My mother's name is Sati. It is, of course, not a name that she would have given to herself. But a name being one of the many matters that parents impose on their children, she learned to accept it, at first grudgingly and later graciously. It is a name that often got her children in trouble: in history class, when teachers would condemn the practice of a widow jumping into her husband's funeral pyre, her son would find it difficult to write an answer condemning sati. Her daughter, meanwhile, would inevitably misspell her name – it is now a part of family folklore that, as a child, I would always write Sita for Sati.
Growing up should have helped to clear the distance between the two names, but marriage, and the noise of its symbolism, ensured that I continued to languor in the lazy substitutability of 'Sita' and 'Sati'. There could be no better cheerleader for that cruel totem of self-sacrifice than Lord Ram's wife – virtuous, innocent, giving – she who sacrificed her youth, comfort and even her dignity for a cruel and foolish husband. Reading this fine new anthology of essays, fiction and art was therefore a double delight: first, to discover a history of reception about a cult figure is an adventure in itself; and, second, to clarify, if only for the lapses of one's childhood spelling error, how the bold and courageous Sita has, over centuries of misinterpretation and angular storytelling, come to be seen as the quintessential doormat.
"Gandhiji saw Sita as a symbol for woman's struggle in a man's world precisely because her chastity holds off Ravana," writes the eminent British economist Meghnad Desai in the opening "Commentary". And while the next few wonderful essays – Reba Som's "Chitrangada not Sita", Malashri Lal's "Sita: Naming, purity and protest", Ranga Rao's "R. K. Narayan's Ramayana", Karen Gabriel's "Draupadi's Moment in Sita's Syntax" – moved through a space of interrogation about the reception of the cult figure, it was obvious that the 'father of the Indian nation', who himself devised, played and supposedly won his battles with chastity, could not have thought of Sita otherwise.
There are two particularly interesting features in this anthology. The first is the section "In Dialogue", which collects seven remarkable conversations on the subject. As such, co-editors Malashri Lal and Namita Gokhale talk about "Sita's Voice"; Sonal Mansingh, Indira Goswami, Madhu Kishwar, Nilimma Devi and Madhureeta Anand offer their differing takes on Sita; and, rounding it out, is Nina Paley, the creator of the tragic-comic animated Sita Sings the Blues. The other interesting feature is Aman Nath's collection and commentary on "Sita in Victorian Indian Prints". Nath takes us through the evolutionary trajectory of Sita as nayika, the beautiful young heroine, to the Raja Ravi Varma-endorsed mould for the "pan-Indian, head covered, sari-clad woman"; parallel to this is the shift in background from the exilic life in the forest to her life in Ravan's Ashok-vatika, and how this likewise marked a shift in the "academic modeling" of portrait paintings. For instance, it is interesting to see Sita feeding pigeons and deer in one slide, and then sitting like a model in a government art college in the next. But perhaps most fascinating is Sita's portrayal as ardhanarishwara, or Shiva as both man and woman, which in spite of all its loaded symbolism cannot fail to make one laugh – Sita sitting on a throne, her man's chest half covered, her half-moustache flaunted like a powerful weapon.