The basic premise of Maharaj Ki Jai Ho (2020) isn't exactly new; "street-smart guys from contemporary India trapped in the past try to survive in the court of a powerful emperor" was also the premise of the splendidly titled Fun2shh: Dudes in the 10th Century, at the very least. The twist is that the emperor in question isn't any random maharaj, it's Dhritarashta, blind king of Hastinapur, scion of the doomed Kuru dynasty, and one of the central characters in the Mahabharata. Did I mention that this is a sitcom?
Pickpocket and small-time thief Sanjay (Satyajeet Dubey) is released from jail on the day of his wedding to Sweety (Maera Mishra). On the way home, though, he's waylaid by gangsters, who force him to steal a super-advanced solar powered car. And when that goes horribly wrong, Sanjay drives onto a military base, where he gets sucked up by a black hole, and thrown into the past. (Definitely not a black hole, but that's what the subtitles tell me. Could be a wormhole.)
Sanjay arrives in the court of Dhritarashta (Nitesh Pandey) and his wife Gandhari (Monica Castelino.) Since the car is obviously a miraculous chariot sent as a gift by Indra himself, it follows that Sanjay must be a miraculous charioteer sent as a gift by Indra himself. (In the actual Mahabharata, Dhritarashta does have a miraculous charioteer named Sanjay who is gifted with divine vision; Sanjay the sitcom character is specifically named after him.)
And, well, it's a sitcom, so wackiness ensues. Sanjay meets Albert D'Souza (Ashwin Mushran), the scientist who created the "black hole," and who has disguised himself as a maidservamt for reasons which are never entirely made clear. He clashes with Shakuni (Aakash Dabhade), Gandhari's brother, who has been reduced from a master manipulator driven by spite to a sitcom foil driven by a desire for money. And he falls hard for Sunaina (Riya Sharma), a ruthless bandit who turns out to be a literal warrior princess, the daughter of Dhritarashta's rival Suryabhan (Rajesh Kumar.)
The characters are fun and engaging, and Sanjay and Sunaina show great chemistry. Sanjay's courtship style largely involves quoting old Shah Rukh Khan movies at Sunaina, and the show gets some great mileage out of the violin gag from Main Hoon Na. This is a TV show that isn't afraid to milk a good joke for everything it's worth.
The problem is that the show is also not afraid to milk a bad joke for everything it's worth. Dhritarashta and Gandhari are deeply in love, delightfully earnest, and fascinated by Sanjay's many "inventions" (like cricket, trial by jury, democracy, and treating women as people) but all too often the punchline is "They're blind." D'Souza is not a mad scientist, but he is a cranky one, utterly amoral, and happy to betray everyone if it means he and Sanjay can finally go home, but the show never lets us forget that he's also a man in women's clothing. And then there are the Rakshasas, and . . . oh dear.
The Rakshasas in Maharaj Ki Jai Ho are not supernatural creatures, they're a human tribe who live in the forests around Hastinapur. I think they were intended as a spoof of the Kalakeya tribe from the Bahubali series. Like the Kalakeya, they're named after a class of demon, and while the Kalakeya are brutal warriors who despoil all they conquer, the Rakshasas are comedy cannibals, while the Kalakeya speak a carefully constructed fictional language, the Rakshasas speak gibberish (and their chieftain is just doing a Donald Duck impression), and while the actors portraying the Kalakeya have had their skin darkened, the rakshasa are painted black. (This seems to be true in-universe, with the characters painted black instead of it being their natural skin tone, but that doesn't really make it better.)
The thing is, Bahubali's Kalakeya are already sort of problematic, and Maharaj Ki Jai Ho exaggerates all their problematic aspects to a cartoonish degree. The Rakshasa showed up early in the series as Sunaina's partners in crime, and I winced through that episode and celebrated when they went away, but towards the end of the series they just kept popping up in the background.
I'm baffled. I'm not sure who decided that this potentially fun sitcom with an engaging premise and a charming cast needed to keep hammering away at its worst joke, but it was the wrong decision.
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