Swara Bhaskar’s comments on the climactic jauhar sequence of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2018 blockbuster period war drama Padmaavat has reentered the discourse after the actor justified her objection to the archaic practice. Swara had claimed that as a woman, she felt “reduced to her vagina” while watching the climax, when Deepika Padukone’s character of Rani Padmini leads hundreds of Rajput women into self-immolation in order to escape the advancing clutches of the invading enemy, Ranveer Singh’s Alauddin Khilji.Now, Swara’s fellow actor Shriya Pilgaonkar has also weighed in on the issue. “I feel generally, it’s very easy for us, in today’s context, to judge another context of another time. We can’t sit in 2026 and judge what people felt and what their values and what their pressures were in the cultural context 1000 to 2000 years ago. Every culture evolves with time, circumstances, situations, and the human condition. I don’t think it’s fair to assume the mindset,” she said on a recent podcast.The Mirzapur actor also argued that the issue with any discourse today is that people just feel everyone should just agree with each other. “I don’t think any discourse really goes like that. The true sign of a healthy conversation is how open you are to change your mind if I present you with new information, and vice-versa. How fair it’s to judge a person from another time, we should decipher it on their own,” Shriya told Filmgyan.She further argued that while critical thinking is “very important”, but understanding the “framework” and “nuance” of that moment is also crucial. “We’re too busy judging people without really understanding the cultural context. At times, we hold a lot of arrogance about what we know, but it’s important for us to understand that if we talk about anything, do we conduct in-depth research into it and try to understand somebody else’s point of view? Or are we too busy to give only our point of view?,” added the actor.Shriya also shared, “Unfortunately, social media is not a very safe place to have open conversations because we just charge at each other. So, you don’t feel like going deep into it. People just want each other to agree with them. The attitude is, ‘If you don’t agree with me, then I’d rather have you not say anything.'”Shriya Pilgaonkar, who recently reprised her role of Sweety in Gurmeet Singh’s hit action crime drama Mirzapur: The Movie, will be next seen in Priyadarshan’s crime thriller Haiwaan, slated to release in cinemas on September 11.Swara Bhaskar’s jauhar remarksSwara Bhaskar had written an open letter to Sanjay Leela Bhansali after Padmaavat, expressing her displeasure with the jauhar sequence. She recently addressed that controversy at an event organized by the India International Centre in Delhi. “I’m watching this, these 800 women committing jauhar, and I was like, yaar, God forbid, if I was a rape survivor, what is this film telling me? I would feel like a coward, that I didn’t kill myself to save my honour. Is that what you want to tell in a society like ours, where I feel like there’s anyway a rape epidemic? Is this what we want to tell our survivors, that you didn’t deserve to live? That if you actually had been honourable and brave women, you would have killed yourself. Are we saying that rape is the end of a woman’s life?,” she said.Story continues below this ad“And then there was that one shot; it made me so mad. I was like, chhiii, in the audience loudly. There is a close-up of a pregnant woman’s belly. And she is going (into the fire), so you’re saying that a foetus that might be female doesn’t deserve to be born, because she might be raped by a Muslim ruler? And then I came out, and I was like, this is terrible. And normally, people think that I do these things out of rage. But I waited for five days. And I was like, let me check if I still feel like this. And then at the end of five days, I wrote this letter,” added the actor.Also Read — Hanuman Ansh box office collection day 30: Neem Karoli Baba film enters Rs 100 crore clubAfter her latest remarks, Padmaavat co-writer Prakash Kapadia responded, “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,'” he told Hindustan Times. “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,” Kapadia added.