that the queens were, n or had become, Christians, but that’s complicating it too much. We’re only talking about getting a movie straight after all; not looking at Akbar’s religious predilections. And there are, too many women in the tale anyway already: wives and wenches, wet nurses… and Ma.
Maryam Makani, Akbar’s mother, was around till only two years before Akbar himself died, and we know how important mothers are….don’t doubt the efficacy of Mere paas Ma hai.
Enter the confusion. Erase all the historians quoted by all previous newspaper and other stories as read. Instead, start with an unusual picture painted by a usual suspect, Salman Rushdie. A lyrical short story in the New Yorker this month has the magic realist making Jodha a palimpsest a figment of a grandiose emperor’s imagination as an embodiment of perfection that the hundreds in his harem can never match up to, even all together.
At the other end, there’s Lt Colonel James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, that was for a long time a major historical ready reckoner. That venerable India-hand’s 19th century account of Rajpootana’s travails, however, can hardly be praised for consistency. In the two volumes, there are many contradictory references to marriages between Rajput princesses and Mughal emperors, a fact which some anti-Jodhaa-Akbar protestors actually dispute!
Some examples of how Tod has complicated the confusion: In the first volume, on page 282, he writes thus about the Rathore prince of Marwar, “Oody ‘le gros’ (Udai the Fat) was the first of his race who gave a daughter in marriage to a Tatar. The bribe for which he bartered his honour was splendid; for four provinces yielding £200,000 of annual revenue were given in exchange for Jod Bae..” and a footnote adds helpfully, “The magnificent tomb of Jod Bae, the mother of Shah Jehan, is at Secundra near Agra…”
Ergo, Tod asserts that the first Rajput- Mughal alliance happened not because Akbar launched his policy of matrimonial alliances as current school textbooks say, but when “Jod Bae” married Jehangir, right? Well, not quite….For, on the very next page Tod says, “It has been already related that Hemayoon espoused a daughter of Bagwandas, consequently Raja Maun was brother in law to Akber…”Hmmm.
In the second volume, on page 30, however, he blithely writes, “On the union of the imperial house with that of Jodpoor, by the marriage of Jod Bae to Akber…” and then on page 36 he says, “Sultan Purvez, the elder son and heir of Jehangir, was the issue of a princess of Marwar (read Jodhpur) while the second son Khoorm, as his name imports, was the son of a Cutchwaha princess of Amber”. It’s dear that the more you read, the more confused you get.
What’s in a name-anyway? If she’s Jodh Bai does she have to be from Jodhpur, i.e., a Rathore princess of Marwar? And if she’s Man Bai (as some say), does she have to be a Kachwaha princess of Jaipur and therefore some relative of the famous Raja Man Singh? Not at all.
Rathore historian Dhananajaya Singh says that Kachwaha royal chronicles have records of a princess (daughter of Raja Bharmal and sister of Man Singh) marrying Akbar and a Rathore princess (later styled Jagat Gosain) marrying Jehangir. So the chances are Akbar’s Jaipuri begum could well have been Jodh and Jehangir’s Jodhpuri begum could well have been Manbai or even Jagat Gosain.
That last name hardly sounds romantic; can you imagine Aishwarya being called Jagat Gosain? Well, why not?
