Sita is perhaps one of the most recognised women in Indian literature and mythology, and one of the least understood. Every Indian woman, writes Namita Gokhale, carries some of Sita within her. This anthology goes looking for what exactly that means and finds far more than expected.
Nehal Rajvanshi
“In Search of Sita”, edited by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal is an anthology of essays, conversations and commentaries, in quest of Sita, as the title suggests. The anthology is divided into four sections: Commentary, Dialogue, Versions, and Creative Interpretations, allowing for a wide spectrum of approaches and perspectives to understanding Sita: academic, creative, folkloric, and deeply personal.
Towards the end of “In Search of Sita”, in one of the essays, a translated piece of fiction by Mallika Sengupta, Sita is publicly summoned by Rama to take yet another oath of chastity. She refuses. Rama collapses to the ground. And Sita kneels beside him and says, quietly: “The loss of chastity is a mere accident, a physical assault just like your and Lakshmana’s entrapment in the coils of the Nagpash in the battle of Lanka. The body of the woman does not alter after an assault, nor does her mind.”
She is not defending herself. She is dismantling the question. She takes a moment of male vulnerability when Rama and Lakshmana were themselves physically overpowered in battle and holds it up like a mirror. That happened to your body, she says, and nobody questioned your honour. Why is my body different? It is a completely logical argument, delivered without anger, and it lands like a verdict.
This Sita doesn’t burn herself, doesn’t sink into the earth, doesn’t cry. She simply stops cooperating with the whole tired ritual of proving her innocence. That scene, how calm it is, how much it refuses to make female suffering into spectacle, captures something essential about this anthology. “In Search of Sita”, edited by Malashri Lal and Namita Gokhale is a book about rediscovering a woman who was always stronger than the story told about her.
The premise is ambitious. Namita Gokhale, in her introduction, frames the project not as deconstruction but as recovery. “For all of us Indian women carry some of her within us..”
The Sita of Valmiki could lift Shiva’s bow with one arm as a child. The Sita of the Uttara Kanda raises two sons alone in the forest without bitterness. The Sita who is finally asked, again, to prove her purity simply disappears into the earth on her own terms. Gokhale writes with warmth and real intelligence, and her opening is one of the anthology’s finest pieces: personal without being self-indulgent, scholarly without being dry.
The collection is divided into four sections and it is in the movement between these registers that the book’s particular richness lies. The editors have understood that no single discipline can hold Sita. She requires the economist, the folk singer, the dancer, the film director, and the novelist all at once.
Meghnad Desai opens the Commentary section with one of the most revealing observations in the book. He notes, with the precision of statistics as an economist, that Sita appears in barely 76 of the Ramayana’s 645 sargas, roughly 10 percent. “The sheer absence of Sita throughout the Ramayana is noteworthy,” he writes. But absence, the book shows us, invites inscription. Every generation writes its own Sita into the gaps Valmiki left. This anthology is the latest, and most generous, act of that inscription.
Arshia Sattar’s contribution is a retrospective on her own translation of the Valmiki Ramayana. Sattar, a self-described feminist, confesses that returning to the text years after her translation, she finds herself drawn not to Sita but to Rama. “I am shocked that it is he who draws me to him, compels me to try and understand his cruelty towards Sita and what it means for him to be king, perhaps even against his innermost wishes.” It is an uncomfortable admission, and she holds it without apology. Her argument, that the path to a fuller understanding of the epic runs through engaging with Rama rather than dismissing him, gives the anthology some of its most productive tension.
Malashri Lal’s essay on naming and protest traces Sita’s cultural life across centuries: from Gandhi, who placed her name before Rama’s in Ramadhun, making Sita the word that sanctifies the God, to Ramanand Sagar’s television serial of the late 1980s, to Deepa Mehta’s Fire, where the name itself became a flashpoint for communal anger. This is social history with real texture, attentive to how a myth moves through time and keeps changing shape depending on who needs it.
The Versions section is where the anthology becomes genuinely surprising. Here it escapes the gravity of the Indian canon of mythology and spreads into the wide, ungoverned territory of regional folk traditions. In the Pahari Lok Ramain of Himachal Pradesh, a slyly domestic Sita argues with Lakshmana about fetching water and demands a golden pitcher before she’ll agree to go. In the Telugu folk ballads, Urmila, Lakshmana’s wife, almost entirely forgotten by classical tradition, spends fourteen years in a grief-coma that reads as a kind of silent protest. Mandakranta Bose’s careful reading of the Bengali Ramayanas finds a Sita who speaks sharply and moves on her own terms. D. Rama Raju’s essay on Telugu folk literature is a particular pleasure: it brings alive a Sita who plays dice, nurses quiet jealousies, and talks to her sister-in-law as a woman among women rather than an icon among devotees.
What emerges across these regional versions is something the classical tradition tended to suppress: Sita as a woman with opinions, appetites, and a sense of her own dignity. In the Pahari tradition she is practically comic, demanding, particular, very much at home in her own body. In the Bengali tradition she is tragic but never passive. In the Telugu folk songs she is so fully human that her suffering, when it comes, feels like an injustice rather than a destiny.
The Creative Interpretations section gathers some of the book’s most memorable writing. Kumudini’s translated “Letters from the Palace” is a small masterpiece: Sita writing home to her mother about fabrics, in-laws, the colour of saris, fussing over borders that are too broad, worrying about whether blue silk fades. And then, in the final brief note, just a few lines about going to the forest, where “peace of mind is now mine.” It is a brilliant piece of imagining, it gives Sita an ordinary interior life, and in doing so makes her extraordinary circumstances feel real.
Ramnika Gupta imagines a Dalit Sita who beats her unfaithful, poisoning husband with a shoe and refuses to go to the police because she doesn’t trust them. Chandra Ghosh Jain writes a letter from a modern Sita to an unborn daughter who may be aborted for being female. Anamika’s essay follows a dream into the earth’s womb, where Sita sits quietly cleaning a pitcher, and an aged Ravana comes to ask her to teach him the Rudra Veena. She sends him away, not with anger but with instruction: “Pain is the road to salvation, friend, pain gives rise to the music in the Rudra Veena. Listen to the music within you and turn back.”
These essays work because they keep Sita within reach of experience, placing her in the grain of a real life, within the immediacy of a particular moment.
Amit Chaudhuri closes the anthology with a retelling of Surpanakha’s infatuation. Surpanakha, transformed into beauty, watches Rama from behind a bush, nursing a longing she knows is against all reason. And Rama, bored in the forest, says to Lakshmana: Have some fun with her. What happens to her nose is reported in two sentences. The blood and the bewilderment are given equal weight. It is the quietest, most unsettling piece in the book, and a reminder that the Ramayana contains more women than just Sita, and that most of them got a worse deal.
“In Search of Sita” does not lead the reader to a single Sita. What it finds instead is a tradition so alive and so contested that it can hold within itself the submissive wife and the goddess, the Dalit woman who beats her husband with a shoe and the middle-aged poet lying awake imagining an older Sita playing the Veena alone in the forest. It is a book that trusts its subject, and trusts its readers, enough to resist resolution. Some questions, it suggests, are more valuable open than closed. Sita has been many things to many people across many centuries. She will keep becoming.