In the bollywood epic Bajirao Mastani, the themes of empire, ruins, and progress is regress is explored at length. The movie is about a hindu king and a muslim princess who fall in love. However, their love is forbidden because as a Hindu king, he is only allowed to be with Hindu princesses. His wife also has a lot to go through, as she has to deal with his inability to love her, as he is crazed with the love he has for the muslim princess. The first characteristic that the prince, Bajirao, exhibits that connects to him not being a virgilian hero, is the fact that he lets go of all of his responsibilities and puts her before his duties. He neglects his pietas, fatum, and labor. Instead of tending to his delicate nation, he instead only puts her needs before his own.
This relief of responsibilities is what causes his nation to go down in flames. He is similar to Dido in the fact that he, like her, puts his lover first. This characteristic is, once again opposite to a Virgilian hero. He also neglects labor, as he stops fighting for his nation and going through war in order to achieve his goals of expanding his nation. Furthermore, the brahmin priests who are like the Gods in this situation intend for him to govern his nation with the good qualities that they have instilled in him.
However, he instead neglects this and openly disobeys them when they try to remind him of his fate. He instead dismisses them completely which correlates to him letting go of his righteous duties and displaying ideals of trojan decadence, such as being lazy, being too involved with romance, and being extremely selfish and not putting his army or his nation first. Furthermore, this showcases the notion of progress is regress within an empire. At first, his empire is blooming and is extremely successful, however, after he meets her, his empire starts to regress and become prone to being overtaken by the Mughal empire.
I feel as though at times it is hard to have a balance between the responsibilities one has to themselves and what they want, and the responsibilities that they have to other people. But, I think that the best way, is not to jump to extremes, but rather to find away to merge both of those worlds, and divide this type of attention responsibilities equally.
This is regressing, especially after there was so much progress that occurred before he met her. This showcases that no matter how powerful an empire is, and no matter how much success it enjoys, like every other empire, it will also one day fall and lose its leverage. Furthermore, it goes along with the notions of women as agents of chaos. Bajirao was representative as an agent of order as he was ruling his empire and it was known as the most powerful empire of his time, but as soon as she came she served as a distraction to him and kept him away from his duties. Along with serving as an agent of chaos, she is also similar to Dido.
As a princess she has her own duties as well that she neglects when she finds him and she ignores her duties to her own empire in order to pursue him, so much so that she follows him from her own empire to go to his. Both the main characters fit into the stereotypes of what the Virgilian hero has as agents of chaos and agents of order as Mastani, the princess who distracts him of his duties and is represented as ruining his empire.
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It amazes me that there is so much similarity between the story you just described and that of Aeneas and Dido. I find it really interesting that anyone with so much power, like that of the king in this story, would give up everything he has simply to be with another woman the falls in love with. I do not deny that love is a powerful emotion, perhaps the most powerful driver of all human activity, but knowing that that relationship would have been forbidden, the king should have know better than to even allow to himself to come anywhere close to even liking a Muslim princess, let alone falling in love with one. However, it is understandable that once he has fallen in love with her, there is almost no going back. I do not believe this can be compared to Aeneas’s situation in the same regard though, because Aeneas was not yet a man already in power; he was still in pursuit of his empire. Overall, I think you made some very interesting connections here. Well done.
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