The Hindus (40 page)

But he cannot bring her back. When Sita enters the earth, she leaves the king alone, without his queen. She abandons and implicitly blames him when she leaves him, turning this second ordeal (again she asks for a miraculous act to prove her complete fidelity to Rama) into a sacrifice as well as, this time, a permanent exit.

Sita’s two ordeals prove her purity, but they are also a supreme, defiant form of protest.
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Sita is no doormat. She does not hesitate to bully her husband when she thinks that he has made a serious mistake. When Rama tries to prevent her from coming to the forest with him, she says: “What could my father have had in mind when he married me to you, Rama, a woman in the body of a man? What are you afraid of? Don’t you believe that I am faithful to you? If you take me with you, I wouldn’t dream of looking at any man but you—I’m not like some women who do that sort of thing. But you’re like a procurer, Rama, handing me over to other people, though I came to you a virgin and have been faithful to you all this long time.” Rama then insists that he had said she couldn’t come with him only in order to test her (2.27.3-8, 26). Yeah, sure; she will hear that “testing” line again. Her assertion that Rama is confusing her with other, less faithful women is also one that we will hear again, for she repeats it years later, when Rama accuses her of having been intimate with Ravana.

When they first enter the forest, Sita asks Rama why he carries weapons in this peaceful place, especially when he has adopted the attire (and, presumably, the lifestyle and dharma) of an ascetic.
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Rama claims that he needs the weapons to protect her and all the other defenseless creatures in the forest. In an impassioned discourse against violence, Sita tells Rama that she fears he is by nature inclined to violence and that simply carrying the weapons will put wicked thoughts in his mind (3.8.1-29). (Indeed he kills many creatures in the forest, both ogres that deserve it and monkeys that do not. Even the ogress Shurpanakha echoes Sita’s concerns by querying Rama’s apparent commitment to the conflicting dharmas of asceticism and married life [3.16.11].)

Sita is not, however, just a woman; she is very much a goddess, though never as explicitly as Rama is a god. In contrast with Rama, whose divinity increases in the centuries
after
the Valmiki text, Sita was a goddess
before
Valmiki composed her story. Sita in the
Ramayana
is an ex-goddess, a human with traces of her former divinity that the story does not erase but largely ignores, whereas Rama is a god in the making, whose moral imperfections leave traces that future generations will scurry to erase. The two meet in passing, like people standing on adjacent escalators, Rama on the way up, Sita on the way down.

One Rig Vedic poem to the deity of the fields analogizes the furrow (which is what the word “Sita” means) to the earth cow who is milked of all foods (RV 4.57.6-7). When Rama weds Sita, he actually marries the earth, as the king always does; the goddess Earth is the consort of every king. But this time he also marries someone explicitly said to be the daughter of the Earth goddess. Sita’s birth, even more supernatural than Rama’s, is narrated several times.
³⁶
On one occasion, Sita’s father, King Janaka of Videha, tells it this way:

Rama is well aware of the story. Grieving after Sita has entered the earth, he says to Earth, “You are my own mother-in-law, since, once upon a time, King Janaka drew Sita out of you when he was plowing.” More particularly, Sita was born when Janaka was plowing the sacrificial arena, in preparation for the ceremony of royal consecration, and she goes back down to earth during Rama’s horse sacrifice; both her birth and her death are framed by sacrifices. Like Rama, Sita becomes incarnate as part of the divine plan to kill Ravana. Sita, not Rama, is primarily responsible for the death of Ravana. Ravana’s brother Vibhishana (who eventually abandons Ravana and fights on Rama’s side) tries in vain to persuade Ravana to give Sita back to Rama and finally says to Ravana, “Why did you bring here that great serpent in the form of Sita, her breasts its coils, her thoughts its poison, her sweet smile its sharp fangs, her five fingers its five hoods?”
³⁸
Shiva promises the gods that “a woman, Sita the slayer of ogres,” will be born, and that the gods will use her to destroy the ogres (6.82.34-37).

