SOURCE: Hess, Linda. “Rejecting Sita: Indian Responses to the Ideal Man's Cruel Treatment of His Ideal Wife.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 1 (March 1999): 1-32.

[In the following entry, Hess discusses the sexual politics of male domination and female subjugation as expressed in the Ramayana, exploring responses to those doctrines.]

This article could also be called “The Mysteries of Normative Texts.” Who decides what's normative? Who decide who's normal? Who benefits and who suffers from declarations of normality? In the inevitable flow of time and change, how do people manage both to cling to norms and to alter them?

Pardon me if I sound monolithic, but for 2,000 years the god-king Rama¹ has been way in front of all contenders for the title of Official Ideal Man in Hindu India. In the opening lines of the Sanskrit poem that is fountainhead to all later Rāmāyana textual traditions, sage and soon-to-be First Poet Valmiki questions sage Narada: “Is there a man in the world today who is truly virtuous? Who is there who is mighty and yet knows both what is right and how to act upon it? Who always speaks the truth and holds firmly to his vows? Who exemplifies proper conduct and is benevolent to all creatures? Who is learned, capable, and a pleasure to behold? Who is self-controlled, having subdued his anger? Who is both judicious and free from envy? Who, when his fury is aroused in battle, is feared even by the gods?” (Valmiki 1984:121).² Narada replies: “The many virtues you have named are hard to find. Let me think a moment, sage, before I speak. Hear now of a man who has them all. His name is Rama. …” Narada catalogues Rama's chief virtues for the next twelve verses.

Since then, most Rāmāyana composers and commentators have not had to stop and think for a moment. They knew right away who the ideal man was, and the ideal woman, the ideal kingdom, the ideal set of brothers, and so forth.³ One example can be taken as emblematic of thousands of opening statements in books and speeches. Inaugurating an international conference on the Rāmāyana in Delhi in 1981, Supreme Court Justice Hidayatullah quotes a Hindu scholar: “The Rāmāyana is a mirror of the highest ideals of Hindu culture and civilisation. Herein is described the ideal hero Sri Ramachandra who is not only the exemplar for all living and dutiful sons, but who is the ideal husband and king. … Sita is the noblest flower of Indian womanhood, devoted to her lord in thought, word and deed … There can be no better text-book of morals which can be safely placed in the hands of youths to inspire them to higher and nobler ideals of conduct and character” (Iyengar:27).

Speaking for himself, then, Justice Hidayatullah, a Muslim, says: “Rama and Sita … are exemplifiers of right thought, right speech and right action under all circumstances. Sita represents compassion and grace. She suffers most but preserves herself with heroism, love and devotion. She is the ideal wife and is the model for our womanhood … Rāmāyana, one of our classics, gives to our youth the fundamentals of our culture” (Iyengar:28).

But in another welcoming address to that same conference, Umashankar Joshi remarks: “If the Rāmāyana moves one to the depths of one's being, it is perhaps due to the raw deal meted out to Sita” (Iyengar:24).

This juxtaposition of ideal and raw deal provides the irritation that moves us, like oysters, to create something here. Sita's raw deal is dramatized primarily in three episodes that have remained controversial over the centuries. First is the agni parīksha or fire ordeal in which Sita, at the end of the great war between Rama and the demons, must undergo a test of chastity that requires her to throw herself into a blazing fire. Second is the abandonment of Sita, recounted in the final book of the Valmiki Rāmāyana. Some years after returning to his capital, Ayodhya, Rama decides that—despite her having passed the fire test with flying colors, despite his personal certainty that she is innocent, and despite her being in an advanced state of pregnancy—Sita must be banished from the kingdom because suspicions about her chastity are proliferating in the countryside. Not only banished, she is deceptively taken to the forest by Lakshman and abandoned without a word of farewell or explanation from her husband. The third moment of rejection, a reprise of the agni parīksha with a variation, occurs at the end of the Valmiki Rāmāyana. Rama makes a final attempt to bring Sita back after she has lived for years in the forest, raising their sons to young manhood without him. He suggests that she endure one more fire ordeal before being allowed to stay with him in Ayodhya. Sita rejects this offer and calls upon mother earth to open and receive her. Earth opens, Sita enters, earth closes. Sita is gone.

These episodes have disturbed Indian poets and audiences for many centuries. How do I know that? For one thing, many devotional Rāmāyanas from the twelfth century on eliminate the episode of Sita's abandonment. Kamban and Tulsidas, for example, end the story with rāmrājya, the golden age of Rama's reign, iconized in the image of Rama and Sita sitting together on the throne with gods, family, and loving devotees all around. Those who have reason to attack the Rāmāyana are likely to single out these episodes to prove that Rama is no hero and the story's messages are pernicious.⁴ Creative alterations of the fire ordeal in textual traditions reflect anxious discomfort with the scene (cf. n. 10 below). I have often heard people suggest that the abandonment episode is inauthentic, a later addition to the text. “Rama couldn't have done that,” some have said to me, or more poignantly, “My Rama couldn't have done that.” An elderly Brahmin priest, interviewed in a documentary film, eloquently conveyed by his sparse words and strained expression the difficulty that these episodes cause to religious Rāmāyana enthusiasts. When asked why Rama spoke cruelly to Sita and made her undergo the fire ordeal, he replied (in Hindi): “It was only for show. Do you understand? There are some episodes about which answers can't be given. It's best if you don't ask about them. It is very … [using the English word] objectionable. There are two or three things that cast dark spots on the ideal man [maryādā purushottama]. Please don't ask about these …” (Benegal).

In this article I will examine reception of the agni parīksha, mainly by Indian audiences, over a long period. I can only touch on some landmark moments and a few vivid examples. From the completion of the Valmiki Rāmāyana, there issues an endless stream of literary Rāmāyanas, in poetic and dramatic forms, in Sanskrit and vernacular languages. They creatively engage with the tradition, altering plot points, shifting emphases, adding and dropping episodes, bearing the marks of regional cultures and historical developments.

As our scholarly studies have widened in recent years, we have gone beyond attending merely to literary history and and regional diversity. We have also begun to document the vibrancy of performance traditions as well as noticing class, gender, and ethnic differences in the treatment of this inexhaustible narrative.⁵ We can't interview people in the first, twelfth, or sixteenth century. But the literary record itself gives evidence of reception; changes in plot and emphasis show changes in comfort levels, values, imaginings of the characters.

Studying reception in our own time through interviews and fieldwork is possible but difficult. It is difficult to know whom to interview and what claims to make about the representativeness of the voices we bring forth. It is difficult to frame questions and to listen in a way that will evoke personal thoughts, feelings, and experiences as they relate to texts and religious figures. The best work I have seen on current reception of Sita and Rama is Madhu Kishwar's “Yes to Sita, No to Ram! The Continuing Popularity of Sita in India.” A short version of the essay was published in the journal Manushi (1997); a longer version includes extensive interviews with women and men of diverse classes and communities (forthcoming). These interviews and the author's analysis are very revealing. Revealing in another way are Steve Derné's interviews with middle class men in Banaras (1995a). Both sets of interviews will be discussed below.

My survey of reception gives glimpses of five moments in the history of Sita's fire ordeal, touching on the following examples:

1. Valmiki's version, roughly 2,000 years old.

2. The approximately twelfth-century devotional Rāmāyana of Kamban, one of the greatest and most popular works of Tamil literature.

3. The devotional Hindi Rāmāyana of Tulsidas, written in the 1570s and still immensely popular and influential.

4. The serialized television Rāmāyana produced by Ramanand Sagar on Doordarshan, India's government-owned television network, in 1987-89.

5. A set of “protesting” examples—mostly but not entirely from the twentieth century—including folk, feminist, low-caste, and other materials.

WOMAN IN FLAMES

At the end of the war in Lanka, when the long battle between Rama's army and the demons culminates with Rama's killing of the demon-king Ravana, Sita is finally informed by Hanuman of her liberation. Throughout the ordeal of abduction, attempts at seduction, imprisonment, terror, and threats to her life, she has fearlessly defied the demon-king and fixed her attention on her husband-lord, to whom she bears unwavering devotion. Now all she wants is to be united with him again. In Valmiki's poem she wonders why he has sent Hanuman instead of coming himself. Every moment's delay is a new agony for her. Rama has ordered that she be bathed, perfumed, decked out in beautiful clothing and jewelry, and even that her hair be curled, before she is presented to him. This dismays her, but she complies. When finally she is brought before him, a stunning display of cruelty is enacted by the ideal man.

