What Swara Bhasker Wrote In Her 2018 Padmaavat Letter To Sanjay Leela Bhansali

The controversy around Swara Bhasker's 2018 open letter to Sanjay Leela Bhansali over Padmaavat has resurfaced after the actor revisited her comments at a recent event in Delhi. 

Swara wrote the letter, published on The Wire shortly after the film's release, both as a fan's response to Bhansali's work and as a strong criticism around the depiction of jauhar, a historical practice of mass self-immolation by Rajput women and children to escape capture, abuse, and slavery during war time.

In the lengthy letter, Swara began by congratulating Bhansali on managing to release Padmaavat, starring Deepika Padukone, Shahid Kapoor, and Ranveer Singh, despite the controversy around it. She also praised the performances and the film's visual grandeur, while recalling her own association with the filmmaker. 

Swara had played a small role in his 2010 film Guzaarish and said she had admired his attention to detail and had long hoped to be directed by him in a leading role.

She also made it clear that she had supported Padmaavat before its release. Referring to the protests and threats surrounding the film, she wrote that she had defended Bhansali and his right to tell the story he wanted to.

"I genuinely believed and still believe that you and every other person in this country has the right to say the story they want to say, the way they want to say it," she wrote, adding that filmmakers should be able to work without having their sets burnt, being assaulted or having their lives threatened.

Swara said she had even booked first-day, first-show tickets, and taken her family and their cook to watch the film. However, she admitted that she was "SO stunned" by what she saw and felt compelled to write to Bhansali.

What Swara Bhasker Said About Women And Jauhar In The 2018 Letter

The central argument of Swara's letter was her discomfort with the film's depiction of sati and jauhar. She argued that women should not be defined by their sexuality, their relationships with men or notions of honour.

"Women have the right to live, despite being raped sir," she wrote, addressing Bhansali. "Women have the right to live, despite the death of their husbands, male 'protectors', 'owners', 'controllers of their sexuality'." She repeated her central point: "Women have the right to live. Period."

Swara then argued that women are more than their bodies and wrote at length about the way she felt the film reduced women's existence to questions surrounding their sexuality.

She argued that a woman's life should not be considered over because she had been raped.

Explaining why she was focusing so strongly on the subject, Swara said she felt the film had reduced her, as a woman watching it, to her sexuality.

She went on to say that women had fought for rights such as voting, education, property ownership, equal pay, maternity leave and the right to adopt children, but that Padmaavat made her feel as though society had been taken "back to basics" - to the question of whether women had the right to live.

"I understand that jauhar and sati are a part of our social history," Swara wrote. However, she questioned whether historical practices that denied women their right to life should be presented without sufficient criticism.

She compared the treatment of sati and jauhar with other violent historical practices, arguing that the fact that something happened in history did not mean it should be glorified. She specifically mentioned lynchings of the Black people in 19th-century America and asked whether a film about such events could be made without addressing racism and racial hatred.

Swara argued that sati, jauhar, female genital mutilation, and honour killings were rooted in "deeply patriarchal, misogynist and problematic ideas". According to her, such practices denied women not only equality but also "personhood", "humanity" and "the right to life".

She acknowledged that Bhansali could argue that the film was set in the 13th century and therefore had to reflect the beliefs and practices of that period. But she disagreed that historical setting was enough to explain the film's treatment of jauhar.

"No sir; Rajasthan in the 13th century with its cruel practices is merely the historical setting of the ballad you have adapted into the film Padmaavat. The context of your film is India in the 21st century," she wrote.

She referred to the horrifying 2012 Delhi gang rape, saying that the survivor did not choose death because 'her honour had been violated', but fought her attackers. Swara also referred to the rape of a 15-year-old Dalit girl in Jind, Haryana, which had taken place shortly before Padmaavat released.

She argued that the contemporary reality of sexual violence and victim blaming made the depiction of jauhar particularly important.

"You do know that acts like sati and raping women are two sides of the same mindset," she wrote, arguing that both could involve attempts to control women's bodies and sexuality.

Why Swara Criticised Padmaavat's Climax

One of the strongest parts of Swara's letter was her description of Padmaavat's climax, in which hundreds of women enter the jauhar fire.

She acknowledged that the sequence was visually striking but said its presentation made her deeply uncomfortable. Swara particularly pointed to the presence of a pregnant woman and a young girl among the women entering the fire.

"I felt in that moment that it was wrong of me to choose life over death. It was wrong to have the desire to live," she wrote, stressing the influence cinema can have on audiences.

Swara argued that Bhansali's filmmaking was powerful enough to influence how people think and therefore carried a responsibility.

"Your cinema particularly is inspiring, evocative and powerful. It can move audiences to emotional highs and lows. It can influence thinking and that, sir, is why you must be responsible as to what it is you are doing and saying in your film," she wrote.

She also rejected the idea that the disclaimer shown at the beginning of Padmaavat was enough to establish that the film did not support sati or jauhar. Swara argued that the disclaimer was followed by a long portrayal of Rajput honour and women choosing death rather than being touched by an enemy.

She pointed to several moments in the film where sati or jauhar was presented as an honourable choice. She highlighted how Padmavati, played by Deepika Padukone, asks her husband (Shahid Kapoor) for permission to commit Jauhar and later delivers a speech presenting the act as part of the battle between truth and falsehood, and good and evil.

Swara was particularly critical of the final sequence, describing how hundreds of women dressed in red move towards the flames while Alauddin Khilji (Ranveer Singh) watches from the outside.

"That had the power of an anthem; seduced the audience into being awestruck and admiring of this act," she wrote. "If this is not glorification and support of sati and jauhar, I really do not know what is."

She also referred to India's history during Partition, when women were raped, kidnapped, abducted and forcibly impregnated. She mentioned accounts of women committing suicide rather than being captured by men from the other religious community, including the deaths of women who jumped into a well at Thoa Khalsa in Punjab.

Citing author Urvashi Butalia's 1998 book The Other Side Of Silence, Swara recalled how one survivor, Bir Bahadur Singh, had spoken about women jumping into a village well during the violence. She noted that Singh was ashamed of his mother for surviving. For Swara, these stories represented a dark part of Indian history that should be remembered with "shame, horror, sadness, reflection, empathy, nuance", rather than being presented through "thoughtless sensational glorification".

Towards the end of the letter, Swara also pointed to India's legal history surrounding sati. She noted that reformers and colonial authorities had worked to abolish and criminalise the practice in the 19th century, while the Indian Sati Prevention Act of 1988 further criminalised aiding, abetting and glorifying sati.

She questioned Bhansali over what she saw as the film's treatment of the practice, writing that his depiction was something he should "answer for" as an artist whose work was being consumed by the public.

Despite the criticism, Swara ended the letter by reaffirming her support for Bhansali's right to make films freely. She wished that he would continue making films "the way you want to" and that he, his actors, producers, studio and audiences would remain safe from threats and vandalism.

"I promise to fight trolls and television commentators for your freedom to express; but I also promise to ask you questions about the art you make for public consumption," she concluded.

What Swara Bhaskar Say At The Delhi Event

In a video going viral on social media from a recent Delhi event, Swara is heard saying, "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'."

Furthermore, she added, "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?"

Swara said Padmaavat had many things 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.

She said she waited five days before penning the open letter, which was published on the website The Wire.

"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.

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