During my college days, we used to sound rebellious in declamation contests while trying to bring in Sita’s example through various corridors of logic and argument. We had wanted to examine why it was Sita and not Rama who had to go through the trial by fire. Why was Sita exiled to the second vanavas—living in a hermitage even after Rama’s victorious return to Ayodhya?
My mother never pardoned me for being so ‘harsh and rude’ to our own glorious past. She would say, ‘It was Sita’s dharma, her righteousness that gave Rama his essential aura and moral strength, and remember he could never find peace after Sita left Ayodhya, finally taking refuge in the mighty waters of Sarayu.’ I remember the lines describing Sita’s request to her mother to take her back, which made women cry:
If unstained in thought and action I have lived from the day of my birth, spare a daughter’s shame and anguish and receive her, Mother Earth! If in duty and devotion, I have laboured undefiled, Mother Earth! Who bore this woman, once again receive thy child! If in truth unto my husband I have proved a faithful wife, Mother Earth! Relieve thy Sita from the burden of this life!
We were never satisfied with the innumerable explanations—all justifying Sita’s fire test and exemplifying Rama’s great love for her. But, and this ‘but’ always remained a very significant one, Rama was maryada purushottam, the living embodiment of the noble virtues, and hence had to listen to his people, even as in this case, to a washerman, to uphold the rajdharma—the duties of the king. He had to be harsh with himself and hence Sita had to go to the forest for the rest of her life, till she prayed to Mother Earth to take her back into her affectionate lap. The ultimate refuge of the daughter was again the same earth from which she had been offered to the great sage King Janaka.
We said that Sita rebelled. She never reconciled to the fact that she was made to prove her chastity, her singular love for her husband in full public glare, and was exiled to prove a point—to uphold the righteousness of her husband. And we were certainly never accused of heresy or sacrilegious behaviour. Even the ochre-robed sanyasins who frequented our house, laughed at my logic and said, ‘Well, when you come of age, you will understand.’
Now, in more intolerant times, I feel that this could happen only in a broad-minded Hindu family, which has become a rarity today. At that age, perhaps my mother personified the ordeals and rebellious character of Sita, or maybe we liked to see Sita’s attributes in her, imparting some sort of divine touch to the daily outbursts of domestic disquiet that we had been witnessing.
We were hardly a happy family. There were always enough reasons for an evening of unrest in our home. My mother remained a symbol of pain and patience. Rising early morning, living in utter penury, funding my tuitions, struggling to keep my studies uninterrupted, working late nights, and having the ‘Fruities’, those twenty-five paisa candies that gave us ultimate joy, she moved forward. Her night-time stories and daytime instructions from Tulsidas’ Ramacharitmanas were the only doses of morality we got that somehow always had references to Sita’s ordeals and her patience. Those were Sita’s introductory lines in our lives.
Later, my regard for Sita translated into Janaki’s strong, unwavering and extraordinarily patient character that could only be epitomized in a mix of fire and earth—one, a symbol of rebellion, the other signifying unlimited patience. My rebellious characterization of Sita in a revolutionary mould was completely off-track. I learnt that it is not necessary to portray someone in a totally alien mode to make him or her more acceptable in our own times. They are not stage actors who have to be presented in the way a director would find convenient for a show. Sita represents certain values that have nourished the ages and millenniums, and we have to accept them in their own form. Sita’s patience irritates modernists. In times like these, when everything is available at the push of a button and speed defines the state of our living, patience is one word that doesn’t find a welcome audience.
Sita’s birth from the womb of Mother Earth signifies nature, colour and vivacity. Her father Janaka was an embodiment of austerity, so much separated from worldly actions that he was known as ‘Videha’, one who is above the realm of physical needs and wants. In her previous birth, she was the daughter of Rishi Kushadhwaj, who was killed by a demon because Kushadhwaj wanted to marry his daughter Vedvati to Vishnu. In order to fulfil her father’s desire, Vedvati began a hard penance and was sighted by Ravana, who wanted to marry her forcibly. Vedvati refused and took her life by jumping into the fire and was reborn as Sita, while Janaka was tilling his land.
