Remember the barbarically horrific rape-murder of the young woman in Delhi in late 2012, the act that shocked the world & began global condemnation of India’s culture of rape, or sexual predation! Four young men tricked the young woman and the accompanying young man into a van; beat up the young man with iron rods and raped-murdered the young woman.
The men had no fear because the four of them were much stronger than the young man accompanying the woman.Their’s was an act of power; of pure sexual predation. Indian society made the poor victimized young woman into a folk hero and discarded the brave young man. He spent a long period in a comma in intensive care; no one has heard of him or spoken about him since that day.
All this was & remains true today. Any one who intervenes in sexual predation of a woman on the streets by gangs or powerful men suffers a similar fate. Only if the story is picked up on Indian TV do the police & politicians step in.
And now Bollywood is celebrating such sexual predation of Indian women.
1.Padmaavat – Celebration of Sexual Predation
Now, despite strident protests in many parts of North India, a visually opulent film named Padmaavat celebrates this sexual predation culture & the death of women that results from it. This film is produced & directed by a man who seems to revel in tales of sexual obsession. He is also smart; he uses prior literature about historical figures as the basis of his films. So the tenuous historical basis can mask the underlying theme of sexual obsession of powerful men for beautiful women.
Such is his new film Padmaavat based on a story from a Muslim piece of literature from 1540, the period in which Afghan/Mongol Muslim rule over a predominantly Hindu North India was at its zenith. It is a typically opulent & well made Bhansali film and, just as typically, the film is an ode to his hero, Allauddin Khilji, the most ferocious among the most ferociously barbaric Afghan tribe, the Ghilzai or Khiljis.
The film is not a historical film about Allauddin’s military conquests. It is entirely about Bhansali’s core obsession – Khilji’s unbridled, insatiable desire to possess & then cast aside beautiful women. In this Bhansali was being true to literature because read what the poem Padmaavat says about Allauddin’s desire:
- “Desire is insatiable, permanent / but this world is illusory and transient / Insatiable desire man continues to have / Till life is over and he reaches his grave.”
Bhansali’s opulent unrestrained portrayal of Allauddin’s insatiable desire begins with his proposal of marriage to the young daughter of reigning Sultan & Allauddin’s uncle. During the feast of marriage, Allauddin is strangely absent. The Sultan sends a page to find Allauddin. The page, a childhood friend of Allauddin, discovers Allauddin engaged in dominating sex with another young woman while his bride & her father wait below in the feast. True to form, Allauddin kills the messenger & then proudly enters the feast as if nothing had happened. A lady in waiting comes down to tell the young bride, the daughter of the reigning Sultan, what had happened. The bride is shocked but helpless as a new Afghan bride often is.
Later, Allauddin murders his uncle, the reigning Sultan, and proclaims himself as the new Sultan. Kudos to Bhansali to focus not on the power grab but on Allauddin’s sexual treatment of his wife that night. Allauddin tells his wife that he has made her the Queen of India and demands that she show her gratitude with sexual favors to him.
Again, kudos to Bhansali – that scene doesn’t even show a shred of love or tenderness between the husband & wife. It is an unadulterated pure scene about sexual predation & power; of the clear demand by Allauddin that his wife perform sexual obeisance to the new conqueror. The titular queen has no choice but to please the conqueror.
And lest we forget, the film is also true to Allauddin’s other love, the younger (castrated) eunuch man, Malik Kafur. The film doesn’t actually show the physical action between Allauddin & Malik. But it explicitly tells that story nonetheless. In the true Afghan Baccha Baaji tradition, it is Malik Kafur who is always with Allauddin and not any of his many women who are confined to the harem.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YaF2m7hCx0[/embedyt]
There is no question about the military conquests of Allauddin; he is truly the First Great Man of the Indo-Afghan Continuum. He was the first Muslim conqueror to cross into Southern India and plunder the astonishing wealth of those kingdoms. The first conquest was by him; the latter were by Malik Kafur, his Muslim eunuch lover. All the regional little kingdoms of South India surrendered just as the North Indian kingdoms had. One of them, Warrangal, sent Allauddin the famous diamond that now sits in the crown of England’s Elizabeth.
