Jauhar vs Sati: Why history shouldn't be judged by today's morality

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat* 

There is a disturbing tendency among India's self-styled liberals to dig up the past not to understand it, but to score political points in the present. The latest target of this historical lampooning is the Rajput practice of Jauhar—the collective self-immolation by women facing certain defeat at the hands of invading armies. Those who denounce it today as barbaric or patriarchal are guilty of the same sin they accuse others of: viewing a complex historical reality through the narrow lens of contemporary politics.

Let us be clear about one thing first. Communities are not homogenous political projects. The attempt to flatten the rich internal diversity of the Rajputs, Dalits, Adivasis, Brahmins, or any other group into a single, manageable identity is a failure of social imagination. It serves political entrepreneurs, not the people themselves. Every community wants its distinct history, its own heroes, and its own narrative of dignity. The Rajputs of Rajasthan remember Jauhar not as a statistic of oppression, but as a badge of collective honor—and significantly, this memory is shared by non-Rajput communities in the region as well. It is not merely a Rajput story; it is a Rajasthan story.

To understand why, we must separate Jauhar from Sati. The two are constantly, and dishonestly, conflated by those who want to paint every pre-modern practice with the same brush of "Hindu patriarchy." They are not the same. Sati, as the world tragically witnessed on September 4, 1987, when 18-year-old Roop Kunwar committed the act in Deorala, Rajasthan, was an individual choice (or coercion) tied to the death of a husband. What followed was grotesque: the event was valorized, politicized, and celebrated across communities. Marwari women distributed prasad and photographs of "Sati Mata." Politicians, including BJP leader Vijaya Raje Scindia and even the editor Prabhash Joshi, defended it. Only sustained pressure from activists and the national media forced the Rajasthan government to pass the Sati Prevention Act in 1987.

Jauhar belongs to an entirely different moral universe. It was not about a widow's devotion to her dead husband. It was a collective decision made in the shadow of an invading army, driven by the certainty of enslavement, torture, and mass rape. To call this cowardice is to betray a profound ignorance of how war has historically worked, and how rape has been systematically used as an instrument of ethnic and religious domination.

We do not need to look to medieval India to understand this. Recent history is stained with enough evidence. During the 1994 Rwanda conflict, between 100,000 and 250,000 women were raped in one hundred days. In the Kosovo War (1998–1999), around 20,000 women survived sexual violence. The Bosnian War (1992–1995) saw between 20,000 and 50,000 survivors, predominantly Muslim Bosniak women targeted by Bosnian Serb forces. During Bangladesh's liberation struggle in 1971, the Pakistani army and Razakars raped an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 women. In each case, rape was not incidental to war; it was a weapon of ethnic cleansing, designed to humiliate, demoralize, and destroy the social fabric of the "enemy."

The aftermath for survivors was often worse than the violence itself. Many were shunned by their own communities, pushed into sex work, or driven to suicide. Those who became pregnant faced an impossible choice. In Bosnia, Pope John Paul II urged pregnant rape victims not to have abortions, framing their trauma as an opportunity for "love." One wonders what "love" he imagined an 18-year-old Bosniak girl, burned with cigarettes, cut with razors, and raped 16 times at gunpoint by soldiers who told her they were breeding Serbian children, could possibly offer to the product of her torture. This was not morality; it was the politics of demography dressed in religious rhetoric.

When Rajput women chose fire over capture, they were making a choice within this brutal historical logic. They were not helpless housewives waiting for death. They were women who had fought, who had seen their men fight, and who understood that defeat meant a fate worse than death—not because their "honor" was located in their bodies, but because their bodies would be used to break their community. To frame this as a failure of feminism, or to suggest that they should have been "trained" to fight like men, is the kind of anachronistic nonsense that only academics funded by Western liberal fellowships can afford to spout. Rajput women did fight—history is full of such examples, from Rajasthan to Uttarakhand's Tilu Rauteli. Jauhar was the last resort, not the first.

The problem is that our intellectual class has internalized a Western model of atomized individualism that is ill-suited to understanding collective societies. The same liberals who rightly stand in solidarity with Nirbhaya today fail to grasp that constitutional rights and rule-of-law protections did not exist in medieval battlefields. Human rights are only meaningful where there is a state capable of enforcing them. Ask the women of Gaza, or the survivors of Bosnia, whether the rule of law protected them. Jauhar was an act of resistance in a lawless zone of war, not a domestic social evil like dowry or caste discrimination.

This is not to glorify death. It is to insist on historical empathy. We do not mock student suicides today without asking what institutional failures drove them to it. We do not dismiss the desperation of the oppressed without examining the structures that broke them. Why then do we feel entitled to mock the choices of women who faced the certainty of mass rape and slavery?

Bollywood, of course, has never helped. Indian cinema has a long and dishonorable tradition of falsifying history to fit commercial formulas—romance, dance, and simplistic morality. From Mughal-e-Azam to Padmaavat, filmmakers package the past for entertainment, and then we are surprised when communities feel insulted. But the answer is not to learn history from Bombay's cinema, nor to use those cinematic distortions to manufacture political controversies that push communities into the arms of the very right-wing forces these liberals claim to oppose.

If the fight is against the BJP, the RSS, or Narendra Modi, fight it on today's issues—unemployment, inequality, social justice, the Constitution. Do not fight it by falsifying a community's historical memory. India has enough issues that unite us; we do not need to revive historical wounds to feel politically relevant.

Jauhar was a product of its time, shaped by the realities of medieval warfare. Sati was a social practice that the law rightly criminalized. Conflating the two is either ignorance or opportunism. Historical figures must be seen through the eyes of their own age, not ours. The Rajput women who chose death over enslavement may not be your role models, but they inspire millions who see in their sacrifice a courage of conviction. Let us not mock that courage to suit our contemporary political interests. Our battle is for a better today. To win it, we need to learn from history—not use it as a weapon against those we have failed to understand.

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*Human rights defender