Swara Bhaskar speaking at the India International Centre, where she revived her criticism of the jauhar scene in Padmaavat.
Anyone who visits the majestic Chittorgarh Fort is led, sooner or later, to a low, dark doorway. And when you are told what happened there, it is difficult not to feel a chill run through you. This is not merely another passageway through an ancient fort. You are standing at a place where, centuries ago, hundreds of women of Bharat walked towards the flames together, choosing death over capture at the hands of a conquering army. To stand there is to feel, however briefly, the weight of what courage once demanded of them and the extraordinary resolve with which they answered.
You would think a place that heavy would humble anyone who spoke of it. I agree that It should be hard to stand in the memory of that choice and call it foolish. And yet, this week, a woman stood on a stage in Delhi, entitled enough to judge the brave.
At an India International Centre event this week, actor Swara Bhaskar returned to a grievance she has been nursing since 2018, when the jauhar sequence in Padmaavat, the long scene in which the women of Chittor walk into the flames rather than fall into Alauddin Khilji's hands, first moved her to write an open letter saying the film had left her feeling reduced to a vagina.
This week she went a good deal further, telling the room that when she watched those women she found herself thinking of a rape survivor somewhere in the audience, and of how the scene would be telling that survivor she was a coward for not having killed herself to save her honour, as though the film, and the whole history standing behind it, were quietly informing India's assaulted women that they no longer deserved to live.
The remarks have since earned her a police complaint in Bihar and the familiar chorus of outrage, though I confess I find the outrage far less interesting than the serene certainty that produced the remarks in the first place.
I understand the fear sitting underneath what she said, in a country where that fear is anything but theoretical, and yet the longer I sat with her actual words, the more it seemed to me that she had reached for the easiest target within her arm's length and mistaken it for a courageous one.
Consider, for a moment, the strange shape of the scene she was staging, because here was a woman in a panelled hall in Lutyens' Delhi, warm and safe and applauded, reaching back across seven centuries to inform the women of Chittor that their courage had been a kind of foolishness, entirely secure in the knowledge that they were in no position to reply.
That asymmetry, in which she holds the microphone and they are left holding only their silence, ought to make a thoughtful person cautious, and it is telling that it appears instead to have made her comfortable.
What she offered the room, in truth, had far less to do with history than with the private pleasure of standing at a distance from it, and it is a pose she has struck many times before, because every few years the same scene is taken back down from the shelf and held up to the same disapproval, until the whole exercise has acquired the cadence of a ritual, the way a certain kind of public figure keeps returning to the one wound she is most reliably rewarded for reopening.
There is nothing daring in any of it, since contempt for one's own inheritance is very likely the safest posture available in an English-speaking Indian room, and dressing that contempt in the vocabulary of compassion does not make it braver, only harder to see for what it actually is.
What I find least forgivable is that the argument ends up wounding the very woman it claims to stand beside, because telling a survivor that a queen who refused annihilation on her own terms was a fool is not solidarity with survivors, however warmly it may be meant, and looking at Padmini's fire and seeing nothing in it but a death cult engineered by men is not the sophisticated reading it imagines itself to be but simply the most literal one on offer, the reading that demands the least possible knowledge of the century, the siege, or the women who lived and died inside it.
It is worth setting down, then, what a reading like that leaves out, because a siege in medieval India did not end the way we now picture an ending, with negotiated terms and safe passage and a ride home at first light.
When Khilji finally broke through the walls of Chittor in 1303, capture did not mean captivity so much as erasure, since it meant slavery, and it meant conversion at the edge of a blade, and it meant being handed like spoil to the man who had just killed your husband, with your name struck from the record and your daughters raised in his house and his faith as his property.
Set against a fate like that, the fire those women chose was the one act of refusal no conqueror could reach or undo, the last piece of sovereignty still belonging to people who had lost everything else except the manner of their own leaving, and to call such a choice weakness is to understand very little about power, and even less about what it costs to hold on to a fragment of it when all else has already been taken.
Our own tradition never made the mistake of reading fire quite so flatly, because it has always understood that a flame can be an origin every bit as much as an end.
Draupadi, after all, does not enter the Mahabharata gently or as anyone's victim, since she rises fully grown out of a sacrificial fire, unbidden and unasked for, and the sages who receive her name her Yajnaseni, the one born of flame.
When she is later dragged by her hair into a hall crowded with the most powerful men of her age and gambled away like livestock, she does not dissolve into quiet acceptance but turns on the whole assembly and demands to know by what dharma a man who has already lost himself at dice can still presume to wager his wife, and it is the men in that hall, and not Draupadi, who are left without an answer and heavy with shame, which is why it is such a quiet scandal that we have chosen across the centuries to remember her tears and to mislay her fury.
