I wish to clarify at the outset that I am going to focus primarily on the Sita of popular imagination rather than the Sita of Tulsi, Balmiki or any other textual or oral version of the Ramayan. Therefore, I deliberately refrain from detailed textual analysis. I have focused on how her life is interpreted and sought to be emulated in today’s context.
However, there is no escaping the fact that in north India the Sita of popular imagination has been deeply influenced by the Sita of Ramcharit Manas by Tulsi. In most other versions of the Ramayan, close companionship and joyful togetherness of the couple are the most prominent features of the Ram-Sita relationship rather than her self-effacing devotion and loyalty which have become the hallmark of the modern day stereotype of Sita. The medieval Ramayan of Tulsi marks the transition from Ram and Sita being presented as an ideal couple to projecting each of them as an ideal man and woman respectively.
As a maryada purushottam, Ram’s conjugal life has to be sacrificed at the altar of “higher” duties. Sita is now portrayed in a highly focussed manner as an ideal wife who acts as the moral anchor in a marriage, and stays unswerving in her loyalty and righteousness no matter how ill-matched be her husband’s response. The power of the ideal wife archetype in Tulsi’s Ramayan overshadows the happy conjugal life of the couple prior to Ram’s rejection of Sita.
The Sita image indeed lends itself to diverse appeals which is perhaps why it has continued to hold sway over the minds of the people of India over the centuries. For instance, in a study carried out in Uttar Pradesh, 500 boys and 360 girls between the ages of 9 and 22 years were asked to select the ideal woman from a list of 24 names of gods, goddesses, heroes, and heroines of history. Sita was seen as the ideal woman by an overwhelming proportion of the respondents. There were no age or sex differences.1 That was a 1957 survey. However, Sita continues to command similar reverence even today, even among modern educated people in India. This paper is a preliminary exploration into why Sita continues to exercise such a powerful grip on popular imagination, especially among women.
A Slavish Wife?: I grew up thinking of Sita as a much-wronged woman — a slavish wife without a mind of her own. And precisely for that reason, she was not for me a symbol of inspiration, but a warning. She was all that I did not want to be. I naively believed she deserved her fate for being so weak and submissive. It was not as though I were deliberately and consciously rejecting Sita as an ideal. Fortunately, she was never held up as an example for me and, therefore, she did not seem an important reference point — positive or negative — in my life. Sita forced herself on my consciousness only after I began working on Manushi. The articles and poems that came to us, especially those for the Hindi edition, showed an obsessive involvement with Sita and her fire ordeal (agnipariksha).
My impression is that 80 to 90 percent of the poems that came to us for the Hindi version of Manushi, and at least half of those for English Manushi, revolved around the mythological Sita, or the writer as a contemporary Sita, with a focus on her steadfast resolve, her suffering, or her rebellion. Sita loomed large in the lives of these women, whether they were asserting their moral strength or rebelling against what they had come to see as the unreasonable demands of society or family. Either way Sita was the point of reference — an ideal they emulated or rejected. I was very puzzled by this obsession, and even began to get impatient with the harangues of our modern day Sitas.
And then came the biggest surprise of all. The first poem I ever wrote was in Hindi, and was entitled, Agnipariksha. I give some extracts in a rough translation:
I too have given agnipariksha, Not one — but many Everyday, a new one. However, this agnipariksha Is not to prove myself worthy of this or that Ram But to make myself Worthy of freedom. Every day your envious, dirty looks Reduced me to ashes And everyday, like a Phoenix, I arose again Out of my own ashes zzz zzz zzz Who is Ram to reject me? I have rejected that entire society Which has converted Homes into prisons.
