| I had my brief moment of fame this week when a TV reporter in Jaipur wanted to know what I thought of the self-imposed ban by cinema owners against the screening of Jodhaa Akbar in the city, for fear it would incite violent mobs to do what they do best. At the heart of the controversy over the new film by Ashutosh Gowarikar is the position taken by some that Akbar's Hindu wife was not Jodhaa Bai at all, that he never married a Rajput princess, that she was, in fact, his daughter-in-law, that the film was distorting facts. |
| The hullabaloo over Jodhaa Bai is hardly new. As a sometime chronicler of the oral history of the state, in interviews spread across several years, I have been told by various clan members that she was an Amber (that's Jaipur for you) princess, that she was from Marwar (that's Jodhpur), that she was not a princess at all, that the Rajput wives that were sent to the Mughal bed were not high-born but the daughters of concubines, and other variants of petty charges about which Rajput state was the first to succumb to Mughal pressure and start the trend of matrimonial alliances as a measure of their loyalty (or, indeed, subjugation) to a foreign power. |
| Pretty soon, though, most Rajput kingdoms in Rajasthan were forging similar alliances, so the bickering about who did it first, or second, or even last, is so much detail, but it can still lead to spilled drinks (if not blood) at cocktail parties where honour and pride is still at stake five centuries after the "princesses" exchanged the Rajput zenana for the Mughal harem. The fact that women, whether in the Rajput or the Mughal hierarchy, accounted for little real significance is evident in that there are no records that actually prove which of them married into the Mughal durbar, in what order, though there is general agreement that there were pre-nuptial agreements about whose sons would be the chosen heirs to the gaddi. |
| Given their near anonymity, you might be forgiven for thinking that recreating the story of at least one such "princess" who found love within the formal framework of an alliance, would endear itself to the community. Wrong. The princess "" whether she was from Jaipur or not "" is a symbol not of romance but of sacrifice, we are informed. Anything else is, yes, "a distortion of facts". |
| The courts issued a directive that the film carry a disclaimer, but apparently this has done little to assuage anger in the pink city. And so, while I railed about creative freedom and artistic licence and so forth with the television reporter, members of the clan took a position that the screening had, in fact, been rightly banned. Why, I asked my sister-in-law, was she opposed to the screening of the movie? "Because on the basis of the film," she insisted, "people will think this was the truth." And is she sure the "facts" in the movie are wrong? "There is no time capsule out there with the truth," she scolded me, though I was unclear whether that meant she knew, or didn't know, whether Jodhaa was Akbar's wife, or daughter-in-law, or even an Amber princess after all. |
| My wife, meanwhile, was looking distinctly uncomfortable. Did she too think censorship rather than debate was the only option available to the people of Jaipur? "I don't know about history and all that guff," she responded, "but I would like to see the film." "So that you can make up your own mind about it?" I applauded her decision. "No, silly," she laughed, reaching for her magnifying glass, "because I want to see the jewellery they are wearing on the sets." |
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