Showing affection for his clamoring soldiers but none for his wife, he orders, against custom and expectation, that they all be allowed to look at her face. She approaches him “confused and shrinking within herself” but still open and vulnerable, casting aside anxiety and gazing at him with undisguised love. Rama now gives a long blustering speech, celebrating his own valor and prowess, proclaiming that he has won her back and defeated his enemy, expunged the stain and avenged the insult caused by the abduction. He dwells on the achievements of his leading generals and repeatedly refers to winning her back in terms of wiping out an insult and preserving his own honor. In case she misses any part of the message, he specifies: “Let it be known that this arduous campaign, so gloriously completed through the support of my friends, was not undertaken wholly for your sake.” But the worst is still to come:

A suspicion has arisen with regard to your conduct, and your presence is as painful to me as a lamp to one whose eye is diseased. Henceforth, go where you like, I give you leave, oh Janaki. Beautiful one, the ten directions are at your disposal. I'll have nothing more to do with you. What man of honor would indulge his passion so far as to take back a woman who has dwelled in the house of another? You have been taken into Ravana's lap, and he has looked lustfully at you. How can I, who boast of belonging to an illustrious lineage, reclaim you? My goal in reconquering you has been achieved. I no longer have any attachment to you. Go where you like. … Go to Lakshmana or Bharata, Shatrughna, Sugriva, or the demon Vibhishana. Make your choice, whoever pleases you most. Surely Ravana, seeing your ravishing, celestial beauty, did not respect your body when you dwelled in his house.⁶

Sita weeps bitterly, then wipes her face and gives a spirited speech. It includes a passionate rebuke of his cruelty and a rational analysis of where moral responsibility lies in the case of violence against women. Not mincing words, she says, “Why do you talk to me like that, oh hero, like a common man talking to an ordinary woman? … You, lion among men, by giving way to wrath and passing premature judgment on a woman, have acted like a worthless man.”

She shows a healthy sense of her own worth, even at a moment of such crushing injury: “I received my name from Janaka but am the daughter of the earth. You have failed to appreciate fully the nobility of my conduct. … You have no reverence for the joining of our hands in my girlhood and my affectionate nature. All this you have cast away.” Then in a voice “strangled with sobs,” she demands that Lakshman raise a pyre for her. “These unjust reproaches have destroyed me, I cannot go on living. Publicly renounced by my husband, who is insensible to my virtue, there is only one recourse—the ordeal by fire.”

A pile of wood is assembled and set ablaze. Circumambulating her husband and then the fire, declaring her innocence and purity, calling on the “witness of all beings” to protect her, likened to “gold that has been melted in the crucible” and “a stream of butter hallowed by the recitation of mantras,” she throws herself into the flames. Rama remains silent.

The fact that the fire god himself steps forth to save Sita from being burned is rather beside the point. That deus ex machina is irrelevant to the human drama, which is all that can be normative for the human audience of the text. In the human drama a living woman's body is consigned to the flames, as culmination of her career of perfect devotion to her husband and as final test of her sexual and psychological purity.

Modern pictorial representations of Sita's fire ordeal always call to my mind the other (in)famous example of woman-burning described in certain prestigious Sanskrit texts: the sati—literally, true woman or good woman; in social history, usually understood as a widow immolated on her husband's funeral pyre. In both cases the key markers of the woman's character are purity and extreme devotion to husband. In both cases they are iconized as resting with divine serenity in the blaze, smiling as the flames envelop them.⁷

From the sixth century, bhakti, or fervent devotionalism focused on a personal form of God, flourished in south India and beyond. When Kamban composed the first great vernacular Rāmāyana in Tamil around the twelfth century, Rama was a fullblown incarnation of Vishnu, Sita was taken to incarnate Vishnu's consort Lakshmi, and the text was soaked from beginning to end in devotional feelings and exhortations. Bhakti Rāmāyanas came forth in many languages in the centuries that followed, and, while presenting an intriguing array of differences, they all had one tendency in common: as the whole point of life was to love Rama, Rama had to be made as lovable as possible. If there was anything problematic about his character or actions, that thing tended to be muted, explained, or made to disappear. Bhakti Rāmāyanas should be so composed as to invite the audience in, encourage their emotional identification with the story, and build to a crescendo of love and fulfillment in the triumph of Rama and rāmrājya, his ideal reign over the ideal kingdom.

Having generalized in this way, I have to say that Kamban's treatment of the fire ordeal does not prove my point. It is true that the poem constantly celebrates the divinity of Rama, affirming love as his essential nature and as the inevitable response he calls forth in others, showing Rama and Sita sharing many moments of idyllic mutual love. But when the time for the fire ordeal comes, Kamban does not soften the harshness of Valmiki's version. In fact, he makes it worse. Amazingly, Kamban's Rama accuses Sita of abandoning him. He twists her miraculous birth in a furrow of earth into the nasty remark that she was born like a worm from the soil rather than from a decent family line. He inverts the universal assessment of Sita as the embodiment of chastity and perfect womanhood, hurling this condemnation: “Womanhood, greatness, / high birth, the power / known as chastity, / right conduct, / clarity and splendor / and truth: / all have perished by the mere birth / of a single creature such as you.” Finally, he says plainly that she should die—“or, if you won't do that, / then go somewhere, / anywhere, / away.” This has, as David Shulman observes, and as Kamban himself suggests, the taste of madness.⁸ At the end of this exercise Rama does not even say, as he does in Valmiki, that he had to go ahead with the fire ordeal for the sake of public appearances, though he always knew that Sita was pure. Rama says nothing.

Shulman's analysis of the episode is profound and subtle. It opens to those who do not read Tamil some of the astounding beauties of Kamban's poetry, the complexity of Kamban's study of love and of relations between the human and divine, the continuity over a millennium of classical Tamil representations of love and passion in poetry. It also provides a lucid comparison of the agni parīksha in Valmiki and Kamban. But Shulman finally is content to focus his attention on “Kamban's protagonist … a god who discovers repeatedly, often to his own amazement, the painful cognitive and emotional consequences of being human” (109). It is not that Shulman fails to note the insanely cruel injustice of Rama's behavior and the passionate integrity of Sita's response (articulating her devotion, suffering, fury, and despair, Shulman feels, “the poet is largely speaking for himself through her mouth”) (103). But Shulman is not interested in picking up the gender theme. Sita is a token for the devotee in the conventions of bhakti religion. She is a lover/victim of God with whom it is convenient for any devotee, male or female, to identify; in fact, she is used as a mouthpiece for Kamban, who positions himself as a mad-fool lover of Rama in his poem.⁹ Shulman doesn't seem to mind her being used this way. The specificity of the husband-wife relationship, the relentless reminders of the husband's superiority, the horrifying abuse inherent in the model of the husband-lord and the worshipful wife who lives only to guard her purity and surrender to his will, the sacralizing of the whole arrangement by making the perpetrator an incarnation of God—none of this becomes noteworthy in Shulman's essay.¹⁰

If Kamban in the twelfth century did not feel any compulsion to mitigate Rama's cruelty in the agni parīksha scene, Tulsidas in sixteenth-century north India did. In his Rāmcharitmānas the scene is still there, but an elaborate plot device explains it away. Tulsidas got the idea for this device (along with a number of other ideas) from a fifteenth-century devotional Rāmāyana in Sanskrit called the Adhyātma Rāmāyana.¹¹ In the third of the epic's seven books—Āranyakānḍa, the book of forest exile—the train of events that will lead to full-scale war with the demons gets rolling. A violent encounter between Lakshman and Ravana's sister (initially an erotic advance on her part) brings her two brothers and a host of demon warriors to attack Rama and Lakshman. Just before this battle starts Rama takes Sita aside and secretly tells her that she is going to go away for a time, while he acts out a charming human līlā (“play,” the divine drama and sport). Rama summons Agni, the Vedic god of fire, and asks him to protect Sita during this sequence of events. Fire takes her in, and from fire emerges a false Sita, called in the text chhāyā Sita (chhāyā = reflection or shadow).¹² She looks and acts exactly like the real Sita. But she is not the real Sita. Tulsidas makes a point of saying that even Lakshman had no idea this was going on. Three books later, when the agni parīksha is prepared, it looks as if Sita's purity is being tested in the fire. But this is not the case. All that is really happening is that the chhāyā Sita is re-entering the fire whence she came, and the fire god is showing up to restore the real Sita, who has been under his protection for a year or so.

