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SITA HAS NEVER been a particularly interesting female icon, especially to a city-bred generation that grew up with the alternately coy and weepy Deepika Chhikalia who was Ramanand Sagar’s version. The Mahabharata and its women, the strong-minded Kunti, the feisty Draupadi, have always seemed far more arresting, more complicated. But the Mahabharata was not “the book kept at home” – that privilege was (and is) accorded, as Namita Gokhale points out, to the Ramayana. The Sita trope recurs throughout Indian popular culture, from the pregnant Leela Chitnis thrown out of the house by a suspicious Prithviraj Kapoor in Awara to the heroines of Ekta Kapoor serials today. The submissive, self-sacrificing Sita we owe to Tulsidas became the nationalised version. “But Sita has been multifarious all along,” says Malashri Lal. “We just haven’t paid attention.” So she and Gokhale set out to reexamine Sita’s place in the Ramayana – and in our lives.

In Search of Sita forces the damsel-in-distress to jostle for space with the child strong enough to lift up the Bow of Shiva with one hand even as she swabbed a floor with the other. It places the model wife against (or alongside) the independent single mother. There’s an earthy Sita and an ethereal one; the lovelorn girl and the articulate spouse. Like the Bhojpuri women who sing their lives through her, we can all now have a Sita of our choosing.

IN SEARCH OF SITA: REVISITING MYTHOLOGY
Ed. Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal
Penguin / Yatra
270 pp; Rs 399