Till last week, not many were aware that a film called Maharaj was supposed to release on Netflix. It starred Junaid Khan, Aamir Khan’s son in his debut, and was based on a milestone legal case. But then, a petition from religious groups in the Gujarat High Court saw its release being deferred.
After a case that lasted a week, Maharaj was finally cleared. It does not hurt religious sensibilities. But sadly, it does hurt logic and the idea of progressive thought itself.
Maharaj hurt me as an audience member, and not for the reasons the VHP or Bajrang Dal were worried about. Maharaj is a fictionalized account of what led to the Maharaj Libel Case of 1862, a landmark case in Indian legal history. Junaid Khan plays Karsandas Mulji , a social reformer and journalist who had written an article exposing the sexual exploitation of female devotees at the hands of Jadunath Maharaj, a leader of the Pushtimarg sect of the Vaishnavas.
The article led to the maharaj filing a case of defamation, which eventually Mulji won. The problem is not in the subject or even Maharaj’s understanding of the case or Pushtimarg’s teachings. It is simply how the film projects an extremely problematic character as the knight in the shining armour.
Karsandas discovers that the Maharaj (played fantastically by Jaideep Ahlawat) has coerced his fiancée Kishori (Shalini Pandey) into having sex with him. The first instinct of our hero is to berate the girl and tell her ‘tumse yeh umeed nahin thi’. It .
