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. However, 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, unfortunately, 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 shining armor. 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 all goes downhill from here.
Every step from there on, this learned Karsandas, the man who advocated for widow remarriage and women’s education, refuses to see the power imbalance between Kishori and the Maharaj, the man whom she worships. His anger is towards his fiancée and her ‘mistake’ and not towards the actual predator in the room. I was willing to excuse this given the Victorian setting of the film and that a little conservatism is to be expected in the 1860s. But as the film progresses, Kishori – the victim – descends into a spiral of self-blame while the man who is supposed to help her leaves her on her own.
. Conservatism aside, these are not the actions of a hero.
The great redemption arc that follows does not come from any admittance of wrongdoing on Karsandas’ part as well. It comes from a need for ‘revenge’, to right the wrongs done by the Maharaj to her and all the other girls like her. But dear Karsan, what of the wrongs you have done to her? You gaslit her, led her to believe she was responsible for being manipulated and abused, and then left her alone. The story of Maharaj could have been about a man who stands up for the woman he loves after she is wronged by a powerful and influential figure. Yet, it was about a man who abandons her and then leads a crusade in her name, all the while not realizing that he was wrong to blame her. Naivety is not a crime big enough to be ostracized for.
And despite all this, Maharaj wants us to believe that this Karsan is a hero. They don’t even bother to project him as a flawed individual. He is righteous all the way through, a beacon of hope in this otherwise dark world. The hypocrisy between his actions and words makes him a rather unlikable person and an odd choice to be the knight in shining armor.
So, while the film has sparked debates and controversies that had religious groups up in arms, its real disservice is to narrative integrity and character development. Maharaj makes a mockery of heroism by projecting a flawed protagonist as the gold standard for righteousness, all the while dismissing the woman’s plight, relegating her to a symbol rather than a person with feelings and a victim’s journey.
This is not just a missed opportunity but a dangerously skewed depiction that does a disservice to both history and contemporary viewers who seek meaningful engagement with progressive thought. The film’s reflections on power dynamics and gender relations are, thus, conveyed through a regressive lens, tarnishing its historical storytelling with misplaced heroism.
I will always fight for a film’s right to be screened, regardless of who thinks it is offensive. But sometimes, when a mediocre, misguided film is the center of such a controversy, one does wonder if they are better off perhaps untouched on their streaming agenda, for it does less harm unseen than it does when viewed without critical introspection.