This device seems transparently to reflect the discomfort that has built up around the episode in a devotional environment where everyone knows that the Sita of the story is innocent and long-suffering, and everyone is supposed to love Rama in a rising tide of fervor and surrender in which all resistances are dissolved. The fire ordeal is shockingly unjust; it sticks in the heart. As if the mere spectacle of Sita's body entering the fire were not enough, Rama's cruel speech in the older texts jacks up the level of pain almost incredibly. Tulsidas omits the cruel speech entirely, though buried in one verse is a fleeting reference to some “harsh words” that Rama spoke. As there is no cruel speech by Rama, there is no outraged rejoinder by Sita. She has become more silent.

The scene proceeds quietly and concludes quickly. Sita speaks minimally. First, after the mention of harsh words, she orders Lakshman to build a fire. When the fire is lit, she is said to rejoice inwardly and feel no fear. She either thinks or says (the text is ambiguous): “If in thought, word, and deed I have never allowed anyone but Rama to enter my heart, then let this fire, which knows everyone's true state, be like cool sandalwood paste to me.” Finally she enters the fire, concentrating on the Lord and crying out, “Victory to the Lord of Kosala, whose feet are adored with pure devotion by Shiva!” Thus, the poet comments, both the false Sita and the worldly stain (of her abduction) were burned in the fierce fire, but no one really perceived what the Lord had done.¹³

Tulsidas has it both ways: he has the appearance of a fire ordeal to remove the worldly stain, and he has an alibi protecting Rama from accusations of cruelty and injustice, Sita from the pain of rejection and public trial. Unfortunately, Rama doesn't bother to tell the public about the deep mystery of his doings. So to their eyes it is just a fire ordeal. What would be the point of concealing this important information? If there is a problem about throwing a good woman into the fire, wouldn't the great exemplar of moral perfection want to communicate this? Here, as in many other places, poets and commentators assure us that the Lord's mysterious ways are beyond our comprehension.

While Rama's cruel speech on the occasion of the agni parīksha was excluded in Tulsidas, it was not forgotten. Evidence that it was very much present in the minds of nineteenth-century Tulsi Rāmāyana enthusiasts is available in the script of the Ramlila of Ramnagar, the month-long annual performance in Banaras that has been abundantly studied by scholars in the last two decades.¹⁴ The Ramlila is a North Indian peformance tradition whose origin is popularly traced back to Tulsidas himself, in the sixteenth century. Ramlilas are closely identified with Tulsi's text, and the monumental annual production sponsored by the Maharajas of Banaras since the early nineteenth century meticulously represents the Tulsidas version of the epic in verbal and visual detail. The entire epic poem of Tulsidas is sung out by a group of reciters in the course of the thirty-day outdoor performance; each passage of sung text alternates with actors performing the scene and speaking in a prose that closely parallels the original poetry.

The script of the Ramnagar Ramlila underwent revision in the late nineteenth century, new speeches and songs being added under the direction of the famous writer Harishchandra and a distinguished court guru, poet, and scholar, Kashthajihvasvami.¹⁵ It is not clear when various elements of the present script were written, but we can say with reasonable certainty that everything was in place by 1885, the year of Harishchandra's death. A short but hard-hitting version of Rama's harsh speech is written back into the Ramlila script, even though it is not present in Tulsidas: “I have undertaken these deeds so that you would be liberated and returned to me, your husband, and would not grow old in the house of the demons. This is why I destroyed the demons. Now you can go wherever you please. Who would accept a woman who had been in the hands of another for even a moment? Certainly not a man of dharma like myself! Whether you are righteous or unrighteous [dharm se, adharm se], hear me oh Janaki, I have no desire to be with you.”¹⁶

Why did the writers reinsert this problematic speech? No doubt because they felt it was dramatically necessary: otherwise, how would Sita's call for a fire be motivated? In a number of other cases the Ramlila scriptwriters composed dialogue where Tulsidas only indicated vaguely that something had been said. We can observe that, however problematic, they still felt it was acceptable to use the speech.

It was not so with the TV Rāmāyana. There was anticipatory controversy in 1988 as the serial approached the agni parīksha episode. How would director-writer Ramanand Sagar handle it? Would he show Sita entering the fire? More pointedly than ever before, the very presence of this scene was understood to be provocative, sensitive, likely to arouse protest.

Sagar handles it, as he handles other potentially controversial points in the epic, with extreme kindness to Rama. There is no hint of a harsh word or thought from him. As the scene approaches he is brooding, troubled. He elicits sympathy. The order to build a pyre is issued privately, just before Sita's arrival, inside a hut where Rama is alone with Lakshman. It is Rama, not Sita, who orders the fire. In this, as in other matters, Sagar feels compelled to rewrite the scene radically, making up events and words that are unprecedented in previous Rāmāyana texts.

Tulsidas states explicitly in Aranyakānḍa that Lakshman did not know about the chhāyā Sita, never suggesting that the secret was later revealed to him. Sagar, in contrast, has Rama tell his brother the whole story just before the agni parīksha, complete with flashback. Building on the traditional portrayal of Lakshman as angry and pained but helplessly obedient in the face of Rama's orders regarding Sita in the last two books, Sagar puts into Lakshman's mouth words that have never appeared in any previous Rāmāyana. Lakshman voices the outrage that might come from a conglomeration of modern speakers. I seem to hear in his protests bits of nineteenth-century British moral legislators, Hindu reformists, and Hindu revivalists, and, in one or two lines, bits that might be associated with feminists and other political activists of the present time.¹⁷

L:
Brother! Why are you so troubled? Bhabhi's coming is delayed—is that it? But why didn't you send me to bring Bhabhi? You couldn't go into the city, but I could. [Bhabhi = elder brother's wife]
R:
Lakshman! Arrangements must be made for a fire.
L:
Arrangements for a fire? Why?
R:
Won't Sita have to arrive by passing through the gate of fire?
L:
Bhabhi? Arrive by passing through a gate of fire?
R:
Yes.
L:
Mother? Mother Sita? No, brother! This is an atrocity, an injustice.
R:
Lakshman!
L:
Brother! I've understood what you mean. You mean that Mother Sita will be forced to go through a trial by fire to prove her purity.
R:
Lakshman!
L:
[his voice breaking] That sati(18) who, cleaving to the dharma of devotion to her husband [pativratadharma], refused the splendid, luxurious palaces of Ravana, conqueror of the three worlds, and chose to sit under the open sky, enduring cold and heat, suffering from sun and rain?
R:
Lakshman!
L:
A king's daughter, an emperor's daughter-in-law, who wandered barefoot behind her husband through the forest—instead of worshiping her, you put her through a trial? For what fault, brother? For what fault?
R:
Lakshman! Listen to me.
L:
No, brother! I won't listen to anything on this subject. If a powerless woman with no one to help her is taken away by force, has she become a criminal? I am the criminal, who got angry at what she said, and against your command left her alone. Because of me, that goddess had to suffer so much pain. I am the one who should be punished. She is no criminal, I am a criminal, I who failed to protect her. And is that faultless woman to be burned in the fire? There can be no greater injustice against all womankind. Will you do this injustice? Remember, I regard Bhabhi as my mother, and being related to her as a son, I can even fight against you.

Rama then also gives a speech that has no precedent in Valmiki, Kamban, or Tulsidas:

What ever gave you the idea that I am testing Sita, or that I have any doubt about her? Sita, who is never out of my heart even for an instant, whom I am watching every moment with my divine eyes. Can anyone else give me proof of her purity and sati-hood? Lakshman! If a man doesn't trust a woman in his heart, can he attain full trust from any exterior proofs? And when were Rama and Sita ever two separate beings? They are one. If I test her, it means I am testing myself. What I am doing has nothing to do with doubt or testing. You don't know—if Ravana had laid a hand on the real Sita, his hand would have been burned up by that supreme sati's glory.¹⁹

Now Lakshman is confused. She's going to pass through the gate of fire, but it's not a test? Rama speaks to him in intimately affectionate tones, explaining the profound mystery of the chhāyā Sita. Here in Book 6 of the Rāmāyana there is a full flashback on screen to these events that took place in Book 3. Rama tells Sita about the upcoming līlā with the demons and calls upon the fire god Agni to hold her in his protection until demonkind is destroyed. Agni appears and takes her in; the false Sita emerges. None of this was shown when the TV serial was presenting Book 3. It was saved for this flashback in order to maximize its power to explain the fire ordeal.

