Jauhar, sometimes spelled Jowhar or Juhar, was a practice of mass self-immolation by Rajput kshatriya women and girls in the Indian subcontinent to avoid capture, sex slavery, enslavement, and rape when facing certain defeat during a war. Some reports of jauhar mention women committing self-immolation along with their children. This practice was historically observed in the northwest regions of India, with the most famous jauhars in recorded history occurring during wars between Hindu Rajput kingdoms in Rajasthan and the opposing Muslim armies. Jauhar was only performed during war, usually when there was no chance of victory. Jauhar involved Hindu Rajput women committing suicide with their children and valuables in a massive fire, in order to avoid capture and abuse in the face of inescapable military defeat. At the same time or shortly thereafter, the men would ritualistically march to the battlefield expecting certain death, which in the regional tradition is called saka. This practice was intended to show that those committing it valued their honour more highly than their lives.

It was different from Sati, which was the burning of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. Jauhar usually happened during wars.

Jauhar by Hindu kingdoms has been documented by Muslim historians of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. Among the most often cited examples of jauhar is the mass suicide committed in 1303 CE by the women of Chittorgarh fort in Rajasthan, when faced with the invading army of the Khilji dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate. The jauhar phenomenon was also observed in other parts of India, such as in the Kampili kingdom of northern Karnataka when it fell in 1327 to Delhi Sultanate armies.

There is an annual celebration of heroism called the Jauhar Mela in Chittorgarh where the local people commemorate their ancestors.

The word jauhar is connected to Sanskrit jatugr̥ha, meaning a "house plastered with lac and other combustible materials for burning people alive in". It has also been incorrectly interpreted to have been derived from the Persian gōhar, which refers to "gem, worth, virtue". This confusion, as author John Stratton Hawley states, rose from the fact that jivhar and jauhar were written in the same manner with the same letter used to denote v and u. Thus, jivhar has also came to be incorrectly associated with the meaning of jauhar.

The practice of jauhar has been claimed as being culturally related to Sati, with both being a form of suicide by women through self-immolation. However, the two are only superficially similar, with the underlying reason for both being significantly different. Sati was the custom of a Hindu widow committing suicide by sitting on her husband's funeral pyre. Jauhar was collective self-immolation by women in order to escape being captured and forced into slavery by invaders when defeat was imminent. Self-immolation was preferred over simple suicide because it would negate the possibility of any defilement of their dead bodies which their husbands, children and/or clansmen might have to watch.

Kaushik Roy states that jauhar was observed only during Hindu-Muslim wars, but not during internecine Hindu-Hindu wars among the Rajputs. John Hawley, however, disagrees with this assertion; he links it to the Greek conquerors who also captured Indian women, arguing that the practice of jauhar might have started with the Greek campaigns in the region. Veena Talwar Oldenburg disagrees as well, saying that "internecine warfare among the Rajput kingdoms almost certainly supplied the first occasions for jauhar, well before the Muslim invasions with which the practice is popularly associated" and that "the geopolitics of the northwest, whence a succession of invaders entered the subcontinent, made of Rajasthan a continual war zone, and its socially most respected community was therefore not the Brahmins but the Kshatriyas or Rajput castes, who controlled and defended the land. This history predates the coming of the Muslims by more than a millennium. Commemorative stones unearthed and dated in Rajasthan and Vijayanagara mark the deaths of both sexes. Their dates, which can be reliably determined, match perfectly the times and zones of war."

The phenomenon of jauhar has been reported and perceived by Hindus and Muslims differently. In Hindu traditions, jauhar was a heroic act by the women of a community facing certain defeat and abuse by the enemy. For Muslim historians, jauhar was portrayed as an act forced upon women by their culture. Amir Khusrau the poetic scholar described it, states Arvind Sharma – a professor of Comparative Religion, as "no doubt magical but nevertheless they are heroic".