NEW DELHI, JUNE 22 (ONLINE): The defamation case that Maharaj fictionalises with a fair bit of dramatic flourish was of historic importance. However, the Netflix film, notwithstanding the controversy that delayed its release, is anything but groundbreaking.
The YRF-produced period drama raises important questions of timeless relevance but loses the plot somewhat by choosing soften its pivotal postulations. It resorts to storytelling means that are disappointingly effete and undermined by equivocation.
Adapted for the screen by Vipul Mehta from Saurabh Shah’s bestselling Gujarati book of the same name and directed by Siddharth P. Malhotra, Maharaj is a middling launch pad for debutant Junaid Khan. The actor is unable to break free from the limitations and burden the enterprise places on him.
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The newcomer plays a young 19th century Bombay journalist whose zeal for social reformation in an era of great flux puts him on a collision course with a predatory holy man. Khan tries gamely to rise above the tameness of the script. It’s a losing battle.
A certain degree of performative stiffness creeps into his fleshing out of the kind of fearless crusader that the audience can instantly root for. He is unfailingly industrious in that endeavour but is unable to conceal the enormity and extent of the effort that it demands.
Maharaj picks a real-life story that is certainly not devoid of intrinsic merit. More than 160 years ago, a journalist, inspired and encouraged by social reformer and political leader Dadabhai Naoroji, crosses swords with a powerful religious leader of the Gujarati Vaishnav sect who wields enormous power over the community and sexually exploits his female devotees.
The clash reaches the Supreme Court of Bombay when a combative Karsandas Mulji (Junaid Khan) publishes a daring newspaper expose and Yadunath Maharaj (Jaideep Ahlawat), head priest of a haveli (a religious order located in a specific temple), files a libel suit.
The man of religion is a charlatan who believes that he is continuing a hoary tradition and performing a divine duty by deflowering just- married women or teenage girls offered to him by their husbands and parents respectively.
The community sees the surrender of body and mind to the lust of the venerated Yadunath Maharaj, JJ to his disciples, as a way to earn the blessings of the Almighty. The godman perpetuates the myth and his followers unquestioningly buy into it. “This is both devotion and tradition,” the maharaj says when Karsan confronts him.
Karsan is driven his radical ideas regarding women’s education, widow remarriage, banning of the veil, abolition of untouchability and blind faith. He articulates his revolutionary thoughts not only to an enraged family headed by an orthodox maternal uncle but also to his would-be bride Kishori (Shalini Pandey).
He also writes articles in Dadabhai Naoroji’s Anglo-Gujarati newspaper Rast Goftar to spread awareness about social evils. Maharaj is about one extraordinary man’s fight against a powerful spiritual guru. It is also about an all-out battle between religious manipulation and individual resistance. But the film also addresses several other significant themes that have relevance across time and societies.
These centre on the dangers inherent in creating personality cults, the importance of free thinking in a society where large segments of people fall prey to
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