Now we have reached the charged moment when Sita (or the false Sita, who exactly resembles the real Sita) must actually enter the fire. The situation has already been substantially defused by Lakshman's impassioned speech on the intolerable injustice to Sita and to all womankind, capped by his readiness to fight with Rama; by Rama's tender expression of eternal love for, oneness with, and trust of Sita; and by the flashback from Āranyakānḍa. Still, depicting the woman in flames is a sensitive matter. Sagar slides through the scene, as he later does in the case of Sita's abandonment, by means of a long musical bridge. The fire itself is depicted as an unrealistic circle of small flames on the flat ground—no pile of wood, no roaring blaze.²⁰ The entry into fire, the appearance of Agni, the restoration of Sita, all occur as alternating male and female voices, with instrumental accompaniment, sing lines from Tulsidas. The tunes are familiar, the music soothing and sweet. The poetry of Tulsidas has an enfolding and completing effect. It raises the sense of sacredness, of rightness. It is comfortable.

COMMENTARIES ON TULSIDAS

In a half-dozen nineteenth and twentieth-century commentaries that I checked there is virtually no sign that traditional exegetes were troubled by the agni parīksha.²¹ In Shankāvalīs, collections of “doubts” where particular lines or issues are singled out as rich or problematic, this episode is never discussed (see Hess forthcoming). In standard commentaries that go over every line this section is handled like any other. The expounders (all male) speak unhesitatingly in the voice of brahmanical orthodoxy, praising Sita as a perfect embodiment of pativratya, pure devotion to her husband-lord. Thus the Mānas-pīyūsh:

The attractive (ramanīyā) quality of women is shown here. Even when the mother of the universe is in anguish over the lord of the universe's extreme statement, she does not say a single sharp word to her husband. Through her dutiful action, she shows that doing her lord's will is dearer than life for a woman. … For a woman husband is god, husband is friend, husband is guru. … See, even in this calamity, even after hearing her husband's bitter words, she does not forget to do obeisance to him and reverently concentrate on him [before entering the fire]. [Never for an instant wavering from utter devotion to her lord in thought, word and deed]—beyond this, there is really no other purpose for a woman to take on a body. …

(Sharan:552)

In Valmiki, Sita answered Rama. Understanding that this conflicts with pativratadharma and is harmful to the education of the people, the Mānas poet did not include it. The speech was put there [in Valmiki] for literary reasons.

(Sharan:549)

Notice that the commentators here pay no attention to the difference between the illusory Sita and the real Sita. They treat the chhāyā Sita as fully exemplary. I have learned over years of watching the Ramlila and later the TV Rāmāyana with audiences in Banaras that the story of the chhāyā Sita, buried in a few lines of verse in Tulsidas's Āranyakānḍa, is little known and easily forgotten. When Ramanand Sagar inflated its prominence by showing it as a flashback just before the fire ordeal, many people in the audience were amazed. They didn't know about Tulsidas's chhāyā Sita, and some thought that Sagar had made up the whole thing.²² Steve Derné reports that middle-class men in Banaras, like the commentators of the Mānas-pīyūsh, are likely to construe the fire ordeal literally as a model of how the ideal wife should behave: “Gopal Mishra, who says that he always undertakes a ritual bath before watching the TV Rāmāyana, says that Rama gave Sita the test of fire ‘to show people that Sita had remained virtuous. … If Sita had been unpure …, she would have burned instantly in the fire. But Sita didn't burn. She was saved, proving the rightness of her character’” (1995a:192 n. 3).

Derné also reports that his interviewees regularly appeal to the Rāmāyana as a model of husband-wife relations:

Men can easily marshal evidence from [Tulsidas's] Rāmcharitmānas, to justify arranged marriages, restrictions on women's movements outside the home, and the imperative that a wife obey her husband. The men I interviewed respect the Rāmcharitmānas as a source of moral directives. … As Ashok Mitra says, “when it comes to marriage, it is important that we follow the example of him whom we call bhagwan [God] Rama.” … Nathuram Mishra quotes a verse from the epic to suggest that chaos is the result of granting women freedom²³. … Gopal Mishra says … that Sita … is the ideal woman because “she doesn't try to do anything other than what her husband has ordered … the customs and traditions [of India] are based on the relationship of bhagwan Rama and Sita. Because Sita always obeyed … Rama's orders, all wives of Hindustan must do what their husbands tell them to do.”

(1995a:129)²⁴

REJECTING SITA, REJECTING RAMA

“No More Sitas”: this headline introduces a letter published in a 1983 issue of Manushi: A Journal about Women and Society. The writer is Saroj Visaria, a Banaras woman whose letter has been translated from Hindi:

The ideals, ethics and morality heaped on women since time immemorial are suffocating and killing. The adjectives used to praise us have become oppressive. Calling us loving, they have locked us in the closed room of culture, calling us gentle, they have reflected us in a mirror of helplessness, calling us kind they have tied us in cowardice, they have handcuffed us with modesty and chained our feet with loyalty … Now we must refuse to be Sitas. By becoming a Sita and submitting to the fire ordeal, woman loses her identity. This fire ordeal is imposed on women today in every city, every home. Our exclusion from the scriptures, from temples, from smritis, is also our strength. We can be fearless since we have no models … Today we are not Sitas but Saritas [rivers], flowing, free, able to cross rocks, capable of generating electricity. …

(Kishwar and Vanita:298-299; orig. Manushi 3/3 [Mar.-May 1983]:24)

Visaria's declaration shows one extreme of a nascent attitude toward the Sita of brahmanical tradition: we don't want her. No more Sitas, no more rigid, male-fashioned ideals. Feminists, political activists, artists, and writers have increasingly found ways to say “no thank you” to the orthodox model.²⁵

But many responses to the tradition have been more complex than straightforward rejection. Research has uncovered counter-traditions, subversive, ironic, and critical treatments of Rāmāyana themes in women's, folk, low-caste, and dissenting literary cultures.²⁶ New poems, plays, and dances have sought to imagine a Sita who was not robbed of her voice and personhood by patriarchal tradition.²⁷ There are enough hints of Sita's power, passion, and courage in the traditional texts to stimulate imaginings of a very different kind of heroine. Bina Agarwal's 1985 poem begins, “Sita speak your side of the story. We know the other side too well …” She highlights injustices to Sita in the conventional narrative, including the agni parīksha:

With your husband you chose exile; / suffered privation, abduction / and then the rejection—the chastity test on the scorching flames / the victim twice victimised. / Could those flames turn to flowers / without searing the soul?

Agarwal concludes:

The poets who wrote your story / said a woman is not worthy of hearing / the Ramayana: like a beast she is fit / for being beaten. / Could such poetry ever bring you glory? / Yet they spoke their verses without challenge / and got away with such falsehoods. / Sita speak! / You who could lift the magic bow in play / with one hand, / who could command the earth with a word, / how did they silence you?

In 1919 a male Malayalam poet, Kumaran Aasan, published The Brooding Sita. “Aasan shows her criticising Rama for his injustice towards her, and demolishing all the justifications put forward in his defence. When she thinks of the possibility of returning to her husband, she cries out: ‘What? Does the emperor think that I should once more go into his … presence and once again prove myself … ? Do you think I am a mere doll? … my mind and soul revolt at the very thought. …’ Aasan's poem generated a fierce controversy because it showed Sita asserting her selfhood, not perishing in despair” (Shreekala:7).

Snehalata Reddy's one-act play Sita, written in 1973, radically revises the fire ordeal scene, allowing an angry Sita to reject Rama, his dharma, and his trial by fire.

SITA:
I am not afraid of death, Lakshmana, but I'm afraid of the fraud that will be perpetuated in the name of Ramarajya! In the name of dharma! I'm afraid of this awesome male domination and the helpless, pathetic and unbelievable martyrdom of women. … This king you all worship is a cruel, heartless tyrant. For the sake of his glory, he wants to sacrifice your queen … (turning to the audience) I beg all of you to fight this injustice and not submit to it. We women have been kept under the yoke for centuries in the name of dharma. Please remember my pain, my rejection, my humiliation—for they will bury it all in silence. Remember me not as a goddess of virtue, but as a defenceless woman, fighting for her self-respect. History has never recorded the whole truth … never the downtrodden—always the powerful … They will gloss over my suffering and camouflage their sins with my submissiveness and devotion … I know that the world will not change overnight … if I dare now, more women will dare … I hope and pray that, by exposing your masculine pomposity, absurdity and injustice, who knows, I may be able to sow the first seed of revolution.
RAMA:
… Come to your senses! … My word is law! … I cannot take it back! … If you do not do your duty, I must reject you!
SITA:
(fiercely) How dare you! It is I who reject you!

