Skip to main content

The Darkness of Padmavati


Historians are not sure whether Padmavati is a mere legend or a historical figure.  That doesn’t matter either.  Objective truth is not the concern of most people.  People want convenient truths.  People want truths that serve their practical purposes.  Most religious truths belong to that category. 

Padmavati is also one such expedient truth.  What is that truth? 

I am Rani Padmavati, the Queen of Chittor.  People call me the Queen of Beauty.  I have never understood why our men bother about beauty at all.  They are warriors and love fighting. Bravery, physical strength and honour are the values they really cherish and want all of us to possess.  We cherish beauty too.  But we’d prefer to keep beauty veiled behind the purdah.  If anyone other than the husband dares to raise the purdah, he will be killed.  Beauty is a private property among us.  We, the women, are our men’s private properties.

That is how my story of Padmavati began, a story which I wrote when the controversy about the Bhansali movie broke out.  My story was, among other things, a peep into the Rajput perception of women.  Women are men’s possessions in that perception.  Precious properties.  Their very identity is concealed behind the veils that drape their faces.  The men will fight on behalf of those properties just as a savage tribal man would hunt heads to keep as his glorious trophies.

At the end of that story, Padmavati sets herself ablaze in order to “guard the Rajput honour.”  The other major purpose of the Padmavati legend (apart from teaching that women are men’s private properties) is precisely that: the honour of the tribe is the honour of the man and it is a woman’s duty to sacrifice herself for safeguarding it.

The legend of Padmavati, like most legends, is created in order to reinforce certain ideals which some powerful individuals of a community want to reinforce.  Today when some individuals are fighting to guard the honour of Padmavati, what they are actually doing is to reinforce their version of certain tinted truths. 

Whatever those truths may be, the fact remains that they are their truths and not everybody’s truths.  In other words, Sanjay Leela Bhansali has as much right to explore Padmavati’s psyche as Salman Rushdie had to explore the psyche of Prophet Mohammad in Satanic Verses or Nikos Kazantzakis had to delve into Jesus’ mind in The Last Temptation of Christ.

Moreover, who are the Rajputs to tell the other millions of people what they should think, create and entertain themselves with?  When they dictate terms to the artist or anyone else, like the right wing organisations in the country have been doing in the past few years, they are behaving just like the crusaders of the Dark Ages. 

India should liberate itself from such parochial and obsolescent mindset.  The Rajputs and similar crusaders in India are taking the country backward into more and more darkness.

From 'Man Against Myth' by Barrows Dunham



Labels:

Comments

  1. CifarNovember 26, 2017 at 11:57 AM

    all such issues are raised nowadays to polarize the society for the bigger gain in 2019 elections but as you have said these things taking country backward again

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 26, 2017 at 1:18 PM

      Power games always create their own truths. We are passing through a dangerous phase as there are too many power games all of which are clandestinely supported by the central power for its own nefarious motives.

      Delete
  2. JaiNovember 26, 2017 at 12:35 PM

    Very true Sir. The current regime does not believe in democracy... What they are aiming to do behind tge scenes is to convert India into a theocracy...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 26, 2017 at 1:18 PM

      And they seem to be succeeding. That's what's scary.

      Delete
  3. Jyotirmoy SarkarNovember 27, 2017 at 9:28 AM

    Cant share my thoughts and views in this issue as i dont have any knowledge about this.
    But i must say...i liked your writing as always.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...
13 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
13 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more