At the end of the
Ramayana
, when Sita keeps disappearing and reappearing in a series of epiphanies, she is scorned and insulted until she commits two acts of violence that prove both her purity and her divinity. In this pattern, she resembles a god, particularly Shiva, who vandalizes Daksha’s sacrifice when Daksha disdains to invite Shiva to it (MB 12.274). But Sita’s story more closely follows the pattern of equine Vedic goddesses like Saranyu and Urvashi: She comes from another world to a mortal king, bears him children (twins, like Saranyu’s), is mistreated by him, and leaves him forever, with only the twin children to console him. She can be set free from her life sentence on earth, her contract with a mortal man (Rama), only if he violates the contract by mistreating her.

Male succession is the whole point of the old myth of the equine goddess who comes down to earth to have human children, and female chastity is essential to that succession, another reason for the trials of Sita. Rama experiences the agonies of love in separation (
viraha
) that later characterized the longing for an otiose divinity; in this, as in so much of the plot, Rama is to Sita as a devotee is to a deity. His separation from Sita is also part of the divine plan to destroy Ravana: Long ago, in a battle of gods against antigods, the wife of the sage Bhrigu kept reviving the antigods as fast as the gods could kill them; Vishnu killed her, and Bhrigu cursed Vishnu, saying, “Because you killed a woman, you will be born in the world of men and live separated from your wife for many years (7.51).” So Rama has a previous conviction of abusing women even before he is born on earth. And as we will soon see, he has an even stronger track record for killing ogresses. Rama’s mistreatment of Sita creates a problem—the justification of Rama—that inspires later
Ramayanas
to contrive ingenious solutions.

Sita walks out on Rama in the end (as Urvashi does in the Veda but not in the Brahmanas), an extraordinary move for a Hindu wife. Moreover, unlike the paradigmatic good Hindu wife, Sita very definitely is
not
reunited with her husband in heaven. For while she goes down into the earth, returning to her mother, he goes (back) up to heaven when he dies years later, returning to Vishnu. Both of them revert to their divine status, but in opposite places. When Brahma is chastising Rama for doubting Sita, he reassures Rama that Sita is an incarnation of the goddess Lakshmi and will be reunited with him in heaven (6.105.25-26), but we never see that happen. Rama’s return to heaven as Vishnu is described in great detail, and the monkeys revert to their divine form, and everyone you’ve ever heard of is there to welcome him in heaven (including the ogres), but not Sita (7.100).

Yet the more Sita is a goddess, the more the pattern of the myth of equine goddesses requires her to be mistreated—as if she were nothing but a human woman. Like Urvashi, Sita is treated less like a goddess and more like a mortal as her husband takes over the position of the immortal in the couple. Her banishing is portrayed in entirely mortal terms, and she suffers as a mortal woman. Like Rama, she regards herself as a mortal and forgets her divinity; she says, when she is imprisoned on Lanka, “I must have committed some awful sin in a previous life to have such a cruel life now. I want to die but I can’t. A curse on being human, since one can’t die when one wants to (5.23.18-20).” Since she (wrongly) thinks she is a mortal, she thinks she cannot die, which goes against common sense; moreover, the ironic implication follows that if she were an immortal (as she is), she could die when she wanted to—precisely what she does in the end when she enters the earth. And just as Rama has to be mortal to kill Ravana, so Sita plays the mortality card in order to resist Ravana and hence to destroy him; Ravana’s ogress consorts remind her that she is a human woman, and she acknowledges this fact, incorporating it into her resistance: “A mortal woman cannot become the wife of an ogre (5.22.3, 5.23.3)” (a remark that could also be read as a warning against intercaste marriage).

Sita is subject to mortal desires and delusions and is vulnerable even though she is said to be invulnerable. For instance, Rama insists (when he claims that he knew all along that Sita was chaste and that he made her go through fire only to prove it to everyone else), “Ravana could not even think of raping Sita, for she was protected by her own energy (6.106.15-16).” Yet that very verb, meaning “to rape, violate, or assault,” is used when Ravana grabs Sita by the hair (3.50.9), a violation from which her chastity does not in fact protect her. When Ravana plots to capture Sita, he gets the ogre Maricha to take the form of a marvelous golden deer, thickly encrusted with precious jewels, which captivates Sita—the princess in exile is delighted to find that Tiffany’s has a branch in the forest—and inspires her to ask Rama to pursue it for her. Lakshmana rightly suspects that it is the ogre Maricha in disguise, and Rama agrees, but Sita insists that Rama get it for her. The deer leads Rama far away from Sita, and when Rama kills the deer and it assumes its true form as an ogre, Rama realizes that he has been tricked and has thereby lost Sita, whom Ravana (by taking the form of an ascetic and fooling Sita) has captured in Rama’s absence (3.40-44). So while Rama ultimately yields to the addiction of hunting, following the deer farther and farther than he knows he should, Sita falls for two illusions (the deer and the ascetic) that make her vulnerable to Ravana and, for many years, lost to Rama.

