Open letter to Swara Bhaskar: Against easy judgements

A still reposted from the Jauhar scene of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmaavat. (reposted from Substack, no copyright infringement intended)

As someone whose practice repeatedly returns to what it means to live in this body - what it means to be a woman, to inhabit a female body, and to carry the accumulated cultural meanings attached to it - I find myself thinking about this conversation somewhat differently.

My work sits somewhere between embodiment and representation: between the body as something we experience intimately, and the body as something upon which culture, history, desire, morality and power continually inscribe themselves.

So when I encounter the image of a woman choosing to enter the fire rather than be captured, I find myself returning to a question that sits at the centre of my own practice:

What is liberation?

What does transcendence mean when the body is the very site through which we are defined, desired, controlled, celebrated and violated?

And what, ultimately, do we as women get to retain for ourselves beyond our bodies?

I was ten years old when I was sorted into Padmini House at Mayo College Girls’ School.

Everyone told us the same thing: she was the beautiful one. The most beautiful woman you could possibly imagine, times a hundred.

For a long time, I was perfectly comfortable with that. I idealised her beauty because that was the version of Padmini that was handed to me. But as I grew older, what I found myself identifying with was not the beauty.

It was the character.

The woman who, in the story I inherited, refuses to allow her body to become something possessed by another.

A woman whose beauty became the reason her kingdom was coveted, whose body became the object around which a political conflict was constructed, and yet who, in the story I was raised with, refused to allow either her beauty or her body to become the measure of her dignity.

That is the Padmini I identified with.

And so I find myself asking a question that feels more interesting than whether I, sitting here in 2026, agree with the decision she made:

What kind of principles must a woman be raised upon to arrive at such a decision? What did these women believe themselves to owe - to themselves, to their families, to their kingdom, to their faith, to their dharma? And what were the women of Rajasthan, in these older stories, being taught that a woman’s life could represent?

Hadi Rani of Salumbar, newly married, severed her own head and sent it to her husband at the battlefield so that he would not be distracted by thoughts of her.

Bhan Kanwar of Bundi travelled to Siwana to commit jauhar after the death of the man to whom she was barely engaged.

This distinction matters enormously when we speak about Jauhar today. Because there is a tendency, particularly in contemporary discourse, to flatten historical women into arguments that are legible to us now. We take an action from another time, place it inside our present moral vocabulary, and then congratulate ourselves for having arrived at the correct interpretation.

I understand that lofty, imbalanced arguments, particularly when stripped of historical, cultural and philosophical nuance, are extraordinarily effective at generating social-media attention. But virality is not nuance. And feminism, at its best, should demand more from us than the easiest possible moral conclusion.

The word for what happened at the end of a Rajput siege was not simply “suicide.”

The burning of Rajput women during the seige of Chittor (reposted from Substack, no copyright infringement intended)

It was Saka.

For the Rajput, Saka was not simply another word for defeat.

It belonged to a particular ritual and martial vocabulary surrounding the final battle of a besieged fort, when the possibility of survival had effectively ended. The moment when the men knew they would go out to fight knowing they would not return, and the women knew they would enter the fire knowing there was no tomorrow.

The moment when the community recognised that the physical kingdom might be lost, but that something else, its dignity, its faith, its allegiance, its dharma, its memory, could still be defended.

For the people within the fort, the body had become the last remaining territory over which they believed they could exercise a decision.

This was not the language of individual liberal autonomy. It was the language of duty. It was something much more demanding and, to us, much more difficult to understand:

“I belong to something larger than myself, and I am willing to surrender even myself to it.”

That is the logic of dharma as it appears within this heroic Rajput imagination. Whether we agree with that ethic is another matter.

We have now learnt a language in which freedom means the preservation of the individual self above all else. The Rajput heroic tradition often imagined freedom differently: as the refusal to surrender one’s principles even when the body itself had to be surrendered.

And this makes the discussion historically and philosophically more complicated than “women were told to kill themselves rather than survive rape.”

The body as the final territory.

This is particularly important to me because my own work begins with the female body. I spend my time thinking about what it means to inhabit a body that is simultaneously mine and not entirely mine, intimate to me, yet constantly interpreted by everyone around me.

Beauty is read.

Sexuality is read.

Clothing is read.

Desire is read.

Motherhood is read.

Purity is read.

Even our suffering is interpreted for us.

And so I cannot look at Padmini’s story without asking what it means when a woman refuses to allow her body to become the final territory of conquest. Because yes, the body is hers. But what happens when the available choices are themselves produced by violence?

I don’t believe that because a woman chooses something, the choice automatically becomes freedom.

Burning alive is among the most excruciating deaths a human being can endure. This was not an easy or painless death, nor was it some convenient escape because fire was somehow less frightening than life.

