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Retelling Ramayana through Sita, the Dalit women of Karnataka, finds courage and soliditary with Sita, who does not live as a story with them, but as beloved family member.
The story of Ramayana, engraved indelibly in our minds since childhood, involves Rama, the epitome of manhood, and Sita as the very apostle of silent devotion and unwavering virtue. Growing older, all of us at some point of time or the other, have contemplated the many Ramayanas, many Ramas and many Sitas- the ancient mythology acting as putty in the hands of story-tellers, historians and cultural commentators.
Re-viewing and resuscitating Sita, among a host of other marginal female characters in the Ramayana, has been a delicious pre-occupation for many a woman questioning the traditional memorialisation of the suffering Queen.
Adding to the constant attempts at empowering Sita in cultural memory, is Dalit activist Du Saraswati’s recent production staged in Bangalore, re-visiting Sita through the oral narratives of Dalit women in the villages of Karnataka.
The play opens with a domestic, yet opinionated, Dalit woman Sanntimmi (ironically meaning “little girl”), who narrates the story of Sita as remembered and re-told by women of her community. This is not the story centred around the dutiful Rama, but his exemplary wife Sita, whose voice and thoughts are given primacy, with the delicious flavour of the local and rural.
What is interesting here is not just the feminist perspective on Sita, but the Dalit feminist point of view. It is with Sita that the Dalit women feel most affinity with. Their sufferings are mirrored in her’s. The Dalits and Adivasis, with their close physical relationship with the earth- sowing, reaping, nurturing- feel one with Sita, the daughter of the Earth. Sita’s is a life marked with physical labour, emotional exploitation and hardly any gratitude. The parallel with the life of the Dalit woman, doubly-suppressed on the basis of caste and gender, is therefore unmistakable.
In Santimmi’s story of Sita, Ramayana is not a revered story of glorious kings, but the story of a woman, scorned and disrespected
In Santimmi’s story of Sita, Ramayana is not a revered story of glorious kings, but the story of a woman, scorned and disrespected. Ramayana, the sacrosanct text syndicated in the collective communal memory, mostly from the upper caste Hindu tradition, is now infused with deeper meaning by Santimmi, with her mischievous irreverence towards conventional patriarchs who waged war more for their manly pride than anything else. She alternates between poking fun at the kings, scolding them as if they were puerile schoolboys and hurling the choicest expletives at their shortcomings.
In the end, Santimmi signs off without killing Sita in the end. For the Dalit women in rural Karnataka, Sita is not just a household name, but almost like a beloved member of the household. She lives on as an example of dignified labour, and suffering sans histrionics, her story re-told with relish, with a sense of familial pride and recognition.
Image via Wikipedia
Dabbling with many loves- literature and social development, quiet reading and loud activism, black coffee and pink scarves, a sleek new Mac and some musty Paperbacks. Always up for a good conversation, can be reached read more...
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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