Bollywood actor Swara Bhasker is no stranger to controversy, and this time she has sparked a debate over Deepika Padukone's 2018 film Padmaavat. The actor, who spoke at the Woman Life Freedom talk at the India International Centre in Delhi on August 31, spoke against the Jauhar scene in the Sanjay Leela Bhansali film.
Speaking at the event, Swara made a controversial statement about the Jauhar sequence shown towards the end of the film and said that it could send the wrong message to rape survivors. She said, "I was watching it, and I thought that if God forbid, I was a rape survivor, what is this film telling me? I would feel like a coward that I didn’t commit suicide to save my honour. Is that what you want to tell in a society like ours where I feel like anyway there is a rape epidemic. Is this what we want to tell our survivors that they don’t deserve to live, that if you actually would have be a honourable and brave women, you would have killed yourself. Are we saying that rape is end of a woman’s life? This scene was so problematic."
She added, "Then there was this one shot, which made me so mad that I shouted 'chii' loudly, there is a close-up of a pregnant woman's belly performing jauhar. So you are telling me that fetus, which might be a female, doesn’t deserve to be born because she might be raped by a Muslim ruler. I was so mad. I waited for five days to check if I still feel like that, and after five days, I wrote a letter."
Swara's remarks have drawn strong reactions on social media, with several users criticising her interpretation of the Jauhar sequence and arguing that the historical practice should not be described as cowardice but it was an act of bravery by women against the barbarity of Muslim invaders.
One social media user wrote, "According to Bhasker, Hindu women who committed jauhar or suicide were "COWARDS" because they chose to die over the prospect of leading their lives as concubines of Muslim invaders."
Another comment called Jauhar an act of bravery and wrote, "Jauhar was and remains an act of utmost bravery in the face of unimaginable brutality. Swara is using a false equivalence of rape to compare a medieval barbarity and atrocity. Showing stunning ignorance she says that she is arguing that why shall a pregnant women commit jauhar just to protect her fetus. What a willful intellectual blindness."
Another comment read, "Does this lady even realise how Mughals kept Hindu women in captivity and treated them as sex slaves? IQ in Minus." One more comment called Swara's comment 'malicious'. "Jauhar was a lot of things but, it certainly wasn’t a “cowardly act” Swara Bhaskar is wrong here that much I can say as a student of history. You can debate mass immolation but, you can’t call it cowardice that’s just being malicious."
In Padmaavat, the Jauhar sequence comes towards the climax after Alauddin Khilji's forces defeat the Rajputs and breach the fort of Chittor. Deepika Padukone's Rani Padmavati leads the women of the fort into Jauhar, portrayed in the film as a collective act of self-immolation to avoid capture. The sequence follows the death of Shahid Kapoor's Maharawal Ratan Singh and Khilji's eventual victory over Chittor.
Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Padmaavat is a 2018 Hindi epic period drama starring Deepika Padukone as Rani Padmavati, Shahid Kapoor as Maharawal Ratan Singh and Ranveer Singh as Sultan Alauddin Khilji. The film also stars Aditi Rao Hydari, Jim Sarbh, Raza Murad and Anupriya Goenka. The film was written by Bhansali and Prakash Kapadia and is based on the epic poem Padmavat by Malik Muhammad Jayasi.
Vibha Maru is an Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times Entertainment, based in Delhi. With a decade of experience across digital and print media, she covers Bollywood, Hollywood and web shows. A self-confessed cinephile who breathes Hindi cinema, Vibha can often be found sacrificing sleep after binge-watching films and web series. Though she holds a Commerce degree, she discovered her true calling in journalism after enrolling at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC). She began her career covering Delhi's cultural scene, food, nightlife, concerts, and city life at The Times of India, before moving into full-time entertainment journalism with India Today. At India Today, Vibha interviewed some of the biggest names in Bollywood and television while carving a niche for herself through film reviews, opinion pieces, nostalgic features, celebrity interviews, and trend-driven stories. She later brought her storytelling and editorial expertise to The Indian Express, where she continued to deepen her understanding of cinema through long-form entertainment explainers, retrospectives and feature writing. Now, as Assistant Editor at Hindustan Times Entertainment, Vibha continues to chronicle the world of movies and pop culture. Her work spans breaking entertainment news, exclusive interviews, celebrity features, and stories that capture the conversations shaping Indian cinema.Read More
