Anamika’s novel Sita’s Veil (तृन धरि ओट) retells Ramayana (covered earlier) from Sita