So perhaps the more important question is not what was wrong with these women? but:

What did they believe awaited them beyond those walls for fire to become preferable?

We cannot know the private thoughts of every woman who entered the fire, and I don’t pretend to. But we can recognise the extremity of the choice. Whatever else one calls it - tragedy, coercion, resistance, sacrifice, agency within impossible circumstances - knowingly walking towards a death as physically terrifying as burning alive required extraordinary courage.

The horror of the image should not automatically be located in the woman who walked into the fire. Some of that horror belongs to the circumstances that made the fire conceivable as the lesser terror.

And no, I don’t think Jauhar is a “glorious choice” when you strip it of the circumstances that produced it. Viewed in isolation, it is horrifying. But history cannot be understood in isolation.

Which brings us to another fact that is difficult to look away from - and, from my keen observations of your politics, I suspect you would very much like to look away from this one.

Jauhar was not something the Rajputs practised indiscriminately in every war they fought. It was associated specifically with circumstances of imminent defeat and with the severe treatment of defeated non-combatants, including the enslavement of women as war booty (ghanimat) under specific medieval military practices.

Very specific.

Jauhar Kund in Chittorgarh (reposted from Substack, no copyright infringement intended)

The Burning of the Rajput women, during the siege of Chitor

I don’t see Rani Padmini as a woman who was incapable of imagining another life. I see a woman whose conception of what constituted a life worth preserving was radically different from yours.

And whether we admire that or reject it, we owe her the intellectual honesty of understanding it before judging it.

I am not here to translate Rani Padmini into the language of 2026 for you, Swara. I am here to ask whether 2026 is sophisticated enough to understand hers.

Because when you ask, “Does a rape survivor not deserve to live after rape?”, the answer is so obvious that it almost feels disingenuous to make it the centre of this conversation. Of course she does.

We have spent decades, rightly, trying to ensure that surviving sexual violence does not become another form of social death.

A woman who survives sexual violence has survived something done to her. She has not become impure. She has not lost her honour. She has not lost her right to live. That should not need explaining in 2026.

But what does that have to do with women whose state had already fallen? Women who had lost their kingdom, their homes, their families and any institutional protection that might have existed for them, and who were facing the consequences of defeat in a medieval war?

To compare the two without first acknowledging that difference is to make the historical woman disappear inside the contemporary argument.

And then there is Padmaavat itself.

This, I think, is where your criticism has somewhere legitimate to go. I can understand questioning what the camera does with jauhar. I can understand asking whether a scene of hundreds of women entering a fire should be framed with grandeur, and whether the audience is being given enough space to experience horror and grief rather than simply the satisfaction of victory.

But that is a criticism of representation.

It is not a reason to retrospectively patronise the women being represented. If anything, I would ask a more uncomfortable question of the film: why does the emotional centre of that ending belong so much to the men watching the women die? Why are these women once again made into symbols through which men experience honour, loss, victory and revenge?

That is a feminist question I can get behind.

Throughout history, women’s bodies have been made to carry meanings far larger than themselves. Beauty, purity, honour, conquest, community, religion, nation.

That is why I resist turning Padmini into a lesson for the modern rape survivor. Her body has already been made to carry enough.

You said you felt reduced to a “vagina” and that the sequence gave you a “chii” feeling. I find that an odd reading of the image. The women are not being reduced to their vaginas; they are confronting what it means for their bodies to be reduced to them. You can find their choice horrifying without making the women themselves the object of disgust.

I think I’ve already established the obvious when I say I do not believe women today should ever be taught that their lives become worth less after sexual violence.

But I also refuse the idea that, in protecting that truth, we must look back at women who chose jauhar and strip their decision of its courage. You can reject chastity as the measure of a woman’s worth without teaching yourself to despise the women for whom protecting it was, within their own moral universe, worth dying for.

In Rajasthan, we inherit a tradition in which people have given their lives for their faith, their land, their people and their principles with a kind of abandon that is almost impossible for the modern imagination to comprehend. There are things we inherit precisely because someone before us decided that life, however precious, was not the only thing worth preserving.

That does not make every sacrifice right. It makes the capacity to sacrifice extraordinary.

We do not have to reproduce her world to honour the woman who lived in it. We do not have to tell a rape survivor that her dignity lies in her chastity to understand why chastity, honour, faith and freedom could once have carried meanings powerful enough to make death preferable to surrender.

And perhaps what makes us most uncomfortable is that sometimes people really did believe in something enough to die for it.

Sometimes they did.

And sometimes, they were women.

I think they deserve to be remembered for the enormity of what they were willing to give, not reduced to the fact that we would have chosen differently.

Jahnvi Singh

This article has been republished from Substack with the author’s permission. All ideas, written content, and illustrations are the exclusive intellectual property of the author and may not be reproduced or distributed without permission.