Sita ( A Poem) Nandini Sahu
Review by Dr Sutanuka Ghosh Roy
Paperback: 129 pages
Publisher: The Poetry Society of India
Language: English
ISBN: 978-93-83888-19-1
This book of poetry attempts to deconstruct the epic subject of the female stereotype. Epic is a predominantly masculine form of poetic utterance; history of literature as well as conventional literary theories would augment that presumption as well. An attempt has been made here to construct a similar exercise on the ancient epic that has in multiple ways ordained Indian systems of thought and gender relations. This text stands as a subversive deconstruction of the epic from the subject position of one subalterned by gender. Traversing a considerable space in literary time ( Ramayana age- contemporary time) the author, acclaimed poet and academician Prof Nandini Sahu chooses inter-semiotic modes for argument. The reviewer’s interest in this text primarily stems from the fact of Indianness of theme and the questioning of gender from a contemporary standpoint. The fact of vernacular and English as a medium of thought has further been analysed in the course of the poem. Sita transcends any temporal barriers to the metaphor of Rama rajya and questions subalternity inherent in stereotyping of gender, in a way that has always thwarted the process of evolution of the nation and its ‘civil’ society.
“Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.’’ (Helene Cixous: The Laugh of the Medusa). The urge to revisit these lines written in 1975 originally in French (and made available in English through the translation of Keith and Paula Cohen in 1976) which laid the basic roadmap for what came to be known as ‘Ecriture Feminine’ came from the very first glance at the ‘Preface’ to Sita (A Poem) by Nandini Sahu. At the very outset, Nandini categorically states that her long poem is not a re-telling of The Ramayana in any of its varied extant forms; it is, as she puts it, “penned as a poetic memoir of the heroine of the epic Sita, told in the first person narrative”. (Sahu: v) (Italics mine). The poet herself calls it a first person narrative; wherein she attempts not just a radical displacement of the focus of the long poem from patriarchal/chauvinistic social ethos, but catapults the text on a universal eco-feminist plane by proclaiming through it the ‘Sitaness’ of every woman. As she writes:
Call her what you may – Sita, Janaki,
Vaidehi, Ramaa – she is Woman
She is every woman, the propagated, interpolated role model. (Sahu: 1)
The twenty-first century Sita, as Nandini writes, is ‘truly animated to this living, present living’. Her belief in the power of the eco-feminist creed seeps through as she writes of Sita, whom she has called ‘the original eco-feminist’:
Come back she has
From the segments of Mother Earth, to live in me, in you,
in the mass consciousness of the universe. (Sahu: 1)
Instead of being a passive adherent to the deification that runs at the sub-textual level as a patriarchal ploy (and is the staple of most parent texts) to hem her consciousness of ‘incandescent strength’ (Canto XXV), the refrain of Sita as the woman (above and beyond a rarefied soul) being in love with her husband and expecting love in return is very eloquent. Ordinarily, for a woman in the public domain, such a professing of the personal would be unexpected, but as a careful perusal of the text will show, this is not the same as reverence for ‘Maryada Purusottam’ that pervades the epic. Rather it is the mark of Sita’s innate womanliness that Nandini designates as her ‘Sita-ness’. She is, by her own acclaim, unwavering and acquiescent, while being intensely aware of her enthralling nature. Thus Rama-rajya becomes a chauvinist’s utopia even as Sita’s narrative is pervasive with her knowledge of these failings on the part of her ‘protector’, and thereby the state.
Nandini identifies the vantage point that gives the hitherto subaltern character the voice of the protagonist, as the persona is contemporized:
I am speaking my words now, lying bereaved
on the lap of my mother, Vasundhara, the
Mother Earth, your memories are sinking
Deep within the mind’s courier. There a
Bride burning, here a girl child is
Doomed. Anon! a female foeticide there!
When I cannot see myself as different
From the concert of the entire womanhood… (Sahu: 12-13)
The ‘difference’ between Sita’s/Nandini’s ability to see through the fault lines of Rama, much of which may be the domain of masculinity studies, and her conscious choice of defining ‘dharma’ as the dutiful wife gives a whole new facet to her character. Thus while on the one hand she mentors herself to comprehend the ‘meaning of wifehood’ which primarily entails the fourteen years of exile and readies herself as the home-maker in dire straits, she simultaneously soliloquies on the injustice being meted out to Urmila, the docile wife of Lakshman who must now endure more than a yug of solitude that is killing, to say the least. The question Sita poses to Rama merits an answer, though there is none:
Where did your
unending compassion to values and duty
vanish in this agenda of pain for her? (Sahu: 15)
Sita (A Poem) conjoins upon women the resolute task of summoning courage in the face of the subversive social tag of blasphemy, to stand up for their own rights and protest its violation. For her part, Sita alias Nandini scripts ecriture feminine by baring her own voice which comes through abject nullification of over three hundred different versions of Ramayana, all of which wily nilly are narratives of the woman as subaltern. This explains the demystification of the epic language and the creation of a discourse that easily crisscrosses time and space. In the same vein the poet must be credited for being free of any undue feminist slant. Sita the champion of women’s rights is also her own critic when it comes to her obsession for the golden deer which is beyond what is ordained by Mother Nature.
