Actor Swara Bhasker has once again opened up about her criticism of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat. Eight years after her controversial open letter to the filmmaker, the actor has recalled what went through her mind while watching the film’s jauhar sequence and why she felt deeply disturbed by its portrayal. However, a section of users on social media didn’t agree with her views.
In the film, Deepika Padukone played Rani Padmavati, while Shahid Kapoor portrayed Rawal Ratan Singh. Her 2018 letter had sparked a heated debate, with Swara facing criticism for her views. Speaking at the Women | Life | Freedom talk at the India International Centre in Delhi on August 31, she revisited the controversy and explained the larger point she was trying to make at the time.
Swara Bhasker recalls why Padmaavat’s jauhar scene angered her
A video from the event has surfaced online in which Swara spoke about how the sequence could be viewed by women who have survived sexual violence. “I’m watching this and it shows all these 800 women committing jauhar which is the story. Watching it I was thinking that ‘God forbid, 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’.”
Swara then questioned the message such a portrayal could send to survivors, particularly in a society where sexual violence remains a serious concern. “Is that what you want to tell women in a society like ours where I feel like there’s any way a rape epidemic. Is that what we want to tell our survivors that you don’t deserve to live? That if you had actually been brave and honourable women, you would have killed yourself? Are we saying that rape is the end of a woman’s life?”
The actor also remembered another scene that she found deeply troubling. According to Swara, Padmaavat had several moments that were “just so problematic”. “There was like one shot that made me so mad. I was like, ‘Chhee!’ There is a close-up of a pregnant woman’s belly and she’s 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? I was so mad and then I came out and I was like, ‘This is terrible’,” she recounted.
How did the internet react?
A section of X users didn’t quite agree with Swara Bhasker’s views on jauhar. These are some of the comments:
Swara says she did not write her Padmaavat letter in anger
Swara also addressed the perception that she tends to voice her opinions impulsively. She clarified that she actually took time before writing her open letter about the film. “Normally people think I do these things (expressing an opinion) in a rage but I waited for five days. I was like ‘Let me check if I still feel like this. At the end of five days I wrote this letter,” she added.
Her 2018 letter was published on The Wire. In it, Swara wrote that she “felt reduced to a vagina” after watching Padmaavat. She also criticised what she viewed as the glorification of jauhar and sati. “Women have the right to live despite being raped, sir. Women have the right to live, despite the death of their husbands, male ‘protectors’, ‘owners’, ‘controllers of their sexuality’… whatever you understand the men to be,” she had written.
Swara has now also explained how one particular line from the letter ended up becoming the focus of the public discussion. She said her larger argument was lost amid a sensational headline.
“This was one line in the letter where I was trying to say women are more than their private parts. And watching this film made me feel that I am reduced to a va*ina. And then they thought this would make a great headline,” she said.
She went on to recall how the headline shaped the response to her entire letter. “So the headline was ‘I felt like a va*ina’. And you could imagine nobody in India reads beyond these headlines. So imagine what happened, that is another saga,” she said.
On the work front, Swara Bhasker was last seen in the reality TV show, Pati Patni Aur Panga, with her husband Fahad Ahmad.
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