Sita,
I shall not weep for you
l have no compassion for you
I believe
You are the cause
Of all our endless pain
Your chastity,
Your insistence on a one-man relationship,
Your jumping into the fire,
Your final disappearance into the bowels of earth
Your guardian Valmiki’s poem
Ramayana –
All these were foolish, thoughtless acts
To perpetuate an image
Only, the image has grown
Bigger than the imagee
A false image, a pernicious image
Your calculations were all wrong
You loved Rama
Followed him to the forest
Suddenly, you turned acquisitive
Desired to own the Golden Deer
Sent Rama to capture it
Blamed Lakshmana who tried to protect you
Playing with fire seems to be your favourite game
Couldn’t recognise Ravana in the guise of
An impostor
Finally,
You arrived in this Asoka bower
Your prison and pyre to
Prove chastity (to whom?)
Rama’s messenger came,
Hanuman,
He who shows respect to Rama
By covering his mouth.
Ready, to carry out all his dictates
You believed him too
Accepting Rama’s ring as an act of faith
You handed over your decorative hairpin to him
Then came the period of waiting,
Waiting for Rama to make his heroic appearance
To redeem you, smacking your lips in anticipation,
You foolish woman,
Will your brain ever be cleared of cobwebs
Rama came, with his monkey band
War, terrible war
Many people killed
Ravana, Kumbakarna, Indrajit
And many other brave warriors,
Didn’t you hear their widows’ heartrending wails
Did you, for a moment, think
That you can build your Ramarajya
Over the burnt ashes of Lanka,
Ignoring the widows’ wails
Well, you wire proven wrong
Your beloved,
Your darling,
Your living God,
The great Sreerama.
Told you
In public, in front of a big crowd
That had gathered to cheer him
As a victor
“Sita, you are impure, defield
I do not want you”
Like an insulted Sati,
You ordered for a fire to be prepared
And jumped Into it
But, you weren’t burnt to ashes
After all, you are Sita, not an ordinary woman
Even the fire cannot touch you
Did it occur to you that even Fire, the purifier
A male symbol and weapon of annihilation
Was rejecting you as an outcaste?
You came back as “pure” Sita,
At least, that’s what they told you
Gold, shining ten times more,
All impurities removed
Damn you. woman, you
And your unshakeable faith
Ram took you back
You went back to Ayodhya
As his wife. as his queen
All insults forgotten
In the melee of the coronation
Bat, for how long did the facade last
A common washerman spoke ill of you
Cast aspersions on your chastity
That was all he, Rama needed
To abandon you in a forest
A pregnant woman, the mother of his children
This time, he didn’t consult you
He just asked his brother to do the dirty job
Two washermen,
One who washed away the dirt from clothes
And the other, an expert
In detecting and cleaning
Character Impurities
They decided your fate,
No court, no defense
An arbitrary, patriarchal decision
Afterwards, Rama performed the horse sacrifice
To prove his kingly might
This time he called you back
Or was asked to call you back
Maybe, to fulfil the ritual wifely obligations,
Eventually, he settled down
With a golden replica of you near him
Even gold melts when fire is applied
But the hard hearted Rama
Sought solace in kingly justice
You were called to the court
To once again publicly declare your purity
This was too much even for you
You cried out to your mother,
The Earth Mother, seeking protection
She came, after all she is a mother
Then you disappeared into the depths of the Earth
That marks the end of your story
Later,
Those who threw you Into the blazing fire
Or exiled to the forest, a prey for wild animals
Declared
That you are one of the five
Celebrated‘ virgins
Uttering your name, they said would pave the way.
For salvation from sins
What cruel propaganda,
You, a failure of a woman painted
As a role model
Today you are a respectable woman
Not a mere victim
Because, even after all that happened
The inequities, the injustices
You did not protest
Not for yourself,
But for the clan of women,
The future of womanhood
Instead, you escaped and hid in your mother’s womb
If that was silent protest,
It was just puerile
All you did was, kept your image
As a traditional, unprotesting, submissive
Wife
The world forgave you
Restored you as the ideal of womanhood
Punished in life for lack of chastity
Deified in death for purity
What is truth, what is fiction,
Even today,
ln the name of Sati and you
How many women, my people
Jump into the fire and get burnt
Just to preserve the idea of chastity
How can you see all that
Sleeping in comfort
On the breasts of your mother!
What a fate you have left for us, women
Sita,
On the one hand admonitions and
Exhortations to be chaste
Forgetting all other loves.
On the other, suspicion, recrimination
Punishment even if you remain chaste
We always live for a public image
Not for ourselves
Another drama goes on side by side,
There are people who fight for Ayodhya,
For Rama, the impeccable,
Those who gain peace and comfort
Uttering the name of Rama
Sita,
No one remembers you
People see you as a symbol
Of Rama’s one-wife policy
We are the ones who suffer the consequences
Of your lack of backbone
Sita,
I have no compassion for you,
Not even respect
Your name of your husband Rama’s name,
The name of your story, Ramayana
It is not enough to rewrite them,
Enough of intellectual garbage,
Enough of interpretations,
Seeking “Sakthi” in “Yukthi”
The whole memory has to be wiped out
Not a temporary amnesia
But, an all-engulfing Pralaya
To start afresh on a clean slate
Then, and then only can we
Women of Bharata’s domain, get our release
Then alone can we be ourselves
Woman with no baggage of the past
Translated by the author from Malayalam
