INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURAL STUDIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Creative Saplings, 2023

The story of Sita in the Indian epic Ramayana has over time been subject to several transformations, reinterpretations, and recontextualization. Sita the fiercely dedicated wife of Lord Rama has evolved to become a woman protagonist and, in some cases, even a feminist idol. Although there have been several modern interpretations of the Ramayana, Nandini Sahu's Sita composed as a poetic memoir running into 25 cantos, in its form, content, and context is situated in a liminal space between the real world and the mythical world. This liminality is otherwise referred to as the "permeable membrane" in the words of A. K Ramanujan provides scope for many voices to emerge; from orality, from marga and desi mediums all of which oscillate between the temporal zones of the past, present, and future, constantly engaging with one another. Furthermore, the figure of Sita and her narratives extend to what Sahu refers to as the "Sitaness" in every woman whose agency has been snatched. For instance, she yokes together women protagonists from the Literary domain such as Desdemona, mythical namely, Trijada, and historical such as Meerabai, Mother Teresa, Kalpna Chawla, and even Nirbhaya respectively to create a uniquely Indian feminist discourse highlighting various instances of injustice meted towards women. Moreover, the poem is crafted using self-reflexive storytelling inspired by oral tradition and folklore. It also implements multilayered intertextual allusions to reimagine Sita as a woman protagonist transcending time and space. Therefore, this paper will investigate the intertextual and folkloric allusions in Nandini Sahu's Sita consequently exploring the relevance of this composition as a contribution towards the creation of a desi-feminist discourse.

University of Bucharest Review, 2021

Counter-narration re-casts existing narratives and foregrounds the marginalised by giving them agency and performativity. They are narratives that challenge and provide resistance against dominant and hegemonic grand narratives which have been instrumental in formulating a social ideology over a long period of time making them normative. The Ramayana, an ancient epic is a multi-layered story of Prince Rama and Princess Sita and their role in the politics of power, state and patriarchy. It is a grand or master narrative that presupposes the passivity of the female as normative. It portrays Sita, King Rama's wife, as someone who experiences marginalization and oppression and is a victim of the dominant narrative of patriarchy. This paper will use the theory of counternarrative and analyse Amish Tripathi's novel Sita: Warrior of Mithila (2017) in order to show how he has recast Sita deconstructing the myth of passivity. Here, Sita resists prescriptive norms of the dominant narrative, wherein she has been projected as the silent receptor and problematizes the patriarchal ideology propagated through the master narrative. This paper will show how counter storytelling or counter narrating by Amish Tripathi has challenged and defied the narrative silence and hegemony in The Ramayana, while making the female powerful and capable in education, warfare and state governance.

Snapshot one. Anita, the feminist theologian, questioned the speaker, Jacqueline, Indianist amongst (post-) Christians, yet interested in women's issues and the study of sacred texts. 'Is there a Westerner in the world today who is truly virtuous and can speak with integrity about another tradition's concerns?'2 Snapshot two. If you had been in Brunswick Street in Withington, Manchester, on the evening of 16 April 1997, you could have entered the Gandhi Hall where Hindu women and men had gathered for the ninth and final night of reciting the Rdmcaritmdnas,3 the sixteenth century Hindi story of 'The Lake of Rama's Acts'. Through this annual reading and related songs and chanting, they were celebrating the birthday of the important Hindu deity, Lord Ram.4 The temple was crowded and brightly decorated, filled with women in glittering saris, men in Indian dress or suits, most sitting comfortably on the floor, the elderly on a semicircle of chairs at the back. The images were bedecked in festival splendour and the air was rich with the vibrations of this much-loved story, repetition creates auspiciousness and wipes away the impurities of the present Kali age.5

As a dancer and choreographer who works with South Asian movement and dance forms to create contemporary political dance theatre, I find myself constantly negotiating my way through the constraints placed upon the creative process by a context over-determined by overlapping stereotypes. The need to work through generalized yet flattening metanarratives about racial and cultural difference also complicates the process of evolving a critical, embodied, multi-focal, and shifting engagement with "tradition" and mythology. In the context of violent fundamentalisms and essentialisms, stories associated with religion-mythology-seem difficult to touch, while the hierarchies inherent in the constituting of specific cultural practices as "tradition" are hard to ignore. At the same time, artists of color are under tremendous pressure to reexamine and sift through these problematic yet potentially enriching texts to offer alternative readings, contesting the Euro-American West's positioning of itself as the repository of all libratory thought.

