Swara Bhasker revisits Padmaavat jauhar scene; says, “Are we saying that rape is the end of a woman’s life?”
Swara Bhasker has revisited the controversy surrounding her 2018 open letter to filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali after watching Padmaavat. Years after the film’s release, Swara explained that the debate around her letter largely focused on one particular line, while the broader concerns she raised about women, sexual violence and the portrayal of jauhar received less attention.
Speaking at an event hosted by the India International Centre (IIC) in Delhi, Swara recalled her reaction to the film’s climax. Padmaavat, starring Deepika Padukone, Shahid Kapoor and Ranveer Singh, was released in January 2018 following months of controversy. Inspired by Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s 16th-century epic poem Padmavat, the film revolves around Rani Padmavati and the conflict between Rajput ruler Ratan Singh and Alauddin Khilji.
Swara said the depiction of jauhar, in which hundreds of women collectively die by self-immolation, made her question the message being conveyed to survivors of sexual violence. “I’m watching this, these 800 women committing jauhar, and I was like, yaar, if I had been, God forbid, if I was a rape survivor, what is this film telling me? I would feel like a coward, that I didn’t kill myself to save my honour. Is that what you want to tell in a society like ours, where I feel like there’s anyway a rape epidemic?” she said.
She further questioned the connection between a woman’s life and the idea of sexual purity. “Is this what we want to tell our survivors, that you didn’t deserve to live? That if you actually had been honourable and brave women, you would have killed yourself. Are we saying that rape is the end of a woman’s life?” she said.
Swara also recalled being particularly disturbed by a close-up of a pregnant woman during the jauhar sequence. “And then there was that one shot, it made me so mad, I was like, chiii, in the audience loudly. There is a close-up of a pregnant woman’s belly. And she is going, so you’re saying that a foetus that might be female doesn’t deserve to be born, because she might be raped by a Muslim ruler?” she said.
The actor clarified that she did not write her open letter immediately after watching the film. Instead, she waited five days to reflect on her response. “And then I came out and I was like this is terrible. And normally people think that I do these things out of rage. But I waited for five days. And I was like, let me check if I still feel like this. And then at the end of five days, I wrote this letter,” she recalled.
Published by The Wire in January 2018, the letter questioned the glorification of jauhar and the portrayal of women’s worth through sexual purity. Swara said the subsequent discussion, however, focused heavily on one phrase from the letter. “I just want to say that when it got published, there was one line in the letter where I was trying to say that women are more than their private parts. And watching this film made me feel that I’m reduced to a vagina,” she said.
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