With Padmaavat triumphantly conquering the box-office like its medieval characters stormed fortresses, one controversial 21st-century red flag has quietly bitten the dust: the J word. Yes, the very one vociferously questioned by actor Swara Bhaskar in an open letter inundated with the V word.
I must admit that it was Swara’s letter and the raging debate (to use a polite word) around it that piqued my curiosity enough to go watch the film. I wanted to see if Sanjay Leela Bhansali had indeed glamourised the jauhar ritual; also to wrap my head around the issue of whether the context/setting of a story is key to its narration or whether critical intervention is desirable so as not to validate the still-prevalent misogyny and misplaced notions of honour in this country. I would imagine it’s a thorny question for a film-maker, particularly one with the Karni Sena snapping at his heels: the question of where to draw the line in depicting a ritual that has been endlessly valourised in Indian folklore and pop culture.
The choice Bhansali makes in Padmaavat is to go with the popular perspective, depicting jauhar as an act of courage and sacrifice by women who chose to immolate themselves rather than submit to the enemy. Fair enough in the interests of abiding by the authenticity of a medieval practice and the legends woven around it. However, the portrayal errs horribly on the side of glamourisation; right from the credit titles, ‘enhanced’ by the crackling sound of fire and tiny red-gold sparks flying on the screen, to the climactic sequence where women march determinedly towards the pyres, there’s a fascination with, and aggrandisement of, the atavistic practice. The impassioned ‘Jai Bhawanis’ and blowing of conch shells could be passed off by Bhansali as the prism through which he ostensibly saw Padmavati’s jauhar — as “an act of war” — but the post-film commentary on how the jauhar is worshipped in every corner of India is not just far from the truth, it’s preposterous and irresponsible glorification.
Alternate depictions
It’s not like the tale of Padmini’s immolation has always been told with wide-eyed reverence. Shyam Benegal’s episode on the queen of Chittor in Bharat Ek Khoj ended with the rescue of Rawal Ratan Singh and the jauhar was thus left out altogether. Another film I found on YouTube — a black-and-white one called Maharani Padmini — has the jauhar sequence, or rather its aftermath, but there’s a certain poignancy to it, buttressed by the dialogue and lyrics. The ritual here is also unquestioned but at least it doesn’t come across as aspirational.
Maharani Padmini, though on the whole as tedious as Padmaavat , is interesting in one aspect: its mind-bogglingly revisionist narrative. Taking creative licence to another level altogether, this version of the tale of Chittor has Allauddin Khilji’s wife making Ratan Singh her brother, and ends with a remorseful Khilji declaring that Padmini is his sister. If the Karni Sena had been around in 1964, its members would have been more than a tad confused.
But here’s the thing: kooky as it may sound, the film is interesting precisely because the narrative isn’t random whimsy; the peacenik sentiment is a conscious one, permeating the entire film and balancing out the standard narrative of Rajput martial pride. In a very significant scene, when Ratan Singh bristles with pride to a little boy about the Rajput sword and its enemy-killing being the gateway to heaven, Padmini rues that the seed of love sown on earth by God has been changed to hatred by men. The king is indulgently derisive of her attempt to preach namby-pamby non-violence to worshippers of the sword, but Padmini doesn’t buckle; she spiritedly avers that if only such worshippers could open their eyes to the immense destruction and the thousands of widows and orphans the sword leaves in its wake, they would give up worshipping it. “Love is the greatest weapon of all — the day it replaces the sword is the day heaven will come down to earth,” she declares.
The pacifism of storywriter Bootaram Sharma and screenwriter D N Madhok doesn’t stop with Padmini. Their Khilji too, unlike the mane-tossing, giggling psychopath of Padmaavat , is sometimes humane: moved to tears by his soldiers’ murder of the Rajput child who gatecrashes his camp to innocently parrot Padmini’s peace message, he declares a truce and even visits the child’s mother to condole. Yes, none of this has any basis in history (neither does Khilji’s stalking of Padmavati for that matter) but it’s interesting as an attempt to infuse an alternate message into a medieval tale of martial pride. It’s a pity that a talented film-maker like Bhansali didn’t likewise make his film a little more layered than a flat paean to the Rajput orthodoxy (my personal horror moment was the use of Mirch Masala 's splendid act of defiance and solidarity in the service of jauhar).
The Sufi prism
Like all the films mentioned here, Sufi poet Malik Mohammed Jayasi’s Padmavat also has no basis in history; more importantly, it was more a mystical tale than a literal one, with allegorical meanings attributed to the characters and places in it. Khilji does pursue Padmini here, but it is a Hindu king, Devpal, whose coveting of the queen leads him to kill Ratan Singh in battle (decades later, Rajput narratives changed that to Khilji). Padmini and Ratan Singh’s first wife commit sati on his pyre while the jauhar ritual is undertaken by the rest of the women in Chittor just as Khilji’s troops capture the fort in an empty victory.
For the Sufi poets, love was supreme and death was mystical, an escape from physical bondage. The medieval Avadhi tales of love often end with the death of both lovers, and many Sufis like Amir Khusrau were said to view sati through this prism — as a selfless, admirable act performed in order to rejoin the lover. However, centuries separate us from the medieval era and its sentiments, and if sati or jauhar have to be cinematically depicted today, there are better ways of doing it than goggle-eyed approval. If Bhansali had showed even for a few frames the flip side of courage — fear and suffering — it would have enabled him to be true to history but also brought out the horrible reality of a medieval ritual that was said to be voluntary but couldn’t have been in its entirety down to the last woman and child. Women gliding, goddess-like, into fires with serene smiles on their face may live up to legendary iconography but end up creating an irresponsible halo around jauhar .
Does this matter? Post-Padmaavat and its controversies, many people have scoffed at the idea that cinematic representations of anachronistic anti-woman practices can create a climate of subtle approval for the latter again. What they miss is that the seed of such approval lies dormant even today in parts of the country that take pride in such traditions, and that stray instances of sati still shame the nation (one should never forget Roop Kanwar’s sati in 1987 which was eulogised in Rajasthan as carrying forward a glorious tradition). And it’s not justjauhar or sati — regressive traditions are an interlinked morass that sprout from a certain mindset, one that still has a grip on millions as the latest ‘honour killing’ last month proves. It’s best that cinema shatters these ideas instead of encouraging them.