(Reddy:40-41)²⁸

An audiotape of Hindi songs and stories produced by a communications center at St. Xavier's College in Bombay gives new interpretations of female characters from Hindu myths, juxtaposing their stories with those of modern Indian women in a male-dominated society. The tape is called Strī kathā: purānī kahāniyām, naye sawāl—“Women's tales: old stories, new questions.” Sita, Kaushalya, Ahalya, Amba, and others are imagined as present in an intimate space with women who ask about their experience. The mythic heroines and the contemporary women share questions and stories of loneliness, oppression, abuse, ideals, struggles to keep their children. Kaushalya sings: “Today I will tell my own story. For such a long time I have kept quiet. I was queen in Ayodhya but couldn't speak from my heart. I was taught to keep silent, confined in the cage of ideals” (Āsthā).²⁹

As in Bina Agarwal's poem (above), Strī kathā's representation of Sita uses the device of letting her true voice, so long silenced, come forth. Young women from the twentieth century sing, coaxing her: “Sita, friend, speak a little, so many years have passed while you remained silent, now open your heart, tell your own story, speak a little, Sita …” Describing her as courageous, able to leap beyond the limits of palace walls, they ask why she finally begged the earth to take her in. Sita's answer begins: “To patience too there is a limit. Again and again the same insult, the same doubt. Once I took the trial by fire. Now again he demanded the same trial, in front of my young sons, in front of the whole court. ‘Prove your purity, because some people still have doubts about you.’ You tell me, was there any other way to save myself from this? No. If I spoke out, who would listen? No more. I went back where I had come from, to the lap of my mother.”

The young women continue: Sita, what did you think, how did you feel, when after all those years he showed up, learned Lav and Kush were his sons, and said, “Come on, you're going back to Ayodhya with me”? After you'd brought them up alone? You gave him constant love and devotion, and what did he give you? Doubts, from the first ordeal to the last.

Sita: That first trial—so long ago. There in Lanka, whatever doubt had arisen in Rama's heart, how could I remove it? It was the Aryan custom, sisters. If I didn't submit to the trial, he wouldn't take me back. How could I go on living alone in Lanka? It was painful, but I thought—after this everything will be all right. They can break my body but not my spirit. Well, the body can be saved, but the spirit's wounds, the heart's wounds, don't go away so easily.

At the end, having spoken of the futility of all her efforts to live as an ideal daughter and wife, Sita suggests a new ideal: by returning to mother earth, she shows daughters an ideal of unity with their mothers and with the earth.

Is it only highly educated, English-speaking, urban feminists like Snehalata Reddy, Bina Agarwal, and activists at St. Xavier's College who put forth such radical critiques and reinterpretations of the traditional Sita? The most direct and blunt critiques do seem to come from such sources. But as we learn to dig deeper, to look and listen more inclusively, we continue to find evidence of revision, subversion, and protest in disparate social, ethnic, and economic groups. A few examples follow.

In 1981 Manushi published a folk song from Uttar Pradesh in which Rama, hearing that his sons are living in the forest, sends Lakshman to bring them and Sita back to Ayodhya. Sita refuses to go. When Guru Vashishtha asks if she has taken leave of her senses, she replies: “Guru, you who know each one's state, how is it you speak / As if you know nothing? / Guru, that Rama who caused me such sorrow, how can I see his face? / The Rama who put me in the fire, who threw me out of the house, / Guru, how shall I see his face? / Guru … I will walk with Lakshman a step or twain / But I will never go back to Ayodhya, / And may fate never cause us to meet again” (Manushi:22-23).³⁰

A documentary film presents a performance by a Maharashtrian Dalit singer who rejects the entire Rāmāyana. In his song Rama represents India's worst ideologies of domination and oppression on the basis of caste, ethnicity, gender, and religion. He begins:

The rulers who control all knowledge claimed the Rāmāyana to be India's history and called us many names—demons, low castes, untouchables. But we were the aborigines of this land. Listen to our story. Today we are called Dalits—the oppressed. Once the Aryans on their horses invaded this land. Then we who are the natives became the displaced. Oh Rama, oh Rama, you became the God and we the demons. You portrayed our Hanuman as a monkey, oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans. You enslaved us to form a monkey army. Those you could not subjugate you called rakshasa—demon. But we are the forest rakshak—protectors. You invented the hierarchy of caste through your laws of Manu, the first man, oh Rama, you representative of Aryans. And you trampled on the rights of women. You made your wife Sita undergo the fire ordeal to prove her chastity. Such were your male laws, oh Rama, oh Rama, you representative of Aryans.

(Patwardhan 1993)³¹

A third example comes from an Assamese version of the Uttarakānḍa. In this text, as in Valmiki, Rama demands a second fire ordeal and Sita refuses, calling on mother earth to open and take her in. But the Assamese poet shows a Sita who does not go quietly. Before entering the earth, Sita “pours out her anger while Rama stands, head bowed in shame, not daring to look her in the eye”:

… I know that my husband is the highest god for me … (Yet) he sent me into exile by trickery. Look, look, why is this a husband's honor? … He wanted to kill the two boys in my womb. When they speak of my husband's virtue, my body burns. He sought to take the lives of my boys and me. His “devotion” was to kill me along with my unborn children. There was nothing more that Rama could do. All speak well of Rama but I know that for me he is like Death itself. Tell me where else is there such a cruel husband?

(Smith:99)

Is this another example of twentieth-century revisionism, perhaps influenced by Euro-American feminism? No, it is the work of the famous Assamese (male) poet Shankaradeva, who flourished around 1600.

Numerous recent Rāmāyana studies that highlight folklore and women's expressive culture are radically altering our understanding of the narrative and its reception. Nabaneeta Dev Sen, for instance, writes of the sixteenth-century Bengali woman poet Chandrabati, whose version of the Rāmāyana is rooted in women's oral traditions. Chandrabati's Rama is “a traitor in love, unjustly banishing his pregnant wife … a poor king, a poor elder brother who bullies his loyal younger brother into acting against his own conscience, a poor father who does not carry out his parental responsibilities … most of all a poor husband—sending Sita into exile partly as a result of his jealousy of Ravana” (Sen:172). That Rama whose epithets are usually “savior of the fallen” and “ocean of compassion” is described by Chandrabati as a “sinner” and a “stone-hearted” man. Visiting the poet's birthplace in Bangladesh in 1989, Sen found women singing Chandrabati's songs of Sita, though they didn't identify their songs with this poet.

As researchers increasingly shed the assumption that brahmanical male discourses must obviously and naturally represent Hinduism and as they turn their attention to previously dark spaces, previously silent voices, a stunning reality presents itself. Those spaces were never really dark, those voices never silent. It is we, the scholarly caste, who have had our eyes and ears covered, just like the professional male Rāmāyana singer who was questioned by Sen in Bangladesh: “I asked … whether he would use such words in connection with Rama. He bit his tongue, touched his ears and shut his eyes, saying only illiterate, ignorant women could utter such blasphemous words” (Sen:173-174).³²

REFLECTIONS ON RECEPTION

How do we measure reception and influence? The short answer is—very inexactly and inconclusively. How important and representative are the protesting versions of Sita cited here? There is plenty of evidence that the oppressive, patriarchal view of Sita isn't going away. Steve Derné's interviews vividly illustrate the unabashed promotion by men in the 1980s of old-fashioned male dominance and wifely submission consciously modeled on Rama and Sita. Michael Allen cites a 1966 booklet published by the Ramakrishna Mission called The Indian Ideal of Womanhood. Setting forth motherhood as the highest goal of the Hindu woman, it glorifies woman's divine talent for “self-effacing love” and points out that “the culture of the Hindu trains him to look upon all women, nay, to look upon the female of all species, as forms of the one Divine Mother,” revering mothers more than fathers and gurus (emphasis added). Allen observes:

In case such adulation might lead one to deduce a sound basis for female power and autonomy, the author proceeds in the following ominous terms:

… self-effacing love and compassion … to the Hindu, is a mark of high spirituality and true culture … it is this vision that India has always held out before her women and which her daughters have passionately struggled to realise in their lives. Even the apparent failings of her women proceed largely from that passion. The practice of suttee, for example, proceeds from loyalty to the ideal of chastity which found itself threatened in a chaotic society.

