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Jodhabai did WHAT to India? The REAL Truth 🤯 Indian Mughal History - FutureIQ

70,556 views Wait, is this logic right? • Dec 13, 2024
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Slog Reference: Jodhabai Changed History of India

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Did Jodhabai Alter the Course of Indian History? In this episode, we uncover the untold story of Jodhabai, a queen whose actions nearly reshaped the future of India. Known as Akbar's wife, her true influence stretches far beyond what most people know. From shaping Mughal policy to challenging European powers, Jodhabai’s strategic moves led to the rise of British power in India. Join us as we explore how one woman’s vision, intelligence, and daring actions could have changed India's history forever. Could Jodhabai have been the key to India’s survival as a free nation? Watch the video till the end to find out!

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Book Link:
Annals & Antiquities of Rajasthan by James Tod: https://tapthe.link/C9r3L_vBW7

00:00 What’s in a Name? / Jodhabai or Miriam?!
02:37 Is History wrong??
03:45 So who IS Jodhabai?
06:44 Slay Queen Jodhabai
09:30 3 Key Moments Of Jodhabai's
14:45 English Or Portuguese, what's the difference?

#futureiq #jodhabai #indianhistory

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Jodhabai Changed History of India

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Transcript

did you know that akbar's wife popularly but mistakenly known as jodhabai was a very accomplished entrepreneur and her business problems resulted in the shifting of mugul strategy because of which today we are an ex British colony instead of an ex Portuguese Colony so this is the story of how a Hindu Queen's Muslim ship carrying hudge pilgrims in Christian Waters patrolled by the Portuguese resulted in changing the course of India's history no wait two questions one what do you mean mistakenly called jodhabai and two wasn't she just akbar's Queen well she was much more than just akbar's Queen okay during her son's Reign she was so influential and Powerful that she almost became a king maker for British wor as
Portuguese but let me answer your first question first she was not jodhabai in fact we don't know her real name because because in those days the mugal did not like the idea of their women's names being banded about in public so women were mostly known by their titles and this person was known either as Mariam zamani a name given to her by Akbar on the birth of Saleem who went on to become jahangir okay or she was called as Malika Hindustan right yeah kind of I mean that makes sense right the word jodhabai isn't really a name it just means the princess from jodpur and she wasn't from jodpur she was from umber then why why is she called jodhabai the
problem is that James STD an officer in the British East India Company wrote a very popular book called annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan 200 years later and in that he mistakenly once referred to her as jodhabai and his book got very popular and that's why the name stuck and then everyone after that started calling her jodhabai in fact James to wasn't a historian okay his book is riddled with mistakes like calling ranaa mirabai's husband or calling padmin a real queen which she was not but it was so well written that it became very popular and in fact a lot of what we today think of as rajputs right and their aura H most of it comes
because of his book okay how do we know that James to is wrong like well by studying the real historians right and what real historians do is they look at books and things that were written at that time not 200 years later so you know jahangir's own writings Abul fil's writings you know Abul fuzel is very famous biographer of the right and in that she is referred to as marama zamani right in fact jangar second wife was the real jod she was from jpur right so James to sort of mixed them up ah because he was looking at it 200 years later and he was probably going with some spoken accounts or whatever somebody confused it he ended up
confusing it because he wasn't really interested in accuracy he was writing nice stories okay yeah so beware of stories when you read them but anyway so the person we know as jodhabai let's for the rest of this episode we will call her jodai even though that's not her name because most of India thinks of her as jodai and who are we to argue with most of India and most importantly the movie will become false if that is the case we can't allow that to happen right yes Jokes Aside the person we know as jodhabai yeah who was she right where did she come from yeah so there was this little kingdom umber okay and it was
like a lame Little Kingdom at that time do you really want to call it lame I'm coming to it see what happened right it gets better okay okay the king who was her father was really struggling and he was this close to being completely crushed by one of akbar's generals right okay then he had a brain wave what he did was he approached the 20-year-old Akbar M and offered the hand of his oldest daughter who's also 20 years old to Akbar in marriage and she was beautiful we have heard stories of that Akbar was smitten of course and soon after the wedding mm Akbar also realized that she was very intelligent very quickly she became his
