Actor Swara Bhasker has been in the headlines for her recent comments about Deepika Padukone’s Jauhar scene in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s directorial Padmaavat. She called the sequence “problematic”, which drew significant backlash on social media. Now, actor Ranvir Shorey has also criticised Swara’s remarks, calling her “utterly shameless.”

Taking to his X handle, Ranvir criticised Swara for her remark about Padmavat. He questioned her for drawing a connection between the Jauhar scene and rape survivors. “I still don’t get it! Comparing Jauhar (suicide by fire in defiance of inevitable and endless rape, violence and even necrophilia!) to rape survivors? Where’s the connection? They’re two completely different sets! The only intention can be to malign one group of people while trying to whitewash the other! Utterly shameless!” he wrote in a tweet on Wednesday.

I still don’t get it! Comparing Jauhar (suicide by fire in defiance of inevitable and endless rape, violence and even necrophilia!) to rape survivors? Where’s the connection? They’re two completely different sets! The only intention can be to malign one group of people while…

— Ranvir Shorey (@RanvirShorey) September 2, 2026

What Swara Bhasker said about Jauhar scene

At a recent event at the India International Centre in New Delhi, Swara Bhasker revealed that she had written an open letter to Sanjay Leela Bhansali after the release of Padmaavat. Talking about the letter, she said, “I was watching it, and I thought that if God forbid, I was a rape survivor, what is this film telling me? I would feel like a coward that I didn’t commit suicide to save my honour.”

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The actor continued, “Is that what you want to tell in a society like ours where I feel like, anyway, there is a rape epidemic? Is this what we want to tell our survivors that they don’t deserve to live, that if you actually would have been an honourable and brave woman, you would have killed yourself. Are we saying that rape is the end of a woman’s life? This scene was so problematic.”

She expressed that one specific scene made her very angry, which was the close-up shot of a pregnant woman’s belly as she performed Jauhar. It left her shouting, “Chii”. Swara revealed that she was extremely upset by the sequence and waited for five days to observe if she felt the same way, before finally writing the open letter to Bhansali.

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After her remarks received backlash on the internet, the actor took to her Instagram account and shared a video to clarify that she did not call Rani Padmavati a “coward.”

“Should we be telling a rape survivor that it would have been better if she had died, and that surviving the assault was a bad thing?” she further questioned.

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Padmavat writer disagrees with Swara Bhasker

Padmavat co-writer Prakash Kapadia defended the Jauhar scene after Swara Bhasker’s comments went viral. “We made the film according to our research and what is written in history books. Every person interprets the film differently. What we showed, including the jauhar scene, was the reality of those times; it cannot be changed now. The situation was that of ‘do or die,” Kapadia told .

He further added, “It depends on the person’s mood; even if it’s a good film and you watch it with a bad state of mind, you will find it bekaar (worthless). It’s also about intention; whether you are going as a viewer, or watching it to find something controversial, or to find negativity… With Padmaavat, people had raised objections even before watching the film and had protested on the streets. The same conversation is continuing years later, so what can I say? Let people say what they want to.”

Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Padmavat started Deepika Padukone, Shahid Kapoor, and Ranveer Singh in lead roles.