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Now, an animated `Sitayana'

Here is a woman who is creating the `Sitayana', the Ramayana from Sita's point of view, as an animation film. PRIYADARSSHINI SHARMA listens to this Western interpretation

The story of Rama, Ramayana, is told a hundred times in hundred different ways, with a hundred different interpretations. `Purushottam' Rama is the ideal man. And Sita, his virtuous wife, the ideal woman. But is that idealism in tune with the modern woman? Is Sita's humiliation, rejection and ultimate sacrifice something to be emulated?

Here comes Sita's life, all animated. Sitayana: `Sita Sings the Blues' is an animated feature in the making by American illustrator and animation artist, Nina Paley. The 72-minute film will be completed in 2008, she hopes. But this modern saga of Sita began in Thiruvanathpuram in 2002.

The Ramayana

"I moved to Thiruvananthapuram in June 2002, with my husband who got a job teaching and directing animation at Toonz.

I first encountered the Ramayana at his workplace, in the form of comic books. Initially I was fascinated and appalled: the story was bizarre and extremely misogynistic. I couldn't relate to any of the characters - Sita especially seemed weak and pathetic. Three months later when I flew to New York on a business trip, my husband dumped me by e-mail." On her own, she felt the pangs that Sita felt. She found herself thinking of Sita more and more.

Did it change Nina Paley's perception of Sita?

I came to love Sita for her courage and purity. Because, unlike me, she never fears her own heart. Sita never apologises for loving Rama, no matter what he does. Paradoxically, by loving Rama she defies him. In my experience, when men reject lovers, they usually want `no hard feelings' - in fact they want no feelings at all. But Sita has feelings, in spades. When Rama in Lanka tells her to run off with someone else, Sita doesn't say "OK, no hard feelings, seeya." Instead, she is unapologetically devastated and angry - she literally goes up in flames. My interpretation of Sita's `trial by fire' is that her purity of feeling spares her death. The flames are her pain, and by feeling them fully, instead of repressing, fighting, or ignoring them, she emerges unscathed. Is she hurting Rama by leaving him for good, or helping him by finally getting out of his hair? Is she delivering him from the shame of having a wife who (gasp!) `slept in another man's house,' or is she shaming him further by demonstrating her own purity, aided by the gods and Mother Earth herself? What a great story!"

It was in Thriuvanathpuram that she had first read the Ramayana in an Amar Chitra Katha comic form. That intrigued her, so she bought the C. Rajagopalchari version.

"It disappointingly omits the Uttara Kanda. Later, I found many more versions in the New York University library; that's where I accidentally came across the satirical `Ramayana Retold' by Aubrey Menon, which is banned in India. But the best, most authoritative Valmiki Ramayana in print is the Penguin India edition translated by Arshia Sattar. That's the one I refer to most often."

But you say Sita is not your role model?

"Sita is called the `ideal woman.' There's another meaning of `ideal' - the platonic ideal, the essence of a thing. In this sense, Sita is the essence of total romantic love, self-sacrifice, and suffering. She is everything my Western feminist values told me not to be. I wanted to be independent and tough; the idea of loving a man who rejected me was abhorrent. But I found myself loving a man who rejected me anyway. There's some primal element of the human heart that loves without reason, that can be mistreated and loves anyway, that seeks self-annihilation in the beloved or, failing that, in death. That is embodied by Sita, and through the Ramayana I learned not to condemn or reject it, but to regard it as divine. Reading and telling her story is cathartic."

How relevant is Sita's story now?

No matter how much progress men and women make in social equality, there will always be broken hearts. The dynamics of love and rejection are eternal. That's why, thousands of years and miles away from Valmiki, American blues and torch songs tell essentially the same story as Sita's.

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