Jodha Akbar

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” — George Orwell’s 1984

“men and women make their own history, but not in conditions of their making” — Karl Marx 

“The way the protests are raging all over India about one thing after another, one would assume everyone in India had read every book and seen every film.I didn’t partcularly care to see the film considering historical characters always seem to be potrayed as types rather than individuals in our historicals and from what i could make of the trailers J & A doesn’t seem to be an exception.(But to be fair i’ve haven’t checked out the movie yet.)

However the controversy against Jodha-Akbar just goes on to show how people are unaware of the concept of multiple discourses, micronarratives, many histories. We as a culture are just so set in our truths that even in the 21st century an alternate version gets our hackles up.

This is not just an issue of creative freedom regarding history but another example of a disturbing trend in recent times – creative or alternate versions of reality not even being heard out. Historian Romila Thapar is branded an ‘intellectual terrorist’ for claiming ancient Hindu’s consumed beef, the resistance to Deepa Mehta’s potrayal of the wretched lives of widows in Water or of lesbianism in Fire. There seems to be no tolerance for contesting truths. 

But subversion will occur and alternate realities will continue to give autocrats the slip.The truth is fluid and if Jacque Derrida is to be believed every discourse contains within it the seeds of its own deconstruction(in this case read destruction)