Women's Link, 2019

This paper explores the contemporary reconfigurations of Sita through the fictional work of three living female authors: Chitra Banerjee Divakurni, Vayu Naidu and Volga. It aims to establish Sita as the figure where two contradictory forces Sanskriti and Prakriti coexist.

International Research Journal of Multidisciplinary Scope, 2024

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's novel The Forest of Enchantments (2019), popularly known as Sitayan revolves around the journey of Sita, the wife of epic hero Rama, who emerges as a harbinger of change, lending her voice to the muted echoes of marginalized women characters within the expanse of Indian mythology, Ramayana. The study analyzes the character of Sita with the societal challenges confronted by her and also her quest for identity and space within the constraints of a patriarchal milieu. Using the tool of feminist revisionist mythology, Divakaruni undertakes a humongous task of scrutinizing the narrative of Sita-a quintessential figure in Indian mythology. Revisionist writing, which received significant applause in recent times, presents an alternative perspective by deconstructing the age-old mythological narratives. Moreover, it highlights the adaptable quality of myths to address contemporary challenges. By employing feminist lens, this study not only unpacks the strictures of patriarchal conventions that dominate, exploit and marginalize the women characters but also establishes the fact that the age-old myths, written mostly by men, have become the victim of patriarchy. Sita's journey stands as a beacon of inspiration for women fighting for justice against the injustices perpetrated by patriarchal society. This paper delves deep into these issues, exploring how Sita navigated the patriarchal landscape while simultaneously amplifying the voices of marginalized women characters. Her story serves as a powerful catalyst for resurrecting and empowering women relegated to the periphery.

Journal of Vaishnava Studies, 2011

I analyze different modes of storytelling in the film <i>Sita Sings the Blues</i> which allow different insights into the film and the tradition from which it comes that might be overlooked when viewed as a single coherent narrative. In my first section, I take up the shadow puppet narrative and the idea of authority. As Paley’s work and the conversations and controversy surrounding it has shown us, the Rāmāyaṇa narrative and its ‘ownership’ is quite hotly contested. In an age of copyrights and intellectual property laws, questions are bound to arise over the ownership of "cultural property." As the creator of <i>Sita Sings the Blues<i>, Paley is familiar with both aspects. In addition to fighting for the rights to use Annette Hanshaw’s songs in the feature, Paley received emails and letters from some that found the content of the film offensive to their ‘religious’ and ‘cultural’ sentiments. In this section, I will begin by asking the question ‘Who owns the Rāmāyaṇa?’ or perhaps more aptly put ‘Who speaks for the Rāmāyaṇa?’ In my second section, I will compare the Singing Sītā narrative with the ‘Nina’ character and how they represent opposing manifestations of the relationship between goddess and woman. I will argue that through dialogue, lyrics, and audible and visual framing they present a bi-directional interchange of the deity and woman in which Sītā is humanized through the expression of her emotions in song and the ‘Nina’ character is apotheosized as the goddess in "squiggly" flesh. This must be compared to the wealth of information from the last twenty years of scholarship on women in the Hindu tradition and the relationship between goddesses and the lives of ordinary and exemplary women in which exceptional women often go through a process of divinization in order to subvert cultural norms or overcome immense adversity, especially injustice and ‘ordinary’ women never seem to receive any trickle-down effect from males’ devotion to the divine feminine. We will see that <i>Sita Sings the Blues<i> simultaneously upholds the normative understanding of the relationship between women and divinity and subverts it by emphasizing the humanity of Sītā. Because of the bi-directional association in <I>Sita Sings the Blues<i>, Sītā is, to use Geertz’s phrase, both a model of and a model for women that is quite unique. This will bring the discussion full circle, and I will conclude with my observations about the authority that can be derived from this innovative use of the Rāmāyaṇa narrative and Paley’s authoritative voice.

