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