Sītā

Her story

Janaka of Videha, ploughing a sacrificial field, turned up an infant in the furrow and raised her as his daughter; her name means the furrow. This birth belongs to the Bāla Kāṇḍa, the poem's later first book. She is won by Rāma when he breaks the bow of Śiva that Janaka had set as her bride-price.

When Rāma is exiled she refuses to be left in the palace, and the argument she makes is one of the strongest speeches in the second book: that a wife's place is not determined by comfort, that she was given to him and not to his house, and that she would be ashamed to stay. She goes in bark cloth.

In the forest she is the only one of the three who questions what they are doing. She puts to Rāma, carefully, that a man living the forest life should perhaps not be carrying weapons, and that killing beings who have not harmed him personally is a fault that will attach to him. He answers that he has promised to protect. The exchange stands unresolved.

She sees the golden deer, wants it, and sends her husband after it; when the dying creature cries out in his voice she drives Lakṣmaṇa after him with an accusation she cannot take back. Rāvaṇa comes as a mendicant, and takes her.

For a year she is held in the aśoka grove at Laṅkā, sitting on the ground in a single soiled garment, guarded by rākṣasīs, refusing Rāvaṇa each time he comes — with a blade of grass held between them, so that she does not have to address him directly. She contemplates suicide and does not commit it. When Hanumān offers to carry her out on his back she refuses: she will not be stolen back, she will not touch another man willingly, and it is Rāma's business to come for her.

After the war Rāma tells her before the assembled army that he fought for his own honour, that no man of his house could take back a woman who has lived in another man's dwelling, and that she is free to go to any of his companions she pleases. She answers him — reminding him that he had a year to send word and did not, and that he is speaking to her like a common man to a common woman — and asks Lakṣmaṇa to build a pyre. She walks into it, and Agni gives her back untouched.

In the seventh book, hearing that his subjects still talk, Rāma has her taken to the forest while pregnant and abandoned. She bears twin sons at Vālmīki's hermitage. Years later, brought back to swear her innocence before an assembly, she does not swear. She calls on the earth, her mother, to take her back if she has been true; the earth opens, and she is received, and does not return.

What the poem does with her

Sītā is not a passive figure in the text, whatever later retellings made of her. She argues with Rāma three times and wins the first argument outright. She refuses Rāvaṇa for a year, under threat, without any expectation of rescue. She refuses Hanumān's rescue on a point of principle. She answers Rāma's repudiation with anger, not with pleading. And her final act is a refusal: called to prove herself a second time, she declines, and leaves.

The tradition has read her in two incompatible ways, and both readings are available in the text. She is the model of a wife's fidelity — the most-cited exemplar of patience, chastity and endurance in Indian culture, held up to women for two thousand years. She is also the epic's standing indictment of the man it is named for, and the figure through whom the poem asks whether an ideal that costs this much is an ideal.

The retellings

Almost every later version does something about the ending, and what it does reveals its priorities. The Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa and Tulsīdās after it introduce a shadow Sītā, so that the real one enters fire before the abduction and is never touched; the ordeal becomes a recovery rather than a test. Kamban and much of the southern tradition end at the coronation and never reach the banishment. The Jain versions have her refuse to return and take monastic vows instead. The Adbhuta Rāmāyaṇa makes her the one who kills a thousand-headed Rāvaṇa, in a Śākta reading that turns the whole story inside out.

Modern retellings — in Telugu, Bengali, Kannada, Hindi, English and a dozen other languages, many of them by women — have made her banishment their subject more often than any other episode in Indian literature. There is also a long folk tradition of Sītā songs, sung by women at grinding and at weddings, in which she speaks in the first person about her mother-in-law, her husband and her exile, and which is considerably less reverent than the written epic.

A note on the lakṣmaṇa-rekhā

The line drawn by Lakṣmaṇa around the hermitage, which Sītā crosses and is thereby taken, is one of the most familiar images in the Indian imagination and has entered ordinary speech as a phrase for a limit one must not cross. It is not in Vālmīki, in any recension. It comes from later retellings, and the fact that a detail everyone knows is absent from the epic is a useful caution about the whole tradition.

The refusals

Three times Sītā is offered a way out and refuses it, and the pattern is the shape of her character. Rāma tells her to stay in the palace and she refuses. Hanumān offers to carry her out of Laṅkā and she refuses, on the grounds that being stolen back is not the same as being won, and that she will not touch another man. Rāma calls her a second time to swear before an assembly, and she refuses, and leaves the world instead.

Each refusal costs her more than compliance would have. The tradition has generally read the first two as models of wifely virtue and the third as a tragedy, but they are the same act performed three times: a woman declining to have the terms of her life set by somebody else's convenience.

The year in Laṅkā

The fifth book gives more sustained attention to Sītā's captivity than any other episode gives to any other character's inner life. She is filthy, starved, sleeping on the ground, guarded by women who threaten to eat her, visited by a king who tells her he will have her one way or another within two months, and entirely without evidence that anyone is coming. She considers suicide, reasons herself out of it, and goes on refusing.

The poem then has her husband tell her, in front of an army, that none of this was about her. Whatever else the Rāmāyaṇa is doing in the sixth book, it has spent a whole book making sure the reader knows exactly what she endured before he says it.

Sītā as goddess

In later theology Sītā is Lakṣmī, and in the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition she is not a subordinate figure but the necessary mediator between the devotee and God — the one who intercedes, and whose presence is what makes Viṣṇu approachable. Rāma is not worshipped alone in that tradition; the pair is the object.

She is also worshipped as a goddess of the earth and of agriculture, which the furrow-birth supports directly, and Mithilā treats her as a daughter of the region rather than as a queen of Kosala.