Remember Jan, Janaka, Janaki? [Agyeya]. The writer of this work, one of the greatest doyens of our literary world, S.H.Vatsyayan Agyeya, led a yatra of littérateurs to Janakpur Dham, where Janaki was born. The region reverberates with the sacred memories of the daughter who became a devi for all. She was everything that a woman can ever dream to be, pious, devoted, patient, beautiful, affectionate and, above all, uncompromising in her duties as well as her commitments.
She was all that Bharat could imagine as the epitome of womanhood. That is perhaps the reason why certain scholars and the so-called modern analysts of women’s issues find it so revolting to see M.K. Gandhi projecting Sita’s ideal before the Indian masses as the symbol of anti-colonialism and indigenous cultural values, and a powerful icon of the unyielding swadeshi spirit. For him and for many other thinkers rooted in the cultural contours that make us identifiable as Indians, Sita remains a far superior character in the collective psyche than even Rama, who was admiringly virtuous. Her silent suffering and enduring patience like that of Earth itself make her the touchstone of morality.
Today, there is an attempt to put Sita in the framework of the so-called modern-day value system and attributes that a Western-oriented contemporary writer would like to see in the woman of today. Therefore, Sita has to be portrayed as a rebellious, uncompromising, courageous and independent character in the mould of Simone de Beauvoir or Betty Friedan.
Why should this be necessary? Why can’t we appreciate and accept what Sita was and has remained since time immemorial? Why on earth do we fall prey to flagellantism, exposing a colonial mindset indicating that devotion to a husband, agreeing to pass through agni pareeksha or the fire ordeal, silent suffering and agreeing to go to the forest even while being pregnant are all signs of a self-effacing woman, who can be pitied but not venerated as an ideal of womanhood. All these interpretations are meant to falsify the entire socio-cultural fabric of a land known for its rich civilization.
It is ironical that the values which have sustained our society for thousands of years and have inspired great souls are being ‘reformed’ and amended by the modernists, whose singular passion is to debunk and dispossess whatever India has cherished for ages. It is not at all necessary to denounce the past to glorify the present, and the future must find its own feet.
Sita’s insistence on following Rama into his exile, and Rama’s anguish and lament on seeing her agony while walking towards the forest are vividly narrated in the Kavitavali of Tulsidas. Her love for Rama and his deep feelings for her overwhelm any sensitive person even today. Rama’s tears rolled down when he saw his beloved trying to walk the rough road covered with pebbles and thorns while following him into the forest. Sita was breaking a convention when she insisted that she would, while facing all odds, happily join Rama, her husband and the only love in her life, in his fourteen years of exile. A timid, compromising and traditional wife would not have dared to defy the social principles of her times in such a manner. When Rama tells her about the rigours of life in exile, she says, ‘Any term of austerities or forest or even heaven, let it be to me with you only. To me, who follows you behind, there will be no tiresomeness. I shall remain in the path without any fatigue, as remaining in a place of recreation or as in a sleep. While walking with you, blades of kusha grass, shrubs by the name of kaasa, reeds and rushes and plants with prickles which fall in the path will touch my soles like a heap of cotton or soft deerskin. I shall reckon the dust raised by the strongest wind that will cover my body as sandal dust of highest advantage. While dwelling in the forest, in its midst, I shall lie down on green grass. Will lying in beds with carpets be more comfortable than that? Leaves, tubers and fruits either a little or abundant in quantity brought and given by you yourself will be like nectar to me. Your companionship will be heaven to me. Without you, it will be hell. Oh, Rama! By knowing thus my great love, obtain supreme joy with me. On the contrary, if you do not take me, who is not alarmed of the forest as such, I shall drink poison now itself. But on no account would I bow to the enemies. As a result of grief I will not be giving to live even afterwards when abandoned by you. Death is therefore better at the time of your relinquishment itself.’ (Valmiki)
Her calm, composed yet unyielding behaviour in Ravana’s captivity, her dialogue with Hanuman in Ashok Vatika, later her appreciation of the contemporary values of society, her undergoing the fire ordeal, and finally her request to Mother Earth to take her back into her lap, all create a symbol that has been accepted by a society which enjoys a free atmosphere of debate, and analyses a person’s character before adopting him or her into the pantheon of gods.
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