Here’s a confession: Never did I ever think that I’ll find a
place in Sita’s tale. I was so mesmerised that it felt as if Sita had stepped
out of the pages of The Forest of
Enchantments (2019) to sing Sitayan to me. I didn’t think much of Sita
until three years ago when I read Volga’s The
Liberation of Sita (2016), translated from Telugu to English by T Vijay
Kumar and C Vijayasree. I had compelled a few of my friends to read The Liberation of Sita so that I could
talk about female companionship. We had then realised that we had spent many
evenings on Whatsapp talking about Ahalya but never really saw her as a
significant part of the Ramayana, and hence the book made the silences in the
epic visible to our young eyes. Beyond
that, we were taken by disbelief that someone could imagine Surpanakha and Sita
coming together to have a dialogue, the ‘other woman’ and the ‘wife’. It was no
longer about the epic as we knew it.
As I mentioned above, I didn’t think much of Sita. Draupadi is a
character to look up to for the angry young feminists as the one who
questioned aloud. However, in the span of a year, I have come to realise that
silence can be a loud rebellion. The virtual mob on online social media
platforms bashes Sita for her silence and applauds Draupadi for her anger. It
takes a while to understand that these women need not be put against each other
for us to validate our struggle against patriarchy.
As I put the jacket on the book, I decided to place Chitra
Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Forest of
Enchantments in the shelf that I have assigned to books I like. It
is easy for me to openly meditate on death and share it in my circle, it’s difficult
to share my meditation on love. Somehow love has ended up in pages of life that
are not to be bothered with and ‘fun’ is how life should be. The Forest of Enchantments retells The
Ramayana as a tragic love story with Sita as its narrator, unexpectedly
validating my meditation on love.
In the beginning I assumed it would be a tale defending Ram’s
actions. It turned out to be an explanation or justification of Sita’s choices. Mid-way through
the tale, I was saddened by the idea that Sita’s story is told as a response to the accusations on her character in the epic by the people who
came after her. There was a pang in my chest that asked, How different are we,
the modern readers, from Ram – wanting proof for Sita’s chastity/story? Aren’t
our accusations on Sita giving in to oppression with her silence similar to the
Agnipariksha? Sita cannot tell her story as a discovery of her identity, her
role in the bigger picture of humanity. She has to tell her story as a woman
looking back at her life who endured what she had to till she knew better.
All the way back, I pondered the
word endure, what it meant. It didn’t
mean giving in. It didn’t mean being weak or accepting injustice. It meant
taking the challenges thrown at us and dealing with them as intelligently as we
knew until we grew stronger than them. (322)
I was hooked to the tale for the lessons on love that Sita
learnt in her life. I’d like to think that there’d come a day when we would be
able to stop ourselves from getting involved when we see red flags (as we now
call it) in a person. I cannot help but accept that we have shushed the doubts
and conflicts in our heads in the name of love, at one point or another. For every, ‘How could I?’, ‘Why
was I silent?’, love and fear become excuses that aren’t theoretically acceptable but are practically
too common – things we would like to change.
I blamed love, too, for my silence.
How it makes us back down from protesting because we are afraid of displeasing
the beloved or because we are afraid that our disagreement is a symptom of a
greater disease: incompatibility of values. (151)
It was also interesting to read how Sita assumed that she
could make Ram see her ways of looking at life and the world. Divakaruni,
beautifully, paints a picture of unseen female existence - how being good at domestic affairs remains on
perhaps the second position for Ram in the hierarchy of roles of men and women. Somehow the excellence at domestic work cannot make a man see a woman as
his equal, it can be appreciated and respected but cannot be seen equivalent to
worldly affairs that men handle.
What I’d taken as admiration all
these years had really been a kind of indulgence, the way one might praise a
child for her childish achievements. The womanly skills I’d mastered were
important and intricate, and by no means easy. They required deep intelligence,
an intelligence of the heart. But Ram didn’t understand that. He didn’t
understand the complexity of female existence.
Earlier, I’d have believed that I
had the ability to alter that, to make him see the world in a different way. But
my year in captivity had taught me much. I knew now that love—no matter how
deep—wasn’t
enough to transform another person: how they thought, what they believed in. At
best, we could only change ourselves. (257)
Divakruni also talks about the rage and forgiveness that
accompanies love – “Forgiveness is more difficult when love is involved" (251). As I turned the pages, my newfound belief of ‘silence becoming a loud rebellion’
was validated too, although it might be misinterpreted or remain unseen by most.
Finally she [Ahalya] put her hand
in his [Gautam’s]. But she didn’t smile, and she didn’t look at him. Was it
then she made the decision that she’d punish him the rest of her life by never
speaking to him again, so he’d always remember what he’d done? They receded
into mist, leaving me with another lesson: once mistrust has wounded it
mortally, love can’t be fully healed. (136)
The story unfolds in a first person narration which uses
many tools to tell that which takes place in Sita’s absence – dreams, visions,
and conversations that take place long after the events had taken place. Sita,
in her Sitayan, gives visibility to the other women of the epic – Urmila,
Mandodari, Ahalya, Surpanakha, Kaikeyi. As much as I wish to hear Manthara’s
story, I don’t think it would be considered significant enough for it has no
struggle to balance the moral compass. Yet, I often wonder can social rejection
and body shaming fill one with such resentment that it surfaces itself with
hatred that’s not aimed at anyone in particular but everyone in general? Wasn’t
Ram’s banishment a punishment to the society that had never seen Manthara as a
human?
One of the most surprising moments in reading the story was when I
found myself in description of Lakshman’s state of being during the return journey
to Ayodhya. “Perhaps, like some soldiers, Lakshman had a hard time letting go
of the dangers he’d suffered. Such individuals, I’d heard, were unable to
relax. They had trouble sleeping and often awoke in the middle of the night
screaming and flailing out at whoever was close.” (259)
I have read a few reviews that say that The Forest of Enchantments isn’t as good as Divakaruni's The Palace of Illusions (2008). My memory of reading the latter
tells me that it was a fast-paced story. It was driven by a secret love between
Draupadi and Karna. Sita’s story is however written after the events have taken
place, not while they are happening. It isn’t just about the conflicts, as was
in case of Draupadi, but also about what is inferred from them. In simpler words,
The Palace of Illusions is the chase
before a relationship begins while The Forest
of Enchantments is a relationship that has reached its maturity. Their beauty is best seen without comparing them with one another, for comparison leads only to dissatisfaction and a longing for something that might not be as pleasurable now as it once was.
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