Swara Bhaskar's insensitive remarks on Jauhar scene from Padmavat- Page 5

Originally posted by: Clochette

Through visually pleasing aesthetics, Bhansali romanticized the brutal and desperate reality of death by fire, causing that reality to recede entirely into the background.

Are there any scenes showing a woman hesitating, weeping, panicking, or questioning the hopelessness of the situation? Was it not portrayed less as a desperate, autonomous act of resistance and more as a religious-patriotic duty fulfilled without complaint? To me, the scene felt more like the 'celebration' of a cruel ritual than the tragic, last resort of desperate women.

Exactly this . That's what's wrong with the movie and the associated legends about Padmavati. The movie is called Padmavati and instead of illustrating the complexities of her life ( according to the stories about her ) as a foreign woman in a strange land eventually having to deal with the hardships of military seige, the loss of her husband and the horrors of defeat she's reduced to this one dimensional creature whose vagina Khilji was obsessed with and every arc of the film was about not letting him have it. The other women are literally AND figuratively extras and nothing more. It's in insult to all the women from history who actually ended up committing jauhar as opposed to a made up Padmavati.

But what can you expect from a misogynist like Sanjay who gets off on glorifying the agony of women just because he can't get over his fetish for women's clothing and jewelry.

If Jauhar was a voluntary ,natural response from women who faced slavery ,sexual abuse and other physical abuse including starvation and murder , how come we have never heard of women thinking of less painful ways to die other than setting themselves on fire. During the eight months of seige I'm sure the women of Chittor contemplated suicide in case the worst happened. How come none of the mothers there thought of finding less agonising ways to spare their kids the horrors of capture and whatever that followed ? We don't hear about women poisoning their children and themselves. We don't hear about snake bites . We don't hear of drowning , or blood letting or self inflicted wounds.

The obsession with fire comes from the fact that these women were burderened with the task of protecting the honour of their dead bodies as well as if having to do it while alive isn't bad enough. They were conditioned and GROOMED from a young age that any violation of their body's dead or alive brings disgrace to the whole community and it was their responsibility to prevent that from happening even when things are entirely out of their control. No woman facing the prospect of torture slavery and rape would wonder what would be done to her corpse unless she has been relentlessly conditioned to think about it because breaking news:- women are human ;- and they would prioritise their lived experiences over dead fcking bodies under normal conditions. People love imagining women love and have an unrealistic threshold for physical agony if ' noble ' causes are involved.

There are documented instances from history where women where force was used on unwilling women. Guards made sure nobody escaped. And when these mass pyres couldn't be arranged the men slit the throats of their wives ,sisters and daughters. " If I'm going down, you shall never have my belongings . And that is why there's no reason for any same person to believe this was voluntary and the women were exercising their ' choice '. Only those sick in the head would romanticise this horrifying ritual and that's pretty apparent here anyway.

As I already wrote in my first post relative to the subject, nature doesn't know the concept of 'honour' or 'moral'... and I'm quite sure that the first humans didn't know it either... it is a human invention... wouldn't it be interesting to get to know how these concepts came into society? And how did it happen that in so many societies women/kids were/are considered as 'properties' or 'assets' of men, and in some few others not at all? Why was 'Patriarchy' created and what role plays sexuality?

If one digs deeper and deeper, one will get to the first 'brick' of the construction of concepts like patriarchy: possessive mentality - possessing /being a possession... (I could write a whole essay about why glorifying Jauhar/Sati in whatever way is supporting a crime against humanity)

Originally posted by: Clochette

As I already wrote in my first post relative to the subject, nature doesn't know the concept of 'honour' or 'moral'... and I'm quite sure that the first humans didn't know it either... it is a human invention... wouldn't it be interesting to get to know how these concepts came into society? And how did it happen that in so many societies women/kids were/are considered as 'properties' or 'assets' of men, and in some few others not at all? Why was 'Patriarchy' created and what role plays sexuality?

If one digs deeper and deeper, one will get to the first 'brick' of the construction of concepts like patriarchy: possessive mentality - possessing /being a possession... (I could write a whole essay about why glorifying Jauhar/Sati in whatever way is supporting a crime against humanity)

@bold - While you are at it, please write an essay on Halala and mutah marriage as well, cos unlike jauhar or sati that no longer happen, halala and mutah do, even now. I think it would be better if you direct your efforts to stop malpractices of present rather than the ones that existed in history. Not speaking against Halala and mutah is also supporting crime against humanity. Islamic women are women too.

Originally posted by: MsWhiskerson

This is what I wonder, do they want those women to face extreme torture? What kind of people do we have here?

Exactly!

Originally posted by: DevilsDex

Yes. And repeatedly. Bear children that will face the same as that is just breeding stock.

And people like her and dex think it's cowardice because according to them it's better to be brave and face daily rape and torture and produce more children to such futures. Disgusting views

