He is the quintessential warrior: large, chiseled, ruthless, and yet filled with integrity and justice. She is a princess: innocent, untouched, idealistic, but also strong-willed and brimming with righteous indignation. She comes to him unwillingly, forced by circumstance. His acceptance of her is merely an accident of fate, a consequence of a larger scheme of things. Their worlds are separated by all sorts of chasms. He scares her, she infuriates him, but when their eyes meet, their hearts flutter and despite their colliding wills, they melt. 

Then, just when she has penetrated his armor and reached his oh so soft and benevolent soul and he has caused much heaving of her oh so ample bosom, evil forces outside their control churn up a painful estrangement. When at last he sees the error of his ways, much wooing follows until finally, she is faced with the magnitude of her own by now all-encompassing love which is further hammered home by his heroic almost-death. Finally, when it is time for the story to end, they both find their way into each others’ very eager arms, and there is much rejoicing and everyone lives happily ever after.

 

Yes, I know it sounds just like the plot of Ashutosh Gowarikar’s long-awaited film, Jodha Akbar. But it isn’t. It’s the plot of every single novel ever published under the embarrassingly prolific “Historical Romance” genre. And if you take out all the opulence, drain all the noble-blood and tweak a few circumstances here and there, then it’s pretty much the plot of every Romance novel ever written. Oh, and I forgot the most important plot point, both the noble-blooded lovers are insanely beautiful, luscious and desirable and created to near-perfection by a very inequitable creator.

 

To that plot point, Jodha Akbar, adheres most faithfully. Both Akbar and Jodha are absolutely gorgeous. His long lean muscles, ripple cooperatively as he locks weapons with humans and bare hands with beasts. Her head-to-toe armor of jewels pales in comparison to the artistic lines of her lovely face. His perfectly tailored and painstakingly embellished clothes hang artfully over his impressive bulk as he moves gracefully from scene to scene. Her moist slightly parted mouth quivers as her doe eyes gaze meaningfully at him. His gold-flecked blue eyes brim with integrity when they aren’t jellying our bellies with their besotted devotion. And we get a ringside view of it all, each ripple, each cut, each tall broad stroke, in great detail, for a very very long time.

 

That might sound like a complaint, but, really, it isn’t. It’s all immensely entertaining, especially, if like me (and apparently like the movie’s writer) you are a closet Romance novel enthusiast. It’s quite a ride. You get to sit inside Royal palanquins and make eyes at a smitten emperor. You get to believe that love can triumph all, that passion can fell vicious politicians and agenda-laden clerics, that men who have countries to rule and lands to annex, at the end of the day, have hearts that go bing bang bang. You get to believe that men who have hundred-woman harems at their disposal pine away for the one they cannot have, but want ever so much. Oh wait, that’s not from the movie that’s from some inane article about ‘real’ history. Scratch that.

 

History has no place in a Historical that hinges on the most important question asked by all good fiction: What if? What if Jodha and Akbar had fallen madly in love? It’s not hard to believe that they did. After all, why would a plundering Mogul suddenly become benevolent toward the majority of his people, if he weren’t ruled by his you know… heart. This is something the clerics also accuse him of. He, of course, does not care. He is too enchanted by his bride’s sweet bhajan-singing voice as it wafts out of her cloistered harem suite and makes its long winding journey to the Dewan-e-Khas with magical clarity. He follows her voice, as if in a trance, into a most charming scene where he lays eyes upon his breathtaking wife for the very first time. An emperor is felled. And history be damned.

 

It is easy to get sucked into the romance of these two beautiful people, who do their royal thing quite well, what with the proud stance and the arrogant glance. But just as you are really getting into their love-laced push and pull, suddenly a whole lot of royals show up, talking politics, their immense bellies hanging over their impeccably zardozied achkans, their varied facial-hair styles trembling with purpose, and you have to get out of your magical trance and focus on their machinations. Then just when you are starting to grasp that there is some very serious business going on, the gooey eyes across pardas and drawn swords return. So you are shuttled between a promising romance and a half-baked battlefield of pride, greed and betrayal, and you start to feel rather put-upon. The tacky cannon-balls-flying-in-the-air and extras-flailing-plastic-swords war scenes don’t help make the transition any easier, and you flail about yourself trying to decide which part of this surprisingly badly tied together film to focus on. Because really, focusing on both is downright trying.

 

The reason perfectly practical and seemingly intelligent people devour romance novels is the same reason kids gobble down candy knowing the dentist’s drill is waiting. It’s the same reason we still go into raptures over DDLJ, Sholey and Mughal-E-Azam, because reality loses its relevance when you appeal to people’s baser instincts. Every once in a while everyone wants to escape into a perfect world without the disturbance of facts and logic. It is a lofty goal to try and engage both our romantic hearts and our knowledge-hungry brains at the very same time. They just don’t work simultaneously, we don’t want them to. Which is why there is serious cinema and then there is the unabashedly escapist cinema we know and love and hunger for like open-mouthed fools. And the twain have rarely ever met.

 

Imagine the ammunition here, to write a great story and make a great film. The greatest emperor in Indian history being played by the most beautiful man to grace Indian cinema in recent years and have the decency to actually be able to act. The most beautiful woman on Indian celluloid playing a princess from the most fierce race to spring from Indian soil. A time of war leading to a time of peace. Religious strife. The seeds of secularism being sown in a country that will never know religious homogeneity. This in the hands of a man who actually made it to the hallowed Oscar halls, with an entire industry waiting to worship at the altar of his well-proven film-making skills. The best costumes, the most magnificent sets, and a salivating audience who is eagerly waiting for its next scrap. It should’ve been magic. It could’ve been magic. But it stops, instead, at being what is infuriatingly called “a nice one time watch.”

 

I would’ve admired Ashutosh Gowarikar’s gumption for taking on the challenge of appealing to both sides of our dual-personalities, but I do believe that he did not set out to do that. More possibly, he set out to make a love story, but then got enamored by the history and just couldn’t put the brakes on. Or it might’ve been the other way around. But in the end he appears to have felt like a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist writing a Harlequin Romance. He seems to have been embarrassed making a shallow love-story with no social relevance after having made Lagaan and Swades. In any case, whatever his excuse, the only level at which Jodha Akbar made any impact on me was as a good old-fashioned romance between two people who refuse to let differences between them separate them. That in itself should have been sufficiently socially relevant. The rest of it was just a backdrop and should’ve been treated as such. Then perhaps the effort wouldn’t have overwhelmed him so much that he had to resort to power-point style transitions between scenes, crudely caricatured villains and a contrived everyone-shows-up-in-one-place climax with dismally inept extras floating about the place.

 

I so wanted to love this movie, I really did. Where a powerless princess dares to put her foot down in the face of a seemingly barbaric power monger and an illiterate barbarian turns out to be a silky smooth statesman who dares to choose harmony over aggression and brings it all together. But unlike Jodha and Akbar, I couldn’t quite pull the love off; instead I got lost on the battlefield somewhere behind a sluggishly bouncing cannonball.