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Nina Paley’s wonderfully visualized movie “Sita Sings the Blues” brings home the deep rooted bias most women have against Sita. “Sita Sings” is a beautiful movie. The illustrations are stunning, and the music! Oh the music is to die for. And yet, the movie, like most other medias, undersells Sita. It depicts Sita as a lovelorn, naïve, clingy person who cannot stand up for herself and revels in the injustices Ram heaps on her. Ram is the jerk, Sita the feminine pushover.

The movie frustrated me (for those interested, you can watch the entire movie on youtube and the quality is excellent) because I expected more understanding from an artist of Paley’s caliber. I have always thought of Sita as a staunch feminist, one who has been misinterpreted and misrepresented for so many generations we can no longer see her for the independent woman she was.

From what is popularly known about Sita, Sita is learned, rich, physically strong – she could lift the shiva-dhanush with her left hand, beloved of her parents – yes, this too is important, too many women find independence difficult because their parents did not love them as much as they loved their sons. She marries a valiant and powerful prince, one who must prove his worth before he can be wedded to her, and she is loyal and loving towards the man she marries. When her husband leaves for the forest she follows him as an equal, capable of handling the challenges her husband would face during exile. Through it all, she remains a trusting person. She trusts her husband, she trusts the forest around her, harsh as it might have been, she trusts the vows of marriage and the bonds of love. She trusts, and she is betrayed. She is abducted by Ravana and held captive, but the abduction is not a betrayal, it is an incident that takes place and during the period of captivity she continues to trust Ram and probably interprets the abduction as one of the many challenges she and her partner were facing together. Upon rescue, she does not demand an agni pariksha of Ram. We know that during Sita’s absence Ram was pursued by other women, Supranakha for one, but Sita does not doubt or question Ram’s fidelity. She does not wonder what Ram had been up to while she was away. She does not ask him to prove his purity. What she does instead is prove her own.

I see Sita enter the fires of the agni pariksha as a different person, and emerge from it differently, and I see Ram’s demand for the agni pariksha as the strongest betrayal she faces.

Everything after the agni pariksha is shoddy and ugly. Sita is more and more alone in the world thereafter. After the washerman incident, Ram asks her to leave the palace. Laxman takes Sita to the jungles and does not return to look into her affairs again. The supremely loyal and faithful Hanuman is no longer in the picture. She is by herself, at the mercy of the elements and the strangers she meets there, and she is pregnant. When she goes into her exile her partner does not follow. Her challenges are hers alone, and she deals with them masterfully. She never returns to the palace again. She gives birth to twins and raises the boys single handedly, doing such an excellent job as a single mother that her sons become capable of winning wars and ruling kingdoms. It’s marvelous to think of all she must have had within her, her skills, her knowledge, her self-esteem, her fierceness, all the things concerning her that are never talked about.
When Ram, harrowed by guilt, loneliness, and a sense of injustice asks Sita to forgive and to return, Sita is not willing to forget. She will not return to Ram. She would rather die, and Sita’s final act is terrifying in its dignity. I wonder sometimes what she must have done, how she killed herself. It seems like she threw herself into a gorge, or off a cliff, into mother-earth. But perhaps, she walked back into the thick forest and never emerged. Perhaps she simply said no. Perhaps she said to her sons, choose, and they chose and she left. She is one of those proud people who are heart wrenching in their solitude.

I love her deeply, but I don’t want to worship her. Not because she is not worth the worship but because the centuries have distorted her image so savagely, made her so weak, simplified her to an equation that always adds up to Ram. The centuries have used Sita to weaken women in general and provide license to men. Sita and Ram are the first couples to have gotten a divorce and it is because Sita did not grovel to return to her marriage that we have hammered her down so systematically. What a contrast Sita is to Sati, who dies too, but to protect her husband’s honor. Sati is hailed as a woman of immense courage and love, one who made such an impact women were forced to burn on their husband’s pyre. Then there is Sita, who dies to protect her own, but we don’t discuss that, do we?