Swara Bhasker Defends Past Comments, Denies Calling Rani Padmavati A Coward

Bollywood actor Swara Bhasker has clarified her recent remarks about the Jauhar sequence in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 2018 film Padmaavat, after facing significant backlash online. Speaking at the "Women, Life, Freedom" talk held at the India International Centre in Delhi on August 31, Bhasker had criticised the film's portrayal of the Jauhar sequence, calling it problematic in the way it depicted mass self-immolation by women rather than survival after capture or assault. Her comments quickly went viral, circulating widely on social media platforms, with a section of users accusing her of calling Rani Padmavati and the other women who performed Jauhar cowards for choosing self-immolation over capture.

In response to the growing backlash, Bhasker shared a video on social media stating that her original remarks had been mistranslated and misrepresented online. Captioning her post, she said her video clip had gone viral and was being wrongly and falsely translated. In the video, she said, in Hindi, that what she had originally said was now being translated in a completely incorrect manner and spread as a falsehood. She went on to clarify explicitly that she never described Rani Padmavati or any of the other women who took part in the Jauhar as cowards, addressing the specific claim that had been attributed to her. She added that people were free to criticise her if they wished, but urged that any criticism be directed at what she had actually said rather than a distorted or fabricated version of her remarks.

In the clarification, Bhasker reiterated the broader point she said she had originally intended to make during her talk at the India International Centre. She questioned whether society should be sending survivors of sexual assault the message that it would have been preferable for them to die rather than survive their trauma. Invoking the case of the 2012 Delhi gang-rape victim widely known as Nirbhaya, she noted that the young woman had fought her attackers until her final breath, using this as an example of resilience she felt was being overlooked in the broader glorification of self-immolation as a response to violence. She closed her remarks by saying that a woman's will to live should never be underestimated.

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Bhasker's comments reignited a long-running controversy dating back to 2018, when the actor first wrote an open letter to Bhansali criticising the film's treatment of the Jauhar sequence and what she described at the time as the glorification of certain historical customs, including Sati and Jauhar, age-old practices in which women were expected to end their lives following the death of their husbands or to avoid capture and assault by invading forces. That original letter drew sharp criticism at the time, including measured responses from members of the film's own cast, with lead actor Shahid Kapoor saying at the time that he had not read the letter in detail but defended the film-makers' right to creative expression.

In her more recent remarks at the India International Centre event, held eight years after her original letter, Bhasker revisited that earlier controversy and explained what she described as the larger point behind her original criticism of the film. This renewed commentary again drew a mixed and often critical response online, with several users arguing that the historical practice of Jauhar should not be characterised as an act of cowardice, but rather understood as an act of defiance and courage in the face of the circumstances the women involved were said to have faced.

Padmaavat, directed by Bhansali, starred Deepika Padukone as Rani Padmavati, Shahid Kapoor as Maharawal Ratan Singh, and Ranveer Singh as Sultan Alauddin Khilji. The film, loosely based on the 16th-century poem "Padmavat" by Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi, was itself the subject of considerable controversy ahead of its original 2018 release, including protests from groups who alleged that it distorted the history of the Rajput queen at the centre of its narrative, a debate that has continued to resurface periodically in the years since the film's release, as reflected in the renewed discussion sparked by Bhasker's latest comments.

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