The multi-dimensional vision of Sita with which she creates a female bonding that encompasses ‘tales of incredible exoneration and extraction’ is indeed praiseworthy. Just as the exiled queen of Ayodhya can look beyond her imminent doom and care for Urmila, so also a Sita liberated from the imprisonment of Ravana after victory to the vanara sena led by Rama cannot but feel for the widowhoods of Mandodari and Sulochana. At one level they are today what she would be in the days to come – victims of boundless male ego. Post the fall of Lanka, her status too changes from a doting wife expectant of her husband’s embrace to a political prisoner whom the next king must hand over to the victorious general who is only incidentally her husband. Rama becomes and behaves as an overlord who commands authority not by persuasion or force, but by converting the discourse of power into absolute authority and thereby defining (il)legitimacy anew. Hence Sita’s intervention here becomes pivotal in charting the course of her life and of the text henceforth:
Was Sita
unacceptable to you in her exilic raiment, a fount of raw energy that
she was? The purity-pollution debate – had it already started
in your mind? (Sahu: 68)
In stark contrast to her welcome in happier times as the imminent queen, under express orders from Rama, Sita is now allowed to be jeered by the mob as the now ‘unchaste’ woman comes to meet her husband in full public view. Thus the female body becomes the site for contestation between private-public spheres, as the husband who is royalty designate, ensures that denunciation of the woman who lived alone in another man’s house without any of her clan to protect her, must happen in the public domain. Within the span of a mere twelve lines, we have Rama saying:
“She was solely responsible for this war, this disaster.” (Sahu: 69)
Oppressive and patriarchal conceptual frameworks are characterized not only by value dualisms and hierarchies but also by “power-over” conceptions of power and relationships of domination (Warren1991b) and a logic of domination, i.e., a structure of argumentation that provides the moral premise that superiority justifies subordination (Warren 1987, 1990, this section). On this view, it is oppressive and patriarchal conceptual frameworks, and the behaviors that they give rise to, that sanction, maintain, and perpetuate the twin dominations of women and nature. Rama criticizes her in public,
You were born of unknown parenthood
Thus your purity was already half challenged
Now you have lost it all; you must not be chaste anymore. (Sahu: 70)
Yet to come to terms with this reversal from her lord, who by Hanuman’s account was deeply pained by the separation due to abduction, Sita in Canto XV is a silent presence who feels ‘nude, defenseless, with a grim cordon of fear’. If the reader can look upon the text as a plea for gender sensitization, then Rama’s protracted castigation of Sita would appear, not as the stripping of this woman who is virtue incarnate, but as a dramatic monologue that only strips the accuser of all vestiges of glory ever attributed to him. Nandini gives us an example of Rama’s intellectual and emotional disrobing of Sita who has considered him her destiny and destination. That way, this text stands the test of what Gordimer has privileged as ‘inward testimony’. The sociological implications of being noveau Sita in the Indian context that Madhu Kishwar writes in her survey based paper ‘Yes to Sita, No to Ram: The Continuing Popularity of Sita in India’ bears out the truth of such inward testimony. Nandini scripts the “sitayan”, with a deft hand.
Works Cited:
Cixous, Helene, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Signs, 1.4 (1976): 875-893. Web. Accessed on 22nd Sept. 2015.
Warren, Karen J. 1991a. Taking Empirical Data Seriously: An Ecofeminist Perspective on Woman-Nature Connections, Working Paper, presented at the North American Society for Social Philosophy (Colorado Springs, Colo.: August 10, 1991).
www.manushi-india.org/pdfs_issues/articles/Yes to Sita, No to Ram.pdf accessed on 25th Sept. 2015.
*****
BIO
Dr Sutanuka Ghosh Roy is Assistant Prof in Tarakeswar Degree College, The University of Burdwan, West Bengal. She is currently engaged in active research and her areas of interest include Eighteenth Century literature, Indian English literature, Canadian Studies, Post colonial Literature, Australian Studies, Dalit Literature, Gender Studies etc. She has published widely and presented papers at National and International Seminars. She is a regular contributor of research articles and papers to anthologies, national and international journals of repute.