Sita, too, passes through fire and then does something we still rarely allow ourselves to sit with, because when her purity is doubted a second time she refuses to perform another trial and instead calls out to the earth that bore her, so that the ground opens and gathers her back, and she returns to her mother rather than remain in a court that will only ever keep asking her to prove herself, which means her final act is not submission at all but a departure on her own terms, a distinction our tradition kept carefully alive long before we learned to be embarrassed by it.
The Gita, spoken on another battlefield altogether, gives the same principle its plainest form when Krishna tells a trembling Arjuna, jatasya hi dhruvo mrityuh, that for anyone who is born death is already certain, which is only another way of saying that death was never the thing most worth fearing.
The line the women of Chittor were living without ever needing to recite it comes a little later still, sva-dharme nidhanam shreyah, para-dharmo bhayavahah, better to die within what is truly your own than to go on breathing inside what belongs to another and be slowly hollowed out by fear, and so they were not, when it came to it, choosing death over life at all, but choosing their own dharma over a conqueror's, which is not some awkward footnote our civilisation ought to apologise for but something a great deal nearer to its spine.
Nor were they the first women of this land to make such a choice, or anywhere close to the last.
The fire rose at Chittor three separate times across its history, first under Khilji in 1303, in the siege that handed down to us the legend of Rani Padmini; then under Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in 1535, when Rani Karnavati led the women in, the same queen who, if the tradition is to be believed, had once sent a rakhi to Humayun and asked a Mughal emperor to stand as her brother; and once more under Akbar in 1568, so that three times a woman looked hard at the same unbearable arithmetic and three times returned the same answer, which rather suggests it was never panic doing the talking but something far more deliberate.
Others reached for the sword instead of the fire and arrived at precisely the same refusal, as Rani Durgavati did in 1564 when she rode out against Akbar's army at the head of her own troops, and when the arrows had finally found her and the field was plainly lost, she turned her dagger on herself rather than be paraded through a Mughal camp as a trophy.
Rani Lakshmibai tied her young son to her back and died with her blade still drawn against the British, fighting so fiercely that Hugh Rose, the very general who defeated her, could find no higher tribute than to call her the one man among the rebels, while Rani Abbakka held the coast at Ullal against the Portuguese for the better part of forty years, Rani Chennamma raised an army at Kittur against the East India Company a full generation before rebellion grew fashionable, and Rani Rudrama Devi ruled the Kakatiya kingdom in her own name while leading into battle men who had been raised to believe a throne was no place for a woman.
Whether they chose the flame or the blade, they were all in the end doing the same thing, which was refusing to let the invader hold the pen that would write the final page of their story.
This is the pattern I have never quite managed to stop noticing, because it repeats itself with a dreary reliability, so that almost every time our history hands us a woman who chose, someone arrives soon afterwards, soft-voiced and endlessly reasonable, to explain that she was really a woman to whom things were simply done.
Padmini is recast as a cautionary tale about male honour, Lakshmibai the sovereign shrinks by slow degrees into Lakshmibai the tragedy, Draupadi's rage is quietly reclassified as grief, and now the women of Chittor are being remade, from a stage in Delhi, into victims too foolish to have grasped that they might have preferred to live.
We are, it seems, endlessly comfortable with our women for as long as they consent to remain victims, and we grow deeply uneasy the moment they insist on being warriors instead, because a victim asks nothing of us beyond our pity, whereas a warrior asks us to look past her at the army standing at the gate and to say aloud who put it there.
That second demand is by far the harder one, and it is exactly the one Swara Bhaskar declines to meet, having spent the whole of her sympathy on the women inside the fire without sparing a single word for the empire that lit it, interrogating their choice at length while leaving the siege that forced it entirely alone, and when your outrage falls harder on the besieged than on the men breaking down their door, you have not stood up for women so much as agreed, in the most courteous manner imaginable, to forget who they were fighting.
None of this places the film itself beyond criticism, and Padmaavat is unmistakably a Bhansali spectacle rather than a work of history, so there is a perfectly fair conversation to be had about the slow motion, the swelling score, and the camera lingering on a pregnant woman as she walks toward the pyre, and the director can and should be asked about every bit of it, but Swara Bhaskar did not stop at the director, because she walked past the screen and reached all the way back to the women themselves, six centuries dead and wholly unable to answer, and pronounced them wanting.
I keep returning, in the end, to that low doorway at Chittorgarh, and to how easily a whole life, and beyond it a whole civilisation, can be flattened into a single frightened frame by someone who was never within a thousand miles of the gate.
The women who walked through it were not confused and they were not weak, and they were certainly not waiting for a more enlightened century to arrive and instruct them on how their courage ought to have felt, because they simply made the last free choice a conquering army had left them, and they made it standing.
We can go on calling that a wound if we choose to, or we can finally let ourselves hear what seven hundred years of memory has been patiently trying to tell us, which is that the fire was never ours to be ashamed of, that it was theirs to be proud of, and that it remains ours, and only ours, to remember.