The ideals of chastity and purity, unselfishness and service, simplicity and modesty, have been pursued by our women, drawn by that vision of innate divinity … The Indian woman cannot jump out of this inheritance of hers. Warned Swami Vivekananda … “Any attempt to modernise our women, if it tries to take our women away from the ideal of Sita, is immediately a failure, as we see every day. The women of India must grow and develop in the footprints of Sita, and that is the only way.”³³

(Allen and Mukherjee:10-16)

Some claim that there is still a powerful consensus promoting and enforcing the self-sacrificing pativrata model for Indian womanhood. Others protest that such a claim wrongly assumes “that women are the passive assimilators of a monolithic set of cultural discourses on gender, in terms of which their own lives are either unambiguously morally exemplary in the manner of Sita … or morally flawed and reprehensible” (Raheja and Gold:142). Both sides at this point can probably agree that women and men relate to the idealized figure of Sita in many ways on many levels, accepting, negotiating, manipulating, reinterpreting, or rejecting the ideals—sometimes doing all of these at different moments.³⁴

BURNING WOMEN

I close with some thought-provoking recent examples of reception. Earlier I associated Sita's image in the fire with the icon of the sati, the widow who burns herself on her husband's funeral pyre, afterwards to be elevated to goddesshood.³⁵ Would it be an unfair stretch to associate both with the brideburning incidents that have been increasing in north India in the last thirty years? We have grown used to seeing news stories that describe a consistent sequence of events: harrassment of a young wife begins soon after marriage, her family is pressured to contribute more money and goods for “dowry,” and when demands are not fulfilled the young woman is found burned to death. The husband's family explains that it was a cooking accident. In a variation on this scenario, a wife of some years' standing may be burnt—because she did or didn't do something, or simply because the husband wanted to be rid of her. Prosecutions are rare and convictions rarer. In most cases the man can easily secure another wife and another dowry.

Some readers will object that it doesn't make sense to associate the paradigm of Sita's trial by fire with the current phenomenon of brideburning. If the latter has become prominent in recent decades, then we must look at current social, political, economic, and legal conditions, not ancient texts, to explain it. This is certainly true. Yet I would argue that the hallowed image of Sita entering the flames under the conditions set forth in the texts, kept alive century after century in version after version, still vibrant in popular performances today from Ramlila to the TV serial, lingers deep in consciousness and may be taken to give a kind of permission for wifeburning.³⁶

Not long after the agni parīksha was shown on television, a short item appeared in Sunday Magazine: “Taking his cue from the epic Ramayan, an educated man forced his wife to test her chastity by burning camphor in her palm. The man threw his wife out of the house when her palm was burnt” (Sunday:84). Is this just a weird story, a bad joke, an aberration, having nothing to do with norms or with mainstream understandings of the Rāmāyana's message?

Another anecdote came unexpectedly while I was writing this paper. Jeanne Fleming, an American friend of mine, had been married in an elaborate Hindu ceremony at the Kumbha Mela in Allahabad (arranged by the Hindu guru of her American husband). While showing slides of this rather spectacular event, she told a funny story. A series of vows was given to her in Sanskrit, with impromptu translations. She told us light-heartedly that she would say “OK, fine,” as each one came along. But then came one that went roughly like this: “Even if I am in a burning house and my husband orders me not to leave the house, I will obey him.” “No way!” was Jeanne's response to this proffered vow. The marriage went on despite her demurral. How widespread, how deeply embedded in sacred contexts, are these still-current texts of women consenting to be burnt up in order to demonstrate devotion or subordination to their husbands?

An Indian woman poet in 1987 also made the connection between Sita's fire ordeal and contemporary brideburning. Half a year before the first Rāmāyana episode aired on TV, M. Geetha published a poem called Agni Pariksha:

They say, Seeta the chaste
emerged from the fire
radiant and beautiful
There was a Seeta I knew
chaste enough, till yesterday,
a foul, charred corpse today
Her husband's hallucinations
lit the fire that consumed
her throbbing flesh.
This kerosene and matches test
is something the Seetas of today
invariably fail.

(Geetha:17)

Madhu Kishwar, co-founder and long-time editor of Manushi, has written on how she became gradually aware of an obsession with Sita, above all with the agni parīksha, among literate women in India:

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. …

My impression is that 80-90٪ of the poems that came to us for Hindi 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 idea 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 (and hopefully the last) poem I ever wrote was in Hindi and was entitled Agnipariksha. …

Not just me, even my colleague, Ruth Vanita, who is from a Christian family, wrote many a poem around the Sita theme.

(Kishwar forthcoming)

Kishwar was jolted into realizing that the intense preoccupation with Sita needed “to be understood more sensitively” than she had previously thought. Over a period of years she interviewed women and men of diverse classes, castes, and religions about their ideal figures. As Sita and Rama came up constantly, she recorded detailed statements about them, arriving at a nuanced appreciation of how these figures live in and are interpreted by Indians in real life. Among her conclusions we read:

It has taken me a long time to understand 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 dharm is superior to and more awe inspiring than that of Rama—someone who puts even maryada purushottam Rama—the most perfect of men—to shame.³⁷

Kishwar presents a range of vivid individual voices that, together, give a nuanced impression of how different people construe the meanings of Sita and Rama. We see how the meanings are woven into their lives, and their lives are woven into the meanings. The collection of interviews, with Kishwar's perceptive analyses, comprise one of the great strengths of the essay. Another strength is the author's inclusion of her own process of learning. For most of her life she harbored the “liberated” woman's stereotyped view of Sita as a slavish and oppressive ideal, which she rejected utterly. She shows how her view gradually shifted as she realized the omnipresence and multiple meanings of Sita in the consciousness of Indians. Then—following the advice in her own memorable 1990 article, “Learning to Take People Seriously”—she spent a long time listening. Her article on Sita presents the results of that listening.

These strengths also point to a problem I see in the essay. Kishwar aims to overturn the stereotype, showing the flexibility, intelligence, and practicality of women's understandings of Sita. But in accomplishing her aim, in redressing the imbalance of insensitive feminist dismissals of Sita, at times Kishwar leans so far in the other direction that she almost supports patriarchal rationalizations of all that happens in the story. On the agni parīksha, she says popular perception sees it as “an act of supreme defiance on [Sita's] part which shows her husband to be unjust and foolish in doubting a woman like her.” There is no mention of how this interpretation would play into the maintenance of patriarchy in its most destructive forms. If a woman's throwing herself into the fire in response to her husband's false accusations can be interpreted as an act of supreme defiance, then God save women from defiance.

Kishwar's essay demonstrates the value of learning from ordinary women about their real-life choices and circumstances; appreciating the fullness and dignity of their lives; sympathetically shedding light on their intelligent strategies in the midst of oppressive structures; and noticing the distance between the limited range of choices experienced by less privileged women and the wide range enjoyed by many writers, scholars, and theorists. All of us who comment on oppression from a position of relative privilege should continually keep these things in mind. But we walk a razor's edge, as the Katha Upanishad puts it. In appreciating the “weapons of the weak,” we should be careful not to valorize institutionalized weakness. In stepping back from a certain aggressive feminist mode that seems to attack women for not fitting some prescribed “feminist” model, we shouldn't step right back into the backlash.

