The royals of Rajputana and the Karni Sena plebs

It isn’t every day Suhel Seth seems to be doing the right thing. That gives one cause to ponder. Is everything fine with this world, has the sun risen in the east and has the earth revolved without shifting its axis? It is indeed such a rare occurrence from the wannabe gadfly. But, yes, a lone sane voice in an asylum can sound like genius.

Almost a week before November 26, which is observed as Constitution Day to commemorate the date in 1949 when the country’s Constituent Assembly adopted the laws that rule it, the Big Fight on NDTV made for strange viewing. Despite 67 years as a republic, a fact drilled into the collective cranium at school and on our passports, the genuflecting before accented royalty was on full ceremonial display, just as much as during the British Raj.

The Big Fight is, of course, the show where three people take an issue and rip the bejesus out of it and nobody allows anyone to finish a sentence. Or am I hungover on another channel? Anyway; on with matters at hand.

On November 18, the issue plaguing the country was the row over Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmavati that has seen people threatening to behead its lead actor, Deepika Padukone, or, at the least, slice off her pretty nose. All this for some dream sequence or dance performance, we would know for sure but then none of the screamers have seen the film other than Arnab Goswami and Rajat Sharma, who have declared it respectful to Rajputs, so don’t panic – thanks guys. The film has been banned for hurting Rajput sentiments in six states including Bihar, governed by born-again BJP ally, the Janata Dal-United.

To make sense of it all on that mid-November show, Vikram Chandra introduced his guests: Counselage managing partner Suhel Seth, The Indian Express film critic Shubhra Gupta and S Irfan Habib (not the Marxist historian from Aligarh).

“Before I come to any of you….” Chandra did a verbal shashtang pranam as if Maharana Pratap was to arrive by séance. An anchor’s equivalent of a Rajput trumpet blast of honorifics followed to introduce Shriji Arvind Singh Mewar of Udaipur. An elderly, bearded gentleman with bushy eyebrows squinted into the camera. The next superlative that followed was more menacing: he was the 76th Custodian of Mewar. Democracy and the republic sighed on Raisina Hill. Chandra wasn’t done yet, oohing and aahing at the mere pleasure of speaking to Arvind Singhji.

Remember this for all time: when someone starts with a disclaimer, he or she is going to head off in precisely the opposite direction. The Custodian of Mewar started with saying he doesn’t at all endorse any call for violence and that he believes he is a liberal. Then he does the first somersault: that non-Rajputs cannot relate to the sensibilities of the Rajput community which possesses them as a clan. He wishes someone cleverer than he would make a more articulate presentation to aid non-Rajputs to understand.

Other somersaults happen lightning-fast and smooth: first, one must decide if the film is historical, a documentary or romantic fiction (it’s a film, sir); second, that when making a film or when writing, artistic licence is needed but, he then adds, it can’t be unbridled. Watch and learn.

All this while Chandra is saying it is uncertain whether Padmavati was a historical figure and that the protesters haven’t seen the film at all since it hasn’t been released. The royal then deems that the Censor Board doesn’t have the mandate to judge the historicity of the movie but allows for its functioning otherwise.

As evidence of Queen Padmavati’s existence, Mr Mewar says she was married into his family (remember, he is the 76th custodian) and shares a photo of the palace where she lived. This is not made much of, except by S Irfan Habib who asks what is the official record or court account of such a marriage. Chandra even suggests to Mewar if he will like it if Bhansali shows the film to some Rajput royals for their clearance.

But, seriously, has the 76th custodian of Mewar, and the sundry minor royalty that have jumped into the studios to battle the “twisting of Rajput history”, done anything which has not been done by the many footsoldiers of the fledgling Karni Sena? The Karni Sena has been making a lot of noise about the film and has been thoroughly dismissed by the TV studio folk as vermin and what not. This is despite the many-hued turbans they wear that enliven the drab studio. Remember the guy who flashed a sword on air?

Why is it okay for the tony and effete elite inhabiting the TV studio to suck up to royalty that says the same curmudgeonly thing while People Like Us turn our noses up at the reactionary turban-clad fundoo?

Or is it that the accented Indian gets a leg and torso up from the inhabitant of rurban India because of the lilt of the word “issue” (not iss-SHOE but iss-sue as in chopSUEy)?

There is the republican angle to all this as well. The Constitution and its Preamble make us all equal. Why should the custodian of Mewar get a full nine minutes to expound on whatever he wishes to say and the rest of the Senas get nothing (Chandra intones something about gundagardi before “introducing” Mr Mewar)? This happened in all TV studios that “debated” Padmavati.

Why should we mock the plebeian and pay extra attention to the royal when all was done and dusted on November 26, 1949?

PS: Suhel Seth went at both the royals and Karni Sena, unlike the fawning studio folk.