Jodha Akbar


Last week I saw Ashutosh Gwarikar’s Jodha Akbar.

Some background: Akbar was an embodiment of many contrary traits. He was great at war. And he was sensitive. A turbulent India, torn by bloody violence and looting since Ghazni set foot, was finally returned to peace. Some exceptional principles of governance and administrative structures were commissioned, that helped keep the country powerful and as one until Aurangazeb’s ascent. Akbar was tolerant off the war field. He cultivated art and literature.

Hritik Roshan seemed a fair representation of the warrior-intellectual emperor. For, he looked martial and yet sensitive. There is little image/information about Jodhabai to make any comparison. At the outset, this movie does not seem to be an attempt at serious portrayal of Akbar’s life or society at the time. Rather, it appears to be a commercial venture into bringing the important issues in Akbar’s life, using the canvas of his union with Jodhabai. And it has done that very well.

The movie is probably just a bit more than half way mark into history. Details obviously scripted. There isn’t probably any independent real account into the details. The Mongols (Mughals, in Persian) were nowhere near the Arabs in documentation, meticulousness or even tradition. The Mongols were relatively unorthodox compared to the Turk-Afghan (Slave) dynasty that ruled Delhi before them – and probably that’s why more tolerant (until Aurangzeb).

So many things in the movie make you feel, as if you’ve gone back in time. The movie of course was largely shot in real locations. Thankfully the Agra fort survives. Décor and costumes seem so real – down to minute detail. The Turk turbans, the pots, curtains, utensils.

In subtle ways, the movie captures most of the important issues in Akbar’s rule. There were rulers before him, but with little success in being able to consolidate an empire in turbulent India. What made him successful?

The following account drives the point.

In 1640, Shah Jehan ruled India. That year, a Portuguese priest Sebastien Manrique traveled across the Gangetic lands, from Orissa coast to Bengal, Bihar, and to North India. He had hired a few Muslim bodyguards and guides. While passing through Bengal, the monsoon broke loose. His team had no chance in reaching the Caravan-sarai in next town, and was forced to seek shelter in an unknown village in the middle of the night. The people were kind to admit them in village, but barred them from entering houses because Manrique’s team was meat-eating (Hindus were overwhelmingly pure vegetarians, even in Bengal). So the visitors were housed in a cattle shed. They were though being served with milk and vegetables, while it rained unabated for days. Finally, one of Manrique’s bodyguards, sick with milk & vegetables, grabbed a peacock (village pet) and killed it. The team cooked and ate. They ran away next morning before dawn. The villagers found out in a few hours and chased. Fight ensued, arrows of the villagers versus guns of the European’s team. There were injuries on both sides. The chase ensued until the next town, where the District Administrator resided. Villagers presented their case. The governor ordered arrest of the European team and ordered punishment. Despite Manrique’s articulate defense, the Administrator ruled that under Akbar’s laws (framed a hundred years back), Hindus’ beliefs/customs cannot be breached in Hindu lands. The offender (the Muslim Bodyguard) was sentenced and had his right arm severed.

Akbar’s non-partisan agenda was his biggest strength. He went on to take on his side, the biggest adversaries – the Rajputs. His alliance with the Rajputs and other Hindu chiefs was his biggest strength. This was sealed with his marriage to Jodha. One after another, almost all the Rajput kingdoms were befriended. (The large exception among the Rajputs was Mewar). Jehangir was aided by his Rajput connection. So also Shah Jehan. Shah Jehan’s war general was a Rajput too, who defended the empire’s boundaries at far away lands, even defeating armies in Shah Jehan’s ancestral lands in Central Asia.

The importance of this should be clear from the fact that India was always ruled with the help of Indians. The Slave Dynasty ruled from Delhi (which was a replica of a major Islamic city in those times). The dynasty had control over areas around Delhi and in North, but little beyond that. Hindu chiefs were almost independent, paying tributes only once in a while (in some cases, once in decades). Iltutmish mustered greater control with alliances and his grand infrastructure & welfare projects generated goodwill. The British could rule India only because they received huge support from the natives. By 1930s, the British had lost confidence of at least a vocal minority of the country and found it tough to continue.