When Sita defends herself against accusations that she has broken her marriage vows, and earlier, when she scolds Rama in the forest, she explicitly contrasts herself with “some women” who behave badly, unnamed shadows who may include not only Kaikeyi and the hunchback woman but also, perhaps, the lascivious ogre women as well as mythological women like Ahalya, the archetypal adulteress, whose story the
Ramayana
tells not once but twice.
³⁹
The polarized images of women in the
Ramayana
led to another major split in Hinduism, for though the Brahmin imaginary made Sita the role model for Hindu women from this time forward, other Sanskrit texts as well as many vernacular versions of the
Ramayana
picked up on the shadow aspect of Sita, the passionate, sexual Sita,
⁴⁰
an aspect that is also embedded in this first text, only partially displaced onto other, explicitly demonic women. Yet the later Brahmin imaginary greatly played down Sita’s dark, deadly aspect and edited out her weaknesses to make her the perfect wife, totally subservient to her husband. How different the lives of actual women in India would have been had Sita as she is actually portrayed in Valmiki’s
Ramayana
(and in some other retellings) been their official role model. The Valmiki
Ramayana
thus sowed the seeds both for the oppression of women in the dharma-shastric tradition and for the resistance against that oppression in other Hindu traditions.

Rama’s nightmare is that Sita will be unchaste, and the sexually voracious ogresses that lurk inside every Good Woman in the
Ramayana
express that nightmare. In a later retelling, the
Bala-Ramayana
, the ogress Shurpanakha takes the form of Kaikeyi, and another ogre takes the form of Dasharatha, and
they
banish Rama; Dasharatha and Kaikeyi have nothing to do with it at all! The entire problem has been projected onto ogres, and the humans remain pure as the driven snow. In Valmiki’s text, however, Kaikeyi and Sita still have their inner ogresses within them, expressed as the natural forces that prevent women from realizing the ideal embodied in the idealized Sita. The portrayals of rapacious ogresses hidden inside apparently good women make us see why it was that Sita’s chastity became a banner at this time while the other aspects of her character were played down; they help us understand why women came to be repressed so virulently in subsequent centuries: to keep those ogresses shackled.

There are three particularly threatening ogresses in the
Ramayana
. Rama kills the ogress Tataka (1.25.1-14), after a sage reminds him of the mythological precedents for killing a woman (1.24.11-19). Lakshmana cuts off the nose and breasts and ears of Ayomukhi (“Iron Mouth”) after she suggests to him, “Let’s make love (3.65.7),” and he cuts off the nose and ears of Shurpanakha when she similarly propositions Rama (3.16-17).
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This multilation is the traditional punishment that the dharma texts prescribe for a promiscuous woman, an adulteress.

The mutilation of Shurpanakha is the only assault against a woman that has serious consequences for Rama, because she is Ravana’s sister. When she attempts to seduce Rama, he teases her cruelly: “I am already married and couldn’t stand the rivalry between co-wives. But Lakshmana is chaste, full of vigor, and has not yet experienced the joys of a wife’s company; he needs a consort. You can enjoy him and you won’t have any rival (3.17.1-5).” That’s when Lakshmana cuts off her nose.
^eo
She flees in agony and humiliation and tells Ravana about Sita, praising her beauty and thus triggering the war, for Ravana takes the bait (Sita) as the gods intended from the start. Shurpanakha’s attempt to replace Sita in Rama’s bed, which Rama and Lakshmana mock, exposes a deep resemblance between the two women and a deep ambiguity in the text’s attitude to Sita’s sexuality. On the one hand, Sita is the epitome of female chastity. On the other hand, she is, like Shurpanakha, a highly sexual woman,
⁴¹
a quality that may explain not only why Ravana desires her but also why he is able to carry her off.