One evening, after a draft of this article was completed, I went to the movies in Berkeley. I knew that the director was an Indian woman and that the plot involved two sisters-in-law whose rotten marriages drove them to discover love and passion with each other. I had no expectation that it would be relevant to what I was writing. But something clicked when I saw the name of the film production company: Trial by Fire. As it turned out, the film—called Fire—was shot through with images of the Rāmāyana. The younger, more independent and passionately combustible of the two women was named Sita. Scenes from the television Rāmāyana entered the plot at crucial moments. A melodramatic and comic urban Ramlila was shown. The husband of the older woman listened to a recitation of Tulsidas with his guru. And always it was the same episode: the agni parīksha. Here, in a middle class Delhi milieu, was a fleshing out of Snehalata Reddy's defiant Sita who rejects the fire ordeal and the dharma that ordains it, rejects Rama's rejection. Here was a full imagining of one scenario that might unfold in the 1990s if the coaxing songs of the Strī Kathā audiotape (discussed above) bore fruit—if Sita spoke with her true voice after so many years of silence. And here also was the brideburning theme. Not only I, not only the poet M. Geetha, but also the filmmaker Deepa Mehta, saw a direct connection between the endless, obsessive replays of Sita entering the fire and the inspiration a man might feel to set fire to a wife who didn't fulfill his needs and expectations.³⁸

Today more than ever before, Sita is a site of contestation. The Sita who clung to the dharma of worshiping her husband and bowing to his will, even when he repeatedly and cruelly rejected her, is still embraced as the ideal woman by many Hindus of both sexes. But others, increasingly, are describing that ideal as concocted by and serving the interests of dominant males from ancient times to the present. What is it that they are rejecting? In a cultural environment where Rama and Sita are widely and fervently believed to be real, both historical and divine figures, we can say that most of them are not claiming to reject the “real” Sita. Swimming in an ocean of texts, knowing that all textual Sitas are chhāyā Sitas, rising and disappearing between the covers of a book or the opening and closing of a performance, they are rejecting the Sita of patriarchy.

Notes

1. For simplicity's sake, I use the spelling “Rama” throughout, though “Ram” reflects vernacular usage better. Diacritical marks are not used with names of people and places; in most cases spelling reflects actual English pronunciation (thus Kamban, not Kampan; parīksha, not parīkśa; Rāmcharitmānas, not Rāmcaritmānas; chhāyā, not chāyā).

2. Verse numbers have been omitted here.

3. One reader has suggested to me that Rama is not held up as an ideal equally in all parts of India and that my generalizations may be more applicable to north India than to the southern and eastern regions.

4. B.R. Ambedkar's Riddles in Hinduism, vol. 4, contains an article, “The Riddle of Rama and Krishna,” that sharply criticizes these popular deified figures as they appear in the Rāmāyana and Mahābhārata. The posthumous publication of the volume by the Maharashthra government in 1988 caused a furor and protracted political struggle. An example of Ambedkar's criticisms as reported in a 1988 article: “Rama was not an ideal husband. His treatment of Sita was in fact extremely cruel. He even puts her through an agni parīksha and later abandons her in the forest, with no thought of the fact that she is pregnant” (Balarama:28). The author notes: “Interestingly, Ambedkar is not the first social reformer to make such a critical appraisal of the Hindu epics and scriptures. In Maharashtra itself Mahatma Jyothibhai Phule, Bhaskarrao Jadhav, Prabodhankar Thackeray (father of Bal Thackeray) and leaders of the Satyashodhak and Lokhitwadi movements, were no less critical of these works than Ambedkar.”

5. For example, Richman 1991, forthcoming; Thiel-Horstmann; Kapur; Lutgendorf 1991, 1995; Mankekar; Blackburn; Schechner 1985,1993; Schechner and Hess; Hess 1983, 1988, 1994.

6. Valmiki 1959:335-336. This episode occurs in sargas 115-120 of the Yuddhakānḍa. The new translation, vol. 6 in the Princeton Rāmāyana, is not yet available, so I rely on the Shastri translation. I have taken the liberty of slightly modernizing the language, especially changing “thee/thy/thou” to forms of “you.”

7. Sati as widow-immolation is not a common occurrence, but Satimātās—goddesses believed to have been human satis, apotheosized after their heroic self-sacrifice—are widely worshiped. Recent studies of sati include Mani; Hawley; Harlan. See McKean, plate 17, for a photo of a recently established, politically charged Sati icon. An unforgettable visual image is available in Anand Patwardhan's 1994 film Father, Son and Holy War, in which a woman domestic worker comments on her understanding of a devotional poster representing the 1987 immolation of a young widow, Roop Kanwar, in Rajasthan. A group interview with male supporters of sati, including some of Roop Kanwar's relatives, is also very interesting. In a slide lecture at the Sita Symposium, Columbia University, May 1, 1998, Vishakha Desai showed that paintings of the agni parīksha prior to this century tended to show Sita in a much more active position, striding toward the fire and standing in it rather than sitting on a pyre in sati-fashion.

8. The translations, and in fact everything I know about the Kamban episode, come from Shulman's fine article.

9. Similarly the gopis in the stories of Krishna bhakti are female characters emblematic of all devotees. Men not only feel free to identify with them as lovers of Krishna but, in fact, tend to take over the territory, enjoying the intimacies of feminization in their religious life, maintaining male power and status in their ordinary life, and not hesitating to exclude and subordinate women in both religious and worldly activities and institutions.

10. In 1972 R.K. Narayan, the well-known English-language Indian novelist, published a “shortened modern prose version” of the Rāmāyana based mainly on Kamban. It is intriguing to me that Narayan pointedly excluded Kamban's version of the fire ordeal, though he did not efface the episode entirely. He entitles his chap. 13 “Interlude,” suggesting that it is not integral to the story. Beneath the title is this heading: “To Link Up the Narrative, an Extract from Valmiki.” Narayan gives a very mild one-page summary of the Valmiki version (compared to seven pages in the Shastri translation). He also dismisses the story of the abandonment of Sita, saying at the end of his “Epilogue”: “I am omitting a sequel which describes a second parting between Rama and Sita, with the latter delivering twins in a forest … [T]his part of the story is not popular, nor is it considered to be authentic, but a latterday addition to Valmiki's version” (171).

11. W. L. Smith, in Rāmāyana Traditions in Eastern India, informs us that the tradition of a false Sita created by Agni goes back to the Kurmapurāna and is also featured in the Brahmavaivartapurāna (92). Smith's section “The Problem of Sita” (91-99) brings together much interesting information.

12. Tulsidas, Āranyakānḍ do. 23 to following ch. 5. Chhāyā Sita is sometimes called māyā (illusory) Sita.

13. The lines are in Lankākānḍa, from dohā 108 through the following chhanda 1.

14. Hess 1983; Kapur; Lutgendorf 1991:248-349; Schechner 1985, 1993; Schechner and Hess.

15. Lutgendorf (1991:266-267) and Dalmia (79, 82) give brief accounts of this revision. They differ on the nature of the Ramlila before the revision. Lutgendorf says that earlier dialogues in Bhojpuri were modernized “into a modified Khari Bholi, the dialect of Delhi that [Harishchandra] had adopted for prose writing.” Dalmia assumes that the actors had previously mimed their performance to the recitation of Tulsidas's poem and that in Harishchandra's time prose dialogues were composed for the first time.

16. In 1976, when Richard Schechner and I were doing fieldwork together in the Ramalila, the Maharaja graciously arranged at our request to have a copy of the Ramlila dialogues made for us. They were written out by hand in small copybooks that are the source for this translation.

17. For instance, the use of the word “atrocity” (atyāchār) and the rhetorical question as to whether women who are victims of male violence should be called criminals.

18. The broad meaning is a perfect woman, a woman embodying truth (sat), an ideal wife; the common specific meaning, and probable association for most listeners, is a widow who sacrifices herself on her husband's funeral pyre.

19. Smith cites a Rāmāyana in which Sita is literally transformed into fire. Agni assures her that Ravana will not be able to touch her: “(Ravana) will not be able to seat you upon his lap … he will be killed by the heat of the fire; if he grasps your hand he will be burnt” (93). Smith also mentions other texts in which Sita's blazing heat or light prevents Ravana from touching her.

20. This stylized circle of flames is very similar to the presentation in the Ramnagar Ramlila—another example of Lutgendorf's thesis that Ramlila conventions strongly influenced Sagar (1995).

21. The Mānas-pīyūsh is a seven-volume anthology of excerpts from prestigious nineteenth and early twentieth-century commentaries. In nine pages devoted to the agni parīksha episode, only three lines suggest doubt about the authenticity of Rama's harsh speech as found in Valmiki and the Mahābhārata: “What harsh words he spoke—this has never been revealed by the Mānas poet. … See Valmiki 115 and Mahābhārata Vanaparva. The reader should know that there is doubt connected to these words …” (Sharan:548).

