Incensed by her comments against the ‘jauhar’ tradition as shown in the 2018 movie ‘Padmaavat’ — of women self-immolating when enemy armies invade their kingdoms — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has accused actor Swara Bhasker of “insulting” women.
She’d added, “Is that what you want to tell in a society like ours where there is anyway a rape epidemic? Is this what we want to tell our survivors, that you didn’t deserve to live? She’d written an open letter to Bhansali at the time of the movie release too.
Bhasker had at a recent event said such a tradition implies that “I would feel like a coward [if] I didn’t kill myself to ‘save my honour'”. After online backlash, she shared a video clarifying that she did not use the word “coward” for Rani Padmavati, the central character played by Deepika Padukone in the Sanjay Leela Bhansali movie.
This person has a voice that is fed to them from above. Krishna Kumar Singh, state BJP leader in Bihar, has lodged a complaint with the police too. He has accused her of making derogatory statements against Hindu society and Rajput women. The climactic scene in ‘Padmaavat’ shows Rani Padmavati leading the women of Chittor in a mass act of self-immolation by fire to avoid capture and abuse by Alauddin Khilji’s invading army.
Responding to a question at a press conference, BJP spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia deployed wordplay with her name Swara, which means voice or tone, saying, “You just mentioned a person whose ‘swara’ (voice) is distorted. The movie is, at its core, based on a famous 16th-century epic poem of the same name written by the Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi in 1540.
The BJP has now accused her of speaking in “someone else’s voice”, not detailing who or what that might be. On her statement specifically, Bhatia said, “I believe no such comments should be made, and it is essential that every woman respects other women.