Not just me, even my former colleague, Ruth Vanita, who is from a Christian family, wrote many a poem around the Sita theme. Her recent collection of poems has several poems that revolve around the Sita symbol. It took a long time, but eventually I became conscious that this obsession with Sita needs to be understood more sensitively than I was hitherto prepared for. Therefore, I began to ask this question fairly regularly of various men and women I met over the years: who do they hold up as an example of the ideal man and ideal woman? Young girls tend to name public figures like Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, Indira Gandhi, and Mother Teresa as their ideals. But those already married or on the threshold of marriage very frequently mention Sita as their ideal (barring the few who are avowedly feminist). At this point of their lives, the distinction between an ideal woman and an ideal wife seem to often get blurred in the minds of women. That includes not just women of my mother or grandmother’s generations but even young college going girls — not just those in small towns and villages, but also those in metropolitan cities like Delhi.
Even among my students in the Delhi University college where I teach, Sita invariably crops up as their notion of an ideal woman. She is frequently the first choice if you ask someone to name a symbol of an ideal wife. When I ask women why they find this ideal still relevant, the most common response is that the example Sita sets will always remain relevant, even though they may themselves not be able to completely live up to it. This failure they attribute to their living in kalyug. They feel that in today’s debased world it is difficult to measure up to such high standards. However, most women add that they do try to live up to the Sita ideal to the best of their ability, while making some adjustments keeping present day circumstances in view.
Importance of Being Sita: Since I don’t have the space to quote extensively from the large number and variety of interviews I have done on the subject, I merely give the gist of what emerged out of these interviews.
It is a common sentiment among Indian women (and men) that the ideals set in bygone ages are still valid and worth emulating, though they admit few people manage to do so in today’s world. This attitude contrasts sharply with the popular western view that assumes that people in by-gone ages were less knowledgeable, were far less aware and conscious of their rights and dignity, had fewer options, and therefore were less evolved as human beings. This linear view of human society makes the past something to be studied and kept in museums but is not expected to encroach upon the supposedly superior wisdom of the present generation. In India, on the other hand, Ram and Sita are not seen as remote figures out of a distant past to be dismissed lightly just because we are living in a different age and have evolved different lifestyles. They are living role models seen as having set standards so superior that they are hard to emulate for those living in our more “corrupt” age, the kalyug.
My interviews indicate that Indian women are not endorsing female slavery when they mention Sita as their ideal. Sita is not perceived as being a mindless creature who meekly suffers maltreatment at the hands of her husband without complaining. Nor does accepting Sita as an ideal mean endorsing a husband’s right to behave unreasonably and a wife’s duty to bear insults graciously. She is seen as a person whose sense of dharma is superior to and more awe inspiring than that of Ram — someone who puts even maryada purushottam Ram — the most perfect of men — to shame. She is the darling of Kaushalya, her mother-in-law, who constantly mourns Sita’s absence from Ayodhya. She worries about her more than she does for her son Ram. As the bahu of Avadh, she is everyone’s dream of an ideal, loving daughter-in-law. To the people of Mithila, she is far more divine and worthy of reverence than Ram.
Her father-in-law, Dashrath, and her three brother-in-laws dote on her. Ram has at least some enemies like Bali who feel wronged and cheated by him. Ram can become angry and act the role of an avenger. Sita is love and forgiveness incarnate and has no ill feelings even for those who torture her in Ravan’s captivity.
In many folk songs, even Lakshman, the forever obedient and devoted brother of Ram, takes Sita’s side against his own brother when Ram decides to banish Sita. In one particular folk song, he argues with Ram: “How can I abandon a bhabhi such as Sita who is like food for the hungry and clothes for the naked? She is like a cool drink of water for the thirsty. She is now in the full term of pregnancy. How can I cast her away at your command?” (Singh, 1986)2 He is in such pain at having to obey and carry out such an unjust command of his king and elder brother that he does not dare disclose the true intent of their trip to the forest. Squirming with shame, he leaves her there on a false pretense.
She is a woman who even the gods revere, a woman who refuses to accept her husband’s tyranny even while she remains steadfast in her love for him and loyalty to him to the very end. People commonly perceive Sita’s steadfastness as a sign of emotional strength and not slavery, because she refuses to forsake her dharma even though Ram forsook his dharma as a husband. Most women (and even men) I have spoken to on the subject refer to her as a “flawless” person, overlooking even those episodes where she acts unreasonably (e.g., her humiliating Lakshman with crude allegations about his intentions towards her), whereas Ram is seen as possessing a major flaw in his otherwise respect worthy character because of the way he behaved towards his wife and children.