22. The Indian Express said that the māyā Sita story was “a revelation to most viewers. … While many felt this was a palpable bit of fiction added to Sagar's multiple-source myth, others, vigilant women's groups among them, who had keyed themselves up for the agni parīksha episode, felt that the producer had chosen this device to avoid getting into any sati-type controversy. … ‘How can you show Ramāyān without showing Sita's agni parīksha?’ asks Sonal Shukla of the Forum Against Oppression of Women. … ‘The māyā Sita destroys the character of Sita as we know it and weakens the story. It is plainly an escape device used by the producer’” (Sadasivam 1988). The article then explains that the māyā Sita, unbeknownst to most viewers, is based on Tulsidas and the Adhyātmā Rāmāyana. Even with this explanation viewers interviewed for the article dismiss the device as absurd, illogical, an interpolation. “How does a māyā Sita convey the concept of purity? … Why would Rama take that trouble to recover a māyā Sita?” Sagar's elaborate speechwriting efforts did not quite take away the sting of the visual image. According to one woman, “Although the sequence was not verbally offensive, it was visually very much so. Sita's unquestioning attitude, her folded hands, her beatific smile as she entered and emerged from the flames—all this bothered me.”

23. Derné does not cite the verse, but I know what it is because my own female research assistant, Nita Pandey, told me in 1989 that her mother had frequently quoted it to her as a warning not to aspire to independence. I was amazed at the time that a half-line that seemed utterly obscure to to me could actually be a potent weapon of socialization. Derné's reference confirms that my assistant's experience was not idiosyncratic but that the verse is widely cited with proverbial force. It occurs in a long lyrical set piece in Kishkindhakānḍa, where Rama describes the rainy season. In a repetitive structure, the first half-line gives a descriptive detail, and the second half-line provides a moralizing simile related to the first. The line in question says: “Great torrents smash embankments [in the farmer's fields] / just as independence ruins a woman” (mahāvrishṭi cali phūti kiārī / jimi sutantra bhaẽ bigarahi nārī (4.14.7).

24. In chap. 2, “Making Gender Culture: Men Talk About Controlling Women” (Derné 1995a: 22-23), men state unabashedly that it is normal and in their own self-interest to enforce obedience, subservience, confinement, self-effacement, and denial of their own experience in women, particularly wives. Examples:

    “My wife will have to mold herself into my form. She has to make her daily routine as mine is. I will not have to make my routine to conform to her.”

    “The most important quality of an ideal wife is that she obey her husband. She should do whatever the husband says.”

    “The biggest thing for the ideal wife is that she accept whatever her husband wants … She should always wear red clothes if that is what pleases him. If the husband wants her to wear jeans and T-shirts, then she should dress that way.”

    “Some wives start to complain as soon as they come to their [husband's] house. The parents will tell them two things and they will tell their husbands four things. There are some wives, however, whose fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law may even beat them and they will not say anything. The woman who remains silent is the ideal wife.”

    “Even if there are difficulties, the women of India will not say anything to anybody. In the sāsural [husband's house], whatever happens is right. Even if it is dirt, she understands it as gold. [This] is the most wonderful tradition.”

    See also Derné 1995b for a discussion of Hindi movies set in modern times but modeling their leading characters on Sita and Rama.

25. There are many examples of such rejection in the twentieth century; the more one looks, the more one finds. I am grateful to an anonymous JAAR reviewer of this article for mentioning a famous Telugu work by Muppala Ranganayakamma, Rāmāyana Vishabriksham, “Ramayana Is a Poisonous Tree,” written from a Marxist perspective.

26. See, for example, Richman 1991 (especially the article by V. Narayana Rao); Richman forthcoming; Raheja and Gold (especially chap. 4, “On the Uses of Subversion: Redefining Conjugality”).

27. Many classical dancers have reinterpreted Sita in recent years. The most high-profile example is Mallika Sarabhai's Sita's Daughters, which toured in India and North America in the mid-1990s.

28. Reddy was a woman who put her body on the line when it came to protesting against injustice. Locked up by the Indira Gandhi government for her protests against the totalitarian “Emergency” imposed in 1975, she died in prison. This reprint of Sita mentions that it was first published in Enact, the Delhi Drama Monthly.

29. I am grateful to Kamala Bhasin, who gave me this tape in 1988.

30. Manushi was far ahead of academic scholars in recognizing the liberating potential of oral traditions and the diverse possibilities of representing old heroes and narratives. Only in the 1990s have we academics produced our Many Rāmāyanas and Questioning Rāmāyanas (Richman 1993, forthcoming), our international Sita Symposium (held at Columbia University, May 1998). In 1981 Manushi introduced this folk song text with the following observations: “Though women have often been excluded from the tradition of written literature, their works devalued or deliberately ‘lost,’ they have always been chief though anonymous participants in a very rich oral tradition, expressing their experience and point-of-view through songs and stories, which develop and change over generations, thus representing a collective creativity. We need to explore and preserve such literature which often presents far more positive images of women than do better-known literary ‘classics.’ The need to do this is particularly urgent now that the media, particularly the films, are picking up and distorting ancient mythology in a violently anti-women way. We need to point out that there are many possible Sitas, Savitris, Draupadis. Do send us folk songs, stories, legends from your region, particularly in dialects, so that they can be translated, shared with all the readers of Manushi, so as to stimulate the imagination of women” (Manushi:22).

31. In a conversation with the filmmaker, Anand Patwardhan, in October 1998, I learned that the words to the song had been composed collaboratively by the Dalit singer, the well-known Dalit poet Daya Pawar, and Patwardhan.

32. Sen has also written “Lady Sings the Blues: When Women Retell the Rāmāyana,” a study of village women's Rāmāyana songs in Bengali, Marathi, Maithili, and Telugu, presented at Columbia University's 1998 Sita Symposium and eventually to be published in a conference volume. From the introduction to this rich paper: “Just as the Rama myth has been exploited by the patriarchal Brahminical system to construct an ideal Hindu male, Sita too has been built up as an ideal Hindu female to help serve the system. … Although Sita's life can hardly be called a happy one, she remains the ideal woman through whom the patriarchal values may be spread far and wide, through whom women may be taught to forbear all injustices silently. But there are always alternative ways of using a myth. If patriarchy has used the Sita myth to silence the women, the village women have picked up the Sita myth to give themselves a voice. They have found a suitable mask in the myth of Sita, a persona, under which they can express themselves, speak of the day-to-day problems and critique patriarchy in their own fashion. … In the women's retelling Sita is no rebel, she is still the yielding suffering wife, but she speaks of her sufferings, of injustice, of loneliness and sorrow. In the women's folk tradition of India, never mind where you are, which century you belong to or what language you speak, you are all sisters in sorrow.” Another fine contribution to this conference was Usha Nillson's “Grinding Millet and Singing of Sita,” which presented high-caste and low-caste women's songs in Hindi.

33. Notice that suttee is described as a failing of the women!

34. In addition to Raheja and Gold, a wonderful ethnographic presentation of such multilevelled performance by a woman is found in Jacobson. And Raheja:11-13 offers a stunning account of a low-caste woman “performing” her ambivalent relations to discourses of gender and honor in a charged social context.

35. It is evident from examples given above that Indians in the present time also use the word sati for Sita. Lakshman and Rama use it several times in the television epic's agni parīksha episode; Sita uses the word satītva, translated here as “purity,” in the Strī kathā tape cited above.

36. As of this writing, scholarly publications on dowry and bride burning remain sparse. An effort to remedy this has been undertaken by the International Society against Dowry and Bride Burning in India (P.O. Box 8766, Salem, MA 01971), under the leadership of Himendra Thakur. This Society has sponsored four conferences since 1995, three at Harvard and one at the University of London, with participation by both activists and academics. A “Souvenir Volume” of papers presented at the first conference was distributed privately (Thakur). Thirteen papers, some of which originated at these conferences, are available in Garzilli's edited volume.

37. Quotations are from a manuscript version of Kishwar's essay, prepared for inclusion in Richman forthcoming. There may be some changes before final publication.

38. As this article goes to press, a new development is unfolding. In late November 1998 a group of mainly female protestors, under the banner of the ultra-rightwing Shiv Sena, attacked cinema halls in Bombay and New Delhi where the Hindu version of Fire was being shown, smashing windows and otherwise vandalizing the theaters. A male spokesman said that the film was an improper representation of “our culture.” News coverage pointed out that Fire had passed the Indian film censors, usually quite conservative about any kind of nudity or sexual display. Surprisingly, they did not object to the scene in which two women kissed and embraced, but they insisted on one change: the name of the younger woman must be changed from Sita to Nita!

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