Thus this brutal, almost barbaric, Afghan Ghilzai tribe hero Allauddin was the master of all he surveyed in India. So when he heard of the unsurpassed beauty of Padmavati, the queen of the regional kingdom of Chittor, she just had to be made his property. He sent an emissary to King of Chittor and demanded the king send the queen to Allauddin for his pleasure.
Chittor is the only regional kingdom in North India to resist Afghan invaders from Kabul. Chittor fought valiantly & bravely but ALWAYS lost the battles. The series of Afghan/Mongol conquerors who rode into North India from Afghanistan won North India by destruction of Chittor armies & massacre of its Hindu people.
Once again, history repeated itself with Allauddin. The King of Chittor refused to send his lovely wife to Allauddin; Allauddin invaded Chittor. Once again, the entire army of Chittor was massacred and all the women of Chittor, including the queen Padmavati, immolated themselves by jumping into the ceremonial funeral pyre.
And this self-immolation by all the women of Chittor is described as a great defeat of Allauddin and a great moral victory of Indian Rajput Culture.
2. Recruiting Film for Afghani Taleban & Lashkar e-Toiba?
Kudos to Bhansali for making it clear how the “culture” of Rajputs played a big role in their destruction by Allauddin. As the film shows, the Rajput king of Chittor had a couple of opportunities to kill Allauddin. But he did not because that would have violated Rajput “principles”. On both occasions, including as the Rajput king is fatally wounded in battle, Allauddin reminds him that “there is only one principle in war – Victory“.
Every sensible soldier, warrior knows this & understands this. But for some reason, the brave but utterly ignorant, insular & stupid Indian Rajputs never understood this in the 500 years of defeats against every Afghan tribe that invaded North India from 998 CE to the 16th century.
Despite these centuries of defeats & massacres, Indian Rajputs never built an espionage infrastructure to alert them of impending invasions by Afghans. They never studied how the Afghan invaders wage war. They never developed asymmetric warfare tactics, never developed weapons. They relied on their false pride of being great warriors with the sword and their reputation of “their bodies fighting even after their heads were cut off“. The result was therefore always the same – Chittor Rajput heads were always cut off and they always lost. The brutal, barbaric but utterly smart Afghans always won against Chittor Rajputs.
But what about the other Rajput kings? Chittor was just one little kingdom. The Rajput region had many other kingdoms – Jaipur, Jodhpur, Ajmer, Marwar etc. Had they come together, they would have been able to fight off Allauddin and even defeat him.
Kudos for Bhansali for making this clear in his Padmaavat film – Allauddin’s army had laid a siege to Chittor. So the King of Chittor sent requests to other Rajput kings to attack Allauddin from his rear. For his part, Allauddin sent warnings to other Rajput kings to not interfere & threatened to destroy those who did interfere. The other Rajput kings chose to live instead of fighting to save the honor of their ethnic sister, the Rajput queen of Chittor.
This Padmaavat film does a marvelous job in demonstrating to anti-India Afghan terrorists how pathetic Indians are; how Indians will always refuse to get united to kill invading Afghans; how the majority of Indians will cower in terror in their cities & homes against attacks by even a few Afghan warriors. Yes, the Indian Army is different today and fighting the Indian army is suicidal. But nothing has changed within the Indian or Hindu people.
Why else would today’s Hindu directors, Hindu actors agree to play the roles in a pathetic display of Indian cowardice & stupidity in this film Padmaavat? Why would Hindus throng to watch this true, opulent but pathetic display of Indian cowardly defeat?
These are questions every fighter & aspiring fighter in the Taleban & Lashkar-e-Toiba would ask. Having asked these basic questions, these young Afghan fighters would feel so proud of their conquering heritage, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t they tell themselves that they should infiltrate into India and massacre these cowardly Indians and rape Indian women? India is now getting rich again while Afghanistan remains dirt poor. So why not learn terrorist tactics and get into India? Because once you enter India, you have avoided the Indian Army and now only face the pathetic Hindu civil society.