Shanlax International Journal of Arts, Science and Humanities A Peer-reviewed Scholarly Indexed Quarterly Journal, 2022

Epic and Myth has its significance and impact in Indian culture and writing all as the years progressed. The characters and the happenings in the novel have invigorated numerous readers and writers. Reinterpretation /Reevaluation and retelling have arisen in Literature, Re-telling Myth in unique perspective view has become a pattern lately. Drawing out the unseen perspectives of the characters in prewritten text, have impacted numerous in all dialects. The large portion of retelling folklore in current scenario isn't on men rather on women's Perspective. Most of the stories that rotates around the female characters and their perspective on the happenings. Among numerous Indian writers, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is one who gives voice in the predominant man patriarchal culture/society. The Forest OF Enchantments by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is about the retelling of our old lofty epic of The Ramayana according to Sita's perspective. This novel brims the Sita who is a celebrated female character from an ancient India to Modern India. In this way, Divakaruni has changed her perspective from conventional depiction of basic and selfless women into Modern day female characters that is looking for their Self Identity in the male patriarchal world.

Indian myth has its own place in depicting the rich tradition, culture and social status of Indian ancestors. Ramayana, one of the greatest epics of india, has portrayed the story of Rama, an incarnation of vishnu. Though there are interpretations on the different versions of Ramayana, it has been brought to us as folk tale that Rama is the saviour of people and Sita is humble and docile in following her husband in all walks of life. Amish Tripati, contemporary indian fiction writer is being celebrated for his portrayal of Gods in human forms. Like his Shiva trilogy, Amish is in process of writing Ramchandra serious, in which the second book Sita, Warrior of Mithila, he tells the story of Sita, an abandoned child. This bildungsroman novel depicts, unlike Sita in Ramayana, Sita as great vishnu. Amish has given a knock off to the present Indian patriarchal society where women are still suppressed and oppressed in various scenario. With the modern sensibility Amish has portrayed Sita as a young trained warrior who is bold, fearless and a great intellect to rule her country. These great qualities of Sita makes her the saviour of mother India. The present paper analyses the character of unconventional vibrating Sita like whom every Indian woman wanted to be.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

The present paper entitled Sita and Draupadi in Novels: Retelling of Epical Women Characters describes the retelling of the myths and deals with the new illustrations of the epical characters Sita and Draupadi as authored in the two novels, The Palace of Illusions (2008) by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of Ramayana (2013) by Devdutt Pattanaik. In earlier times, women were seen as passive receiver of a more humanitarian treatment to be given by males. There was thus an attempt to improve the woman rather than reform the social conditions which opposed them. Women's role is not recognized at many times. However, Sita and Draupadi have been portrayed as powerful characters in the two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. While they seemed to be complying and dutiful at times, a deeper analysis into their lives. The difficulties that women face within their families are constant in any case of religion, caste or community and yet women continue to be ruled by a abundance of family laws which are illness to women. A woman in general, draws many shades of character. She is efficient of conveying the huge love and fondness of Sita, while also turning into an aggressive comeback seeking entity like Draupadi. Sita and Draupadi do exist in each subjugated woman. She goes through lots of mourning in her life; still she never bends herself in any circumstances. As societies at large is largely male oriented still a woman remains compliant in a society. She holds on her dignity and manages to struggle, achieving success and winning the respect and identification of all those around her. We need to listen to the voices of women from different cultural backgrounds that are calling for culturally located response. This paper will deal with the two stated novels to locate their positions as illustrated by the two authors.