“I Would Feel Like a Coward”: Swara Bhasker erupts controversy over Padmaavat’s Jauhar scene AGAIN
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New Delhi , September 1: Eight years after her controversial open letter to filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali over Padmaavat, actor Swara Bhasker has once again spoken about the film’s depiction of Jauhar, saying the sequence involving hundreds of women left her deeply disturbed.
She questioned the message that such a depiction could send to survivors of sexual violence.
Released in 2018, Padmaavat, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali and starring Deepika Padukone, Shahid Kapoor and Ranveer Singh, became one of the most debated Bollywood films of its time. With her recent remarks, she is being trolled on social media, and users are calling her statements misleading.
Speaking at a recent event in Delhi, Bhasker said, “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'.”
She questioned the message that such a depiction could send to survivors of sexual violence.
“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?” she said.
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Bhasker also criticised another sequence in the film involving a pregnant woman. Recalling the shot, she said, “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...”
She questioned the implication of the scene, saying, “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'.”
Swara Bhaskar speaks about her letter to filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali on the scene of Jauhar in the movie Padmavat pic.twitter.com/6X4Z0SvFtC
— Yeshi Seli (@YeshiSeli) August 31, 2026
The actor also rejected the perception that she wrote the open letter impulsively. According to Bhasker, she waited five days before publishing her response. In the letter, Bhasker had written a strongly worded open letter to Bhansali in 2018 after watching Padmaavat, questioning what she described as the glorification of jauhar and sati in the film. The letter sparked a major debate on social media and within the film industry at the time.
“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 said.
In her original 2018 letter, published on The Wire, Bhasker had said she “felt reduced to a vagina” after watching Padmaavat. She also criticised what she saw as the glorification of jauhar and sati.
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She had written, “Women have the right to live despite being raped, sir. Women have the right to live, despite the death of their husbands, male 'protectors', 'owners', 'controllers of their sexuality'... whatever you understand the men to be.”