We are being serious. We cannot think of a better recruiting film for young Afghan Pashtun terrorists to join anti-India terrorist groups in Afghanistan-Pakistan. We don’t know that was Bhansali’s intention but that is certainly one result of his Padmaavat film.
3. India’s Culture of Rape
This story of Allauddin & his sexual predation of Padmavati is seared into Indian consciousness, at least North Indian consciousness. It is a very large part of the culture of rape in India, especially North India. The Afghani Pashtuns, or Pathans as British called them, remain the standard of male virility in India. As Shah Rukh Khan, the Afghani Pathan superstar of Bollywood, said of his Pathan heritage in January 2013:
- “I am a Khan. The name itself conjures multiple images in my mind too: a strapping man riding a horse, his reckless hair flowing from beneath a turban tied firm around his head. His ruggedly handsome face marked by weathered lines and a distinctly large nose.”
As we wrote on February 2, 2013 in our article “India’s” Culture of Rape,
- This warrior virile Pathan stereotype is ingrained into the North Indian psyche, especially the semi-urban or rural psyche. These are the guys who defeated North Indians in every single battle since 1001 CE and North Indians know that.
- This is why young men from rural or semi-urban North India consciously imitate the Pathans even more than the urban English-speaking youth imitate the British.
And what is the Pathan stereotype?
- ” … Their favorite method was rape, rape of any Indian woman they could get their hands on. Read any historical novel of that period (1300-1800) and you read at least one story of a group of Pathans viciously beating up a husband, tying him up and brutally raping the wife in front of the husband. Yes, exactly what the six accused men did to the 23-year old Delhi woman and her friend.”
- “The Pathan soldiers of the invading armies would capture as many Indian women as they could and take them back to Afghanistan to be sold in Iran or Arabia. The Pathans who stayed back in India were content to rape and sometimes took the raped women as wives.”
If you think a bit, you will see what happened in the film Padmaavat is what happened in the barbaric rape-murder of the young woman in Delhi. And that still happens regularly in today’s India, especially rural India.
The Indian police and the Indian Government would never release official statistics. But we wonder what would those statistics show about how many rapes are of Hindu women by Muslim men & how many rapes are of Muslim women by Hindu men?
4. Who is winning in today’s Bollywood? – Allauddin or Rajputs?
There is no question that, thanks mainly to the unique & separate personal law for Muslims, Hindu women & wives enjoy greater legal freedoms in India than Muslim women & wives. So wouldn’t it be natural to expect Muslim women to marry Hindu men & unnatural to expect Hindu women to marry Muslim men?
The reality says otherwise at least in Bollywood. We can’t think of even one Muslim actress who married a Hindu actor while every body knows of famous, beautiful top-tier Hindu actresses marrying Muslim Pathan actors of Bollywood. In fact, all three Muslim Pathan superstars of Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan, Amir Khan & Saif Ali Khan, have Hindu wives.
So not only did Afghani Pathan Allauddin win over Hindus in 1300 but Afghan Pathans of today are winners over Hindus in today’s modern rich Bollywood India.
Kudos to Sanjay Leela Bhansali for broadcasting this pathetic reality to the world. Recruiters for Lashkar-e-Toiba & the Afghani Taleban are thanking him, we suspect.
PS: Ranvir Singh has played the role of Allauddin to perfection. You can see why the majority of Hindus cowered in front to Allauddin Khilji. The Hindu King of Chittor is played by Shahid Kapoor as an insipid & un-smart husband who is often overruled & overshadowed by his beautiful wife. We don’t know whether that was deliberate to make his wife seem stronger but the result is actual demonstration of Hindu male sissyness. That must be Bhansali’s direction. Because whatever their other faults, Chittor kings were brave even foolhardy alpha males.
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The movie is a combination of ultimate royalty and description of history. I loved the movie. there is less of drama and more of real history. On Box Office, Padmaavat crosses Bajirao Mastani lifetime in just 10 days.