FREE CHOICE: An historical story.
Almost 6 months ago, I watched this movie with my family and until this day, I still cant get over the beautiful culture and story this movie shared with their viewers.
This is a real-life story, set in 1303 AD India. An epitome of love and sacrifice between queen Padmavati, and King Rana Rawal Ratan Singh. The story goes back a thousands of years ago, when Padmavati who was purely admired for her impeccable beauty, falls in love with the king.
They later get married and start a new life together, when Allaudin khilji enters their life. He was known to be a very cruel ruler, and he mostly invaded kingdoms for their land and women. He somehow finds out about the queen of Rana’s kingdom, and tries to attack the kingdom to claim her. Before he made the decision to attack them, he did try his best to meet her in person. But the king never wanted any stranger to look at his wife in any lustful way, so every time Allaudin tried, Rana respectfully denied his move.
The person who informed Allaudin about padmavati told him that, a man would rule the world if he had her presence in his life, as she was some eternal power that attracted success. With the greed of attaining a beautiful woman with positive powers, he started war.
It was the time of war, Allaudin and Rana’s war soldiers were equally good, but Rana went ahead with an one on one sword fight to finish the battle as fast he could. Unfortunately, Rana got attacked brutally by Allaudin and died on the battle field. Allaudin went to declare his victory by attacking the palace to attain Padmavati.
A soldier confirms Rana’s death to padmavati, and she gets her fellow women and herself ready for a “Jauhar”. Jauhar is the act of mass self-immolation by women in parts of the Indian subcontinent, to avoid capture, enslavement and rape by any foreign invaders, when facing certain defeat during a war.
Queen padmavati and 200 other women jumped into the fire after they were faced by defeat. These women who sacrificed their lives for their royal honor and lineage are still praised for their courageous act. They could not fight back, and so they sacrificed themselves to prevent their self-respect from being intoxicated by the enemies. The Jauhar scene left me speechless, women of that time were so courageous and brave that they could burn themselves in order to keep their self respect and pride. I was hugely astonished by the crazy amount of work the production team put into this film, the tremendous performance by the actors and lastly the beautiful culture and historical story it portrayed.
If you are interested, you can watch the trailer of the movie from the link down below.