The two emperors who indulged in extremism, perished. One was Muhammad bin Tughlaq (Slave dynasty). He was opposed to any conciliatory effort or alliances with the Hindu kings. He managed to antagonize and alienate the Hindu governors (former kings retaining their independence as governor appoint of the emperor) that his great father had cultivated arduously. His morning pastime was torturing captured Hindu kings, followed by stripping their daughters, force them dance in the courtroom and then give them away as gift to any visiting Arab or Persian. Soon, his Hindu governors launched rebellion. Tughlaq spent the rest of his life in an effort to crush rebellion, horse-riding from one part of the country to another. He died on the field.

Aurangazeb’s case was not much different. He was the same kind of religious bigot. He tried to crush Hindu powers, unleashed barbarism. He spent the last twenty years of his life combating Shivaji, but in vein. He died on field, at Deccan, far away from his home Delhi.

In comparison Akbar’s policies were consistent and treated all with equal right.

The Weaker Sex


Among my favorite columnists are Tavleen Singh (IE), Lucy Kellaway (FT), Shekhar Gupta (IE), Veer Sanghvi (HT), John Kay (FT), Arun Shourie (IE), Shobha De (Week). (I have been careful in not mentioning my guru, for it may err on the side of bias). I have greater respect for the intellectual content in all of these writers. But I read the women writers with much greater interest.

Tavleen Singh of Indian Express (New Delhi) writes with enormous fire. She dumps political correctness for some straight talking. Not shying away from what should be apparent and should be told that way. For so many of her male counterparts, it’s regular to seek refuge in words, in order to obscure what is an uneasy truth. Ms Singh has no such pretensions. Nor does she pretend to be a pseudo-secular in a country where the rest of the media & so-called intellectuals are just that. She does not spare cowards & ineffective, either out of fear or for just because they happen to be gentle or honest. The line of thinking is clear.

Lucy Kellaway of Financial Times (London) is not far. While these two ladies write in spheres completely different from each other, their writings have many similar elements. Ms Kellaway ridicules team building exercises revered by the HR departments. She tries to breathe sense into those who labour to understand boss’s jokes as serious humor. Thank god, someone speaks the truth, even if it truth is not always fashionable.

The consistency is even more striking. How week after week, for years these ladies have kept up the onslaught.

Once my guru had remarked: “if there is such thing as a weaker sex, it can’t be women”.

India & Urbanization




One in every 25 indians lives in Delhi or Mumbai. Add Kolkata to it and the figure comes down to 20. Nearly 50 million Indians live in these 3 cities. This is larger than populations of most European countries, or even Australia.

But as a nation, we are reluctant urban.

To be politically correct, you have to say that ‘India is a country of farmers’. The truth of course is far from that. India is actually a country of farm labourers. Nearly 65% of india’s population is engaged in farm related activity in villages. They account for 20% of India’s economic output. And that is why they are poor. Just too many people farming a land area. Again, on paper India has the largest land area under cultivation. But much of that is farce because the land under irrigation is much smaller. As for the land under irrigation, output per unit of land is much lower than in China. In many areas where farmers are reluctant to give up their land for industry, the landholding is roughly an acre (87,000 sq ft) per owner – the size of a kitchen garden! What farming are we talking about?

In the earlier decades, we killed our textile industry much before militant trade-unions hammered the final nail. The government thought textile to be important industry for growth and jobs. Its socialist policies thought it necessary to intervene, and in turn needed the size of each textile manufacturer to be limited. As a result, we nurtured our textile industry into utter un-competitiveness and allowed other countries to catch up, shrinking our share in the world market from more than a third to a less than 1.5%.

This reminds me of a famous international institutional investor saying “China is what it is because of its government, and India is what it is in spite of its government”.

Now we are probably doing that to our farms. Subsidies, more subsidies and loan waivers. For any vibrant economy, the uncompetitive methods need to die and pave way for the more efficient ways. We need efficient farms, to improve farm productivity. We need industrial and city jobs for today’s village folks – the only way to improve their earnings and standard of living. That would need vibrant cities.

But we are still living in a state of denial. Our governments are ashamed of committing funds to make our cities capable of handling more people, more efficiently. Every now and then, erupts a politician pretending to speak for the villages.

Good quality of life is a good thing– and everyone would acknowledge it. Once upon a time, villages provided that. Today villages are in bad shape. Our villages lack basic amenities. To laud village-life as virtuous in current times, while demonizing cities, is self-denial. Denying that the only way to lift a billion people's lives lies is in urban centres.


We need many more Mumbais and Delhis.