Director: Siddharth Malhotra
Writer: Sneha Desai, Vipul Mehta, Bernard Williams
Cast: Junaid Khan, Jaideep Ahlawat, Shalini Pandey
Available on: Netflix
Maharaj is based on the 1862 Maharaj Libel Case debated in the Supreme Court of Bombay. The 19th century was a fertile and fragile period, because suddenly as Indians we were asked to explain ourselves and our faith, to condense it and rationalize its practices — this was, afterall, the century where both the words “Hinduism” and “Hindutva” were coined. The reformers and religionists had different ideas, framing faith according to their respective interpretations and expectations, while the British mediated these tensions with laws that made religious practices like sati illegal, while promoting widow remarriage, and increasing the age of consent for women. Reform is tricky, because it often isn’t clear if it comes from a space of abolishing religion or altering it. There is always an anxiety that looms over change, and this period, with its legal tenets and social tumults was no less different. The 1862 Libel Case is one such moment where these anxieties came to boil.
Jadunath Maharaj had filed a defamation case against the journalist and social reformer Karsandas Mulji, who, in his newspaper Satyaprakash, had outlined Jadunath’s sexual liaisons with female devotees. He even wrote of men who showed their devotion by offering their wives as sexual objects to the “maharaj” — direct male descendents of Vallabha, the founder of the Vaishnavite Pushtimarg sect. Based on this court case, Saurabh Shah wrote a Gujarati novel, also named Maharaj, from which this two-hour film is milked.
Debutante Junaid Khan — best known as actor Aamir Khan’s son — plays the atheist reformer Karsandas Mulji, while Jaideep Ahlawat plays the unruffled and rapacious maharaj. In a looming, lazy voiceover and shabby, quickly-disposed scenes, we are given a ringside biography of Karsandas, from birth to boyhood, and then more — he is eternally inquisitive, irreverent towards untouchability, and promoter of widow remarriage. He is a staunch atheist who gambols with reformers like Dadabhai Naoroji. But no one at home or in his larger community takes him seriously; his reform is considered a plaything.
When he finds out his fiance, Kishori, played by Shalini Pandey, is one of the women who has slept with the maharaj, he is distraught. Not just by the act but by Kishori’s defense of it.