I always knew she was problematic

Originally posted by: DevilsDex

At some point, someone has to respond to this garbage, so allow me

and excuse my French, but what the f#%+

Jauhar was not a TED Talk about chastity. It was not a family honour killing. It was not a rape survivor being told to die. It was women looking at a breached fort and an incoming force whose habit, on the record, was to convert the women of a defeated court into harem stock. Kamala Devi of Gujarat did not "move on." She was taken. Deval Devi was taken later and passed through that court like loot with a pulse. That is the second room in the house you keep deleting so your question can sound holy."Does a rape survivor not deserve to live after rape?"Yes. In 2026. With a phone, a statute, a court, a hospital, a city to run to. Congratulations on discovering the Indian Constitution. Now explain what that sentence has to do with women who had already lost the state. There was no FIR against Khalji. There was no Delhi to escape to. There was no climax dance where the vice-chancellor gets shamed and the credits roll. The state was the rapist. You are comparing a woman who can still leave the room to women whose room was the last room.You shouted "chii" at a pregnant belly and decided the film was saying a girl child should not be born because a Muslim king might rape her. That is not analysis. That is you stuffing your column into someone else's uterus. The shot is a woman who knows the child will not be born into a family. It will be born into inventory. You turned a funeral into a communal talking point and called the funeral the problem.Then you asked what we are choosing to glorify.Fine. Let's use your scale.You spent a career demanding that cinema stare at female sexuality without flinching. In Veere Di Wedding the country was asked to sit through you with a vibrator while your on-screen husband walked in. You defended it. You said it should shock people into laughter, not disgust. You said women are more than their private parts, in the same breath as the scene that made your private parts the poster. When you put sex on screen, it is agency. When Rajput women refuse to hand their sex to the men who just killed their city, you felt "reduced to a vagina." That letter was not a theory of personhood. It was a tantrum about which vagina the camera is allowed to serve.You keep saying the film tells survivors they are cowards for living. No. You are telling dead women they are cowards for refusing a harem. That is the inversion. A survivor who lives today is not a coward. A woman who walked into fire rather than become a concubine of the man who sacked her fort was not a coward either. Both things can be true because they are not the same event. You flattened them on purpose. A flattened event is easier to moralise. It is also a lie.Nobody is asking modern India to revive jauhar. The film carried a disclaimer. History is allowed to be shown as history. What you want is a rule that the only permitted female death on screen is the kind that flatters your politics, and the only permitted female sex is the kind that flatters your brand.So here is the actual simple question, since you asked for one:When the choices are ash or a lifetime as sexual property of the men who just finished the massacre, and some women choose ash; who is the barbarian? The women in the fire, or the commentator in Delhi calling them a bad message for rape statistics?You don't get to loot their context, rename their refusal "chastity culture," and then pose as the only adult in the room who cares whether survivors live. Survivors should live. The women in that scene were trying not to become the next consignment. If that distinction is too fine for you, the problem is not Padmaavat. The problem is that you need history to be a poster.

P.S. Yeah this was not about your fantasy role play in our bedroom with you having cuffs on for a few hours.

All these

I could do that, Nathu, but that's not the subject of this thread.

Don't get me wrong when I tend to look for the historical unfolding of certain practices... it's for my personal better understanding... to me, the way Bhansali pictured the Jauhar left a bad taste, but I don't judge the women... it had been a very understandable reaction to choose the selfkilling instead of the physical and emotional tortures they would have been subjected to... women worldwide did it in wars... It need deep desperation but also inner strength and courage (in this case)... but jumping into fire (and also making kids do that) may not have been a woman's choice if it hadn't been imposed on them by a mindset built on male perceptions.

As for Swara... I don't care what exactly she wrote... I don't care about her, actually.

Originally posted by: Clochette

I could do that, Nathu, but that's not the subject of this thread.

Don't get me wrong when I tend to look for the historical unfolding of certain practices... it's for my personal better understanding... to me, the way Bhansali pictured the Jauhar left a bad taste, but I don't judge the women... it had been a very understandable reaction to choose the selfkilling instead of the physical and emotional tortures they would have been subjected to... women worldwide did it in wars... It need deep desperation but also inner strength and courage (in this case)... but jumping into fire (and also making kids do that) may not have been a woman's choice if it hadn't been imposed on them by a mindset built on male perceptions.

As for Swara... I don't care what exactly she wrote... I don't care about her, actually.

Unfortunately there will never be a thread on Halala and mutah in bollywood forum, cos no bollywood celebrity will dare to speak on that topic for obvious reasons. But you are free to write that essay on Halala and mutah in the CA section of this forum. I will be eagerly waiting to read that essay of yours 👍🙏

As for Woman choosing Jauhar... Woman wouldn't have chosen to die at all if there was a choice. The only choices they had was to either die immediately or get daily death in the hands of those barbarians. Strange that no body criticises those invaders that didn't leave them any choice.

There were many wars within Hindu rulers in India but never once did hindu women of the losing state have to perform Jauhar cos none of the Hindus indulged in necrophilia.

You say it may not have been a woman's choice but what if it indeed was? You have no idea of the moral code followed by Indian woman, especially the Rajputs of that era. Some people argue that they could have chosen an easy death, if not for a mindset built on male perceptions, and let the invaders r@pe their dead bodies. But the Rajput women had such pride in their lineage & dharma that I'm sure, being a Rajput myself, that they themselves wouldn't want their dead bodies to be defiled in that manner.

You may not know but in Hindus we have the tradition to honour even the dead body. It is given proper respect with pooja and kriya karm while cremating after death. It's extremely important to have a proper cremation after death for next life. The dead body doesn't just lose its importance after death so that it can be eaten by cannibals or defiled by necrophiliacs. That's our belief system as Hindus. Sanctity of dead body and its cremation is very important for Hindus just like it is burial for muslims and Christians. The woman did that cremation for themselves, in Jauhar, as there would be no-one to do that for their dead bodies, instead only the Barbarians who would defile their dead bodies. I hope you are understanding this concept....

I know some people may find it hard to believe but Rajput woman themselves had those ideas of self respect and sanctity of their dead body, being Hindus, without any mindset imposed by male expectations.

Letting dead body being eaten by cannibals or defiled by necrophiliacs is against this traditional belief of Hinduism. I'm sure you or others may find male influence, patriarchy etc even in this but that's the way Hinduism and it's beliefs have always been. It will take leftists many lifetimes to change the core beliefs of Hinduism so as to destroy it finally.