Sitayanas for our times

Pasts Without Prejudice

Only a determined feminist will connect Clara Zetkin – once emblazoned on a 10 Deutsche Mark note, sharing semiotic space with a laundry worker – to the celebration of International Women’s Day since 1911, in commemoration of the socialist workers of New York who marched for better wages and hours in 1909. Nothing could be further from these revolutionary origins than the Covid vaccination centre that was awash with pink and white balloons on March 8 while armies of women swathed in pink fervour awaited the (male, naturally) minister’s visit.

Women’s Day has long been turned into a ‘Hallmark moment’ worldwide, with ‘Happy Hours’, bike rallies, sponsored golf tournaments, buy-one-get-two-frees and so on. Didn’t the Soviet Union itself, once the revolution was ‘over’, declare that it had ‘answered’ the women’s question with the invention of the potato peeler? It is enough to give that felicitous phrase, ‘the invention of tradition’, a really bad name.

So it is as good a time as any to move in quite the opposite direction, and revisit the rich ‘inventions of tradition’ of a different kind, of the many lives that the paragon of Indian virtue, Sita, has herself enjoyed, as she has passed through many retellings, oral and written, by balladeers, women pounding grain, feminists, revolutionaries, and troubadours.

I grew up hearing snatches of the ‘parrot song’ of Thunchathu Ezuthachan, written in Malayalam in the 16th century, the most popular text for domestic recitation in homes across Kerala. At that time, I was too young to relate to the background – until I read AK Ramanujam’s insightful essay. He points out that, in this version, Sita herself clearly acknowledged the many lives of the great epic. She said, upon hearing of Rama’s decision to depart on his forest exile alone for 14 years:

Countless Ramayanas

have been composed before this.

Do you know of one where Sita doesn’t

go with Rama to the forest?

Not for Ezuthachan the threat of suicide or self-immolation from Sita, as in one variant, but a beautiful self-referencing and humorous acknowledgement of the multiple renderings of this epic form.

Later, I learned of the songs of non-Brahmin women who call up a different, defiant Sita. Why did the peasant women of the Telugu region sing of the casual way in which Sita picked up Shiva’s bow, giving her father the idea of finding her a perfect match by using that very bow as the standard of princely strength? Why did these women balladeers refuse to make their Sita simper and fret for the golden deer, making her say to a reluctant Rama, “You give me your bows and arrows, I will go right now and get the animal”? These Sitas are given meaning, made their own.

What do we make of folk tellings in Kannada which depart considerably from the versions of Valmiki and Tulsidas, or even Ezhuthachan, so that it is Ravula (aka Ravana) who gives birth to Sita in a sneeze, before she is deposited in Janaka’s field.

There are, too, the radical retellings of Sita’s destiny – no, fate -- by Polanki Rama Moorthy, EV Ramaswami Naicker, and not least, Ranganayakkamma. They unpack what was said, what was left unsaid, or simply query what was intended by the story of Rama, and his virtuous wife. Why, asks Ranganayakamma, does Sita plead to be allowed to join Rama in his forest exile if only to fulfill what the Brahmins had foretold? Of what social order was that a sign, and what was the place of women in it?

Paula Richman has a detailed discussion of Ranganayaki Thatham’s innovative portrayal of Sita. Using the pen name Kumudini, in a story written in 1934, the author recovers Sita’s speech in four letters she writes to the Chief Queen of Mithila, describing her life in her marital home. Though she appears, in her request for specific kinds of saris for Deepavali, (not with big borders, please!) to be succumbing to the sartorial pressure of her peers, she is quick to recognise the unexpected offer of freedom from such pressures that is presented by exile to the forest.

“I do not want you to send a sari. Everything is over. We are going to live in the forest…The only thing for me to wear is bark-cloth. If you consider how much it rains in the forest, you will realise that nothing else is appropriate. Therefore, if you can arrange it, send bark-cloth clothing.”

Why return to this rich heritage of ‘Sitayanas’ – of the continuous invention of tradition -- in a week that has gone by in a blaze of dubious celebrations? To recall, if only momentarily, that Sita has been a very useful figure through which the women of India voice their experiences, their desires, and even their moral outrage. They may not change the world, but they remind us that even ‘perfection’ is riddled with ambiguities.