favorite wife the highest ranking person in his harim and because of that the influence of the rest of the family also went up right they became very powerful in the mugal Kingdom the king became a major general uh in fact her nephew is Man Singh who later on went off to become the most powerful general of the mugul army right Raj Man Singh yes we've heard that name before correct in fact I remember some bits of this from the movie that came out Jodha Akbar and in fact the movie did portray her in a very positive light right in fact the portrayal wasn't positive enough oh okay because she was so much more okay see
the movie did show that she was very influential with Akbar right uh it shows her that she made Akbar more tolerant of Hinduism and of all religions in General it is also true that she changed the culture of the mugal code brought in a whole bunch of new sensibilities from her rajput background she is also the reason why Akbar abolished the unfair jiz attx on non-muslims okay all of this is true but that's not all okay she was much more okay for example she was an entrepreneur carrying on a serious big business she had so much money that she had a stuff of financial advisers and I quote mirroring in miniature the emperor's own finance ministry wow okay
she was one of the only four members of the court and the only woman to have the rank of 12,000 Cavalry okay wow that's huge of the other four people one of them was the emperor himself yeah okay yeah she was also granted the right to issue fans usually the exclusive privilege of the emperor yeah and she did all of this from behind the PDA wow this is seriously impressive for a woman in that day and age and the queen of a king it's beyond impressive for a woman okay for example she is the one who convinced the muls that they need to build a strong Navy otherwise they would be overtaken by the fangs okay okay the
mughals came from Afghanistan turkistan landlock countries so they didn't have Navy or oceans in their DNA true but she was smart enough to realize that now a Navy is extremely important do you know why why the biggest thing happening in India at that time was trade with the Middle East and Europe oh why the oceans why the Sea Arabian Sea right exactly in fact she built huge ships that she controlled and she ran a business trading silk Indigo and spices with the Middle East not just that but her ships also carried Pilgrims going to and from mecca for the Hajj ah okay now it makes sense why you said that she was a a Hindu Queen uh car whose ships carried
Muslim passengers going for Hajj in Christian Waters what was all that about by the way so this ship huh is extremely important okay the future of India just on the ship okay but the general point is that her actions and her influence resulted in major changes in the mugul court okay so I'll give three instances but the background is this the Portuguese have been in India for a while remember vasama first came to India by a keep of good operation correct end of 1400s they hang out on the west coast Surat Daman Goa Etc right and they have a very strong Navy presence in the Arabian Sea they pretty much control that sea they basically
yeah correct okay recently the British East India company has landed okay and it is trying to make inroads into this trade and not making much progress but ultimately this is all controlled by the mugal emperor right correct the mugal emperor can give permission and he can take away permission correct right so in the court of the mul Emperor there is an ongoing tussle between the British representatives and the Portuguese Representatives right given this background let me tell you three instances which show how jodhabai was almost a king maker in this particular tussle okay this is interesting first one is simple okay jodai had a ship which was going to sail and she wanted to buy indigo from a place near Agra
load it onto her ship in Surat and take it to Middle East where she would sell it for a large profit very import export entrepreneurial of her oh totally totally okay now at this time the first officer of the British East India Company in India William Hawkins okay he sent one of his people to also look at what trade could be done and this person a little idiotic went and overbid jodai for that same Indigo he paid a little extra and he took all that IND jod B was livid of course he was she lost a whole bunch of money on this and her ships went empty at this time the emperor was her son jahangir okay she
went and complained to him and she got the British East India Company kicked out of the mugul Court yeah you out be the queen you are going to get kicked out so the entire British East India Company project got delayed by a very long time because of this that was instance one okay the second instance this is the important one around which everything hinges I am all yours yeah in 1612 the second British East India Company Voyage came to India okay landed at Surat the Portuguese tried to keep them out ah there was a minor naval battle which the British won okay and they landed in Surat okay and they went to jahangir's court asking for
permission to again set up a factory there and trade yeah because he had kicked them out so they needed his permission yeah and jangar saw that they had won one minor neval battle so he said okay you know yeah it's good to have two powers to play against each other this the Portuguese did not like of course to show jahangir that they were unhappy They seized one of the mugal ships in the Arabian Sea and took the whole thing over including all the cargo in it wow jangir must have been pissed well no the Portuguese were known to do these things and the mugal and the others around had pretty much all just accepted this as oh the Portuguese you
