India, Sept. 8 -- The debate over Jauhar in Padmaavat has exposed an uncomfortable tendency in contemporary discourse: judging the past entirely through the moral vocabulary of the present. There is nothing wrong with questioning whether a modern film can inadvertently romanticise a practice that constitutional morality rightly rejects today

There are really two separate questions in the controversy over an actor's comments on the Jauhar sequence in Padmaavat - what Jauhar meant in its historical context, and what message a modern film depicting it may convey to a contemporary audience.

The latter is a perfectly legitimate subject for debate. But the former cannot be reconstructed entirely through the moral vocabulary of the present.

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