Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

used to babysit the family’s three- or
four-year-old boy. I once narrated the
Ramayana to the child when I put
him to sleep. His mother came and
asked me the next morning if I had
told him a horror story. I told her I
hadn’t. She told me, “But you told him
about a ten-headed demon. He had
nightmares.” I replied, “I only told him
the Ramayana, our epic. The tenheaded
demon is Ravana. He is a nice
person.”
While the ten-headed Ravana is
casually accepted by children when the
Ramayana is narrated, there are also
other elements in the narration which
we don’t question as children. The
narrations glorify Rama and present
him as an exemplary man, a
superhuman. But there is a silence
about Sita. Apart from her being
found as a child in the field and being
named Sita (the furrow) and the Sita
swayamvar when she marries Rama,
there is nothing more to Sita as a
person in the narration. She was
Rama’s wife and she followed him and
she had told him, “Wherever you are,
that is my Ayodhya.” What was
emphasised was that Sita was a chaste
woman.
The agni pariksha where Sita had to
enter the fire to prove her chastity was
Imagining Rama – C.S. Lakshmi
always glossed over in these
narrations. The Uttara-kanda where
Sita is banished to the forest and
becomes the mother of Lava and
Kusha was almost never part of the
narrations. A few stories of Lava and
Kusha were narrated now and then.
The climax of Sita entering the earth
became incidental; Rama was the one
who was glorified in the narrations.
But at times, some folk elements used
to be added.
In one such narration there is a
beautiful story about Sita. She is the
daughter of a tribal chieftain. There is
a bow in the family which is kept in
one corner of the house. It is Sita’s job
to smear cow dung on the floor and
one day as she is doing it she lifts the
bow effortlessly and then places it
back. Her mother sees it and tells the
father how their daughter had lifted a
bow which could not be lifted by
anyone. Apart from this there was a
silence about Sita. Chastity was the
only thing one associated with her.
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