know they are like that only okay and it used to just continue but this time was different do you know why I am guessing it had something to do with J yes it was J's ship personal ship that they took and the Portuguese are soon going to realize that they messed with the wrong woman you come for the queen you better not miss yes so chai went to her son jahangir and threw a tantrum jahangir shut down all trade out of Surat oh Surat was the biggest yeah SE trading port in India at that time in addition he went and laid Siege to Theon oh okay he shut down the Jesuit Church in Agra and he stopped paying all
allowances to Portuguese priests in mugal India tightening the screws on the Portuguese and now the Portuguese were suddenly oh [ __ ] what has happened right so they ran to jangar to negotiate a stop to all of this right and they tried they said oh we will do this we will pay you for the ship we will give all this oh by the way can you kick the British out again and jangar said nothing doing you give me all the money make me happy I will allow you to trade and I will keep the English also here right but pretty much from this point on H the influence of the Portuguese they never regained the same level and the British
kept increasing right told you you come for the queen you better not miss I'm going to quote William Foster okay he said the great mul's mother was a great Adventurer which caused the Great mugul to drive the pingal out of his place portal okay the Portuguese pingal Portugal pingal okay yeah so this was the turning point but I want to give a third instance which is not as important but it does underline the influence and importance of jodhabai the Queen Mother yeah so this is five years later English Pirates this time okay tried to seize jodai ship why do they keep missing with this woman ship when they know that consequences are disastrous well no
these were pirates they probably didn't know in any case right but this time luckily the official English fleet was in the area and it showed up just in time and it protected the ship and it drw away the Pirates okay crying favor with the Queen Mother nice why is this important now let me again quote Sir Thomas roow the English ambassador to Jang court at that time the most important British East India Company official at the time he said that it was lucky they could protect the ship because if not all prospects of English trade in India would be utterly lost oh okay so this kind of explains the almost King maker for the British part that you
mentioned earlier but English colony Portuguese Colony what difference does it really make I mean we would have been all goans are living a very Su life yeah you think that would have been so much better right but no not at all okay uh okay see being a British colony was terrible terrible terrible for India okay but being a Portuguese Colony would have been much worse okay if you study the history of the different Colonial Powers you will see that the British were the ones that were best to their colonies okay what the British did what because yes they extracted a lot they exploited a lot but at least they let the locals have their own religion they
let the locals do limited self-government and they let the locals also build some lowlevel industry and so on right right a lot of infrastructure social and governing infrastructure was built by contrast the Portuguese didn't do any of this in any of their colonies okay the Portuguese were pure extractors ah and as a result if you look today at which colonies are British versus Portuguese a Portuguese colony is much more likely to suffer a worse fate right they are likely to have an economy that purely depends on a natural resource which is not a great economic situation to be in they are likely to have extremely corrupt governments when they have a government at all otherwise it is
more like you know a warlord fighting each other okay and that is because of the difference in policies H examples of such Portuguese colonies that then became independent Angola and mozambik Portuguese colonies have prolonged conflict weak institutions shattered economies and poor human capital development leading to instability and Civil Wars okay compare with Ghana and Kenya which are far better off Ghana and Kenya being British colonies I'm guessing right yes yes okay but then the other possibility is that we may not have been anybody's Colony well then we would have been a mugal colony and no maratas kicked out the mugal right yeah maybe we might we may have been a marata kingdom who knows geopolitics is always
very volatile very fluid and especially in such scenarios where small little moments of pissing off the Queen Mother can have such an effect on on how the entire culture of a geography develops actually that's probably not very true okay so there are two competing theories of History right one is like the great man Theory which says that one person's actions change the course of history whereas there are others who feel that you know ultimately geopolitical realities the macro picture geography these things play an important role and the one person doing whatever if that person hadn't done it someone else would have done it right so for example we have argued that the Mahabharat War had to happen this way
irrespective of the personalities of the people involved right so check out our episode on the geopolitics of Mahabharat and you'll realize after watching that episode that the Mahabharat did not happen because of drad's vastar there are bigger reasons behind the Mahabharat happening which we'll line up for you next Shri naen this is future IQ and that wasn't jodhabai