The Unforgettable Desire

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. Dr...

I find men discussing the position of women and their dignity and honour in society quite amusing because I am not sure if honour and dignity have been defined or conceptualized from the point of view of women. In my head these terms have nothing to do with a woman, they belong to and in a man’s world or dictionary. Yet, innumerable discussions focus on women’s dignity and honour. What do these words mean? Thanks to my grandmother watching programs, with volume level higher than usual, on an Odia channel ‘Prarthana TV’ since six in the evening I overheard a discussion on Sita’s Agnipariksha (in a show named  Tarka Bahu Dura ). I was intrigued. Three men were discussing an issue that had a woman at its centre – one of the men being the host. The two other men appeared to have opposing views on the matter. However, these opposing views centred on the credibility of Ram being ‘Maryada Purushottam’.  What caught my attention was the idea of a ‘Chhaya’ (shadow) or ‘Maya’...