When gods go wrong: Hindus talk of Ram and Sita, Shiv and Parvati and sundry other gods in very human ways and feel no hesitation in passing moral judgements on them. Very few Hindu men or women justify those actions of these deities which they consider wrong or immoral by contemporaneously upheld standards of morality. In other words, gods and goddesses are expected to live up to the expectations of fair play demanded by their present day worshippers. Their praiseworthy actions are neatly sifted from those where the gods fail to uphold dharmic conduct. Such criticism and condemnation is not seen as a sign of being irreligious or irreverent but as an acknowledgement that even gods are not perfect or infallible. This provides a far greater sense of freedom and volition to individuals within the Hindu faith than in religions where god’s commandments are to be unconditionally obeyed and the god is upheld as a symbol of infallibility.
Sita’s offer of agnipariksha and her coming out of it unscathed is by and large seen not as an act of supine surrender to the whims of an unreasonable husband but as an act of defiance that challenges her husband’s aspersions, as a means of showing him to be so flawed in his judgement that the gods have to come and pull up Ram for his foolishness. Unlike Draupadi, she does not call upon them for help. Their help comes unsolicited. She emerges as a woman that even agni (fire god) —who has the power to destroy everything he touches — dare not touch or harm. Thus, in popular perception Sita’s agni pariksha is not put in the same category as the mandatory virginity test Diana had to go through in order to prove herself a suitable bride for Prince Charles, but rather as an act of supreme defiance on her part. It only underscores the point that Ram is emotionally unreliable and can be unjust in his dealings with Sita, that he behaved like a petty minded, stupidly mistrustful, jealous husband and showed himself to be a slave to social opinion. Most women and men I interviewed felt he had no right to reject and humiliate her or to demand an agnipariksha.
Rejection of Ram: The refusal of Sita to go through a second agnipariksha — which Ram demands in addition to the first one that she had offered in defiance — has left a far deeper impact on the popular imagination. It is interpreted not as an act of self annihilation but as a momentous but dignified rejection of Ram as a husband. It is noteworthy that Sita is considered the foremost of the mahasatis even though she rejected Ram’s tyrannical demand of that final fire ordeal resolutely and refused to come back and live with him. It is he who is left grieving for her and is humbled and rejected by his own sons. Ram may not have rejected her as a wife but only as a queen in deference to social opinion, but Sita rejects him as a husband. In Kalidasa’s Raghuvansha, after her banishment by Ram, Sita does not address Ram as Aryaputra (a term for husband that literally translates as son of my father-in-law) but refers to him as ‘King’ instead. For instance, when Lakshman comes to her with Ram’s message, she conveys her rejection of him as her husband in the following words: “Tell the king on my behalf that even after finding me pure after the fire ordeal he had in your presence, now you have chosen to leave me because of public slander. Do you think it is befitting the noble family in which you were born?” (Kalidasa)3.
His rejection of Sita is almost universally condemned while her rejection of him is held up as an example of supreme dignity. By that act she emerges triumphant and supreme; she leaves a permanent stigma on Ram’s name. I have never heard even one person, man or woman, suggest that Sita should have gone through the second fire ordeal quietly and obediently and accepted life with her husband once again, though I often hear people say that Ram had no business to reject her in the first place.
Despite the Divorce: Ram may have forsaken Sita, but the power of popular sentiment has kept them united. Her name precedes Ram’s in the popular greeting in North India: Jai Siya Ram, as also in several bhajans and chants. He is seen as incomplete without her. He stands alone only in the BJP’s propaganda and posters. Otherwise he is never worshipped without his spouse. There is no Ram mandir without Sita by his side. However, there is at least one Sita mandir that I personally know of where Sita presides without Ram. I was introduced to it by the workers of Shetkari Sangathana. This is in Raveri village of Yavatmal district in Maharashtra. The people of the village and surrounding areas tell a moving story associated with the Sita mandir in the area, about how that temple came to be. When Sita was banished by Ram, she roamed from village to village as a homeless destitute. When she came to this particular village, she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. She begged for food but the villagers, for some reason, did not oblige. She cursed the village, vowing that no anaj (grain) would ever grow in their fields. The villagers say that until the advent of hybrid wheat, for centuries, no wheat grew in their village, though plenty grew in neighbouring villages. The villagers all believe in Sita mai’s curse. Her two sons were both said to have been born on the outskirts of the village, where a temple was built commemorating Sita mata’s years of banishment.
Apologia for Ram: The injustice done to Sita seems to weigh very heavily on the collective conscience of men in India. Those few who try to find justifications for Ram’s cruel behaviour towards Sita take pains to explain it in one of the following ways:
- Ram did it not because he personally doubted Sita but because of the demands of his dharma as a king; he knew she was innocent but he had to show his praja (subject) that unlike his father, he was not a slave to a woman, that as a just raja he was willing to make any amount of personal sacrifices for them.
- It was an act of sacrifice for him as well. He suffered no less, and lived an ascetic life thereafter;
- He banished only the shadow of Sita. He kept the real Sita by his side all the time.
Shastri Pandurang V. Athavale’s interpretation typifies the far-fetched apologia offered by those who wish to exonerate Ram. They even drag in the modern day holy cow of nationalism in an attempt to explain away his conduct: “What we have to remember is that it was not Ram who abandoned Sita; in reality, it was the king who abandoned the queen, in the performance of his duty. He had to choose between a family or a nation. Ram sacrificed his personal happiness for the national interests and Sita extended her full cooperation to Ram. To perform his duty as a king, Ram had sacrificed his queen, not his wife…. At the time of performing Ashvamedha Yagna, many requested Ram to marry another woman [which could be done according to the command of holy scriptures].Ram firmly replied to them: ‘In the heart of Ram there is a place for only one woman and that one is Sita.’
Athavale is at pains to point out that Ram’s abandonment of Sita was a symbol of the highest self-sacrifice. “Sita was dearer to Ram than his own life. He had never doubted the chastity of Sita … For had it been so, he would not have kept by his side the golden image of Sita during the sacrificial rites [Ashwamedha Yagna].” (Athavale, 1976)5.
However, even a passionate devotee of Ram like Pandurang Shastri finds it hard to give a totally clean chit to Ram:
“Once Ram appeared callous, even cruel. Upon the death of Ravan, after the battle of Lanka, Sita, extremely happy appears before Ram. Sternly, Ram says to her, ‘I do not want you who has been looked at and touched by another person. You may go wherever you want to. You may go either to Bharat, Laxman, Shatrughan, or witnessed the power of Sita’s story to move men’s hearts in large areas of Maharashtra when I was working with a massive farmer’s organisation, Shetkari Sangathana, on the Lakshmi Mukti programme as part of a campaign to empower women with land rights. The Lakshmi Mukti campaign tried to communicate the idea that the peasantry could not get a fair deal or be able to prosper, as long as the curse of Sita mata stayed on them, as long as they kept their griha Lakshmis enslaved by keeping them economically dependent and powerless in the family. In this campaign we emphasised that the followers of the Sangathana should not wait for government laws to be framed to enforce the economic rights of women, that the farmers should do it voluntarily as a long overdue gesture of gratitude towards their own Lakshmis.
The Sangathana announced in 1989 that any village in which a hundred or more families each voluntarily transferred a piece of land to the wife’s name would be honoured as a Lakshmi Mukti Gaon (a village which had liberated its hitherto enslaved Lakshmis) through a public function in which Sharad Joshi would distribute certificates of honour to each such family. (Sita is believed to be an incarnation of Lakshmi). During the campaign tours to persuade the peasant followers of Shetkari Sangathana to voluntarily transfer a portion of the family land to the wife’s name, Sangathana leader Sharad Joshi’s speeches revolved around the Sita story, which seems to have played a big role in evoking a positive response from the men. Joshi would explain the Lakshmi Mukti campaign by first pointing out how a farmer’s wife toils for her family selflessly and how crucial her labour and care is for the well-being of the family. Then he would go on to ask his audience:
“But then, how do we men treat our Lakshmis? Often no better than Ram treated Sita, one of the best wives anyone could have.”
He would then go on to recount the kind of sacrifices Sita made for Ram.
“When Ram was banished to 14 years’ banvaas, (life in the forest) Kaikeyi had not demanded that Sita go with him. She could well have stayed back in the palace, but Sita insisted that wherever Ram goes, there goes Sita. She said, my place is by your side. She suffered numerous privations for him joyfully. Finally Ravan abducts Sita for no fault of hers but to teach Ram a lesson for his misbehaviour with his sister. Though Ravan respected her chastity and did not violate Sita, her own husband subjected her to the cruel humiliation of agnipariksha to prove her chastity. Even fire could not touch her but on their return to his kingdom, at the mere hint of a slanderous remark by a dhobi, Ram asks Lakshman to take away Sita and leave her in a forest. He does not ever personally explain anything to her.”
And then step by step Joshi would build on the cruelty of Ram, how even if his dharma as a king demanded the sacrifice of his marriage, he could have behaved more humanely towards her.
“In that entire capital of Ayodhya, this queen could not call any place her own for mere shelter. Could Ram not have told his queen that though they could not continue living together as husband and wife because of praja’s opinion, she could live apart in another palace? Or offered her a small house? Or at least a small kothri (room/dungeon) where she could live quietly with her children? But no, Maharani Sita became a bhikarin (beggar) overnight simply because her husband turned against her and pushed her out. It did not occur to him that if his subjects were not willing to accept her, that he too could have followed her example. He could go along with her after saying to his subjects ‘If Sita is not good enough to be your queen, then my place is by her side. I cannot stay here either.’ Instead he left her to live the life of a destitute beggar even while she was carrying his children.”
Joshi would then go on to narrate the legend associated with the Sita mandir at Raveri and the power of Sita mata’s curse to those who treated her unfairly, and go on to warn his audience that by maltreating their wives, by keeping them economically dependent, the peasantry had collectively invoked the curse of their Sitas. Hence their poverty, their inability to obtain their due and their enslaved condition. He presented the redressal of the wrongs of today’s Sitas as a precondition for the peasantry being successful in their fight for justice, and effectively resisting their own exploitation.
He would conclude by saying that the purpose of the Lakshmi Mukti programme was to see that no modern day Sita would ever have to suffer the fate of Ram’s Sita because she had nothing to call her own. By transferring land to their wives, they were paying off “a long overdue debt” to Sita mata. In village after village I would see men reduced to tears listening to the story of Sita. Hundreds of villages have already carried out the Lakshmi Mukti programme of land transfer to wives, celebrating the occasion as though it were a festival. Many more hundreds of villages pledged to do so. However the leadership could not sustain the campaign’s momentum because it left them little time for their other work and agitations.
Apart from the charisma and credibility of Sharad Joshi, I also attribute the appeal of the movement to the power of the Sita story. Men were told they were atoning for the wrongdoing of Ram and they felt good about being called upon to do so. Sharad Joshi himself admits that the Sita story moves him so profoundly that he himself is reduced to tears whenever he reads those sections of the Ramayan which describe Ram’s banishment of Sita. In his view, Balmiki introduces the injustice to Sita not so much with a view to hold up Sita’s dignified suffering as an example for women but to turn people against Ram-like behaviour:
“Why otherwise would he show him behave so crudely in those episodes, even though Ram never loses his dignity elsewhere, no matter how difficult the circumstances? He could have easily made Ram into as perfect a husband as he was a son. Instead, by saddling him with such a flaw, such crudity of behaviour in contrast to Sita’s dignity, Balmiki wants to show how difficult it is for even supposedly perfect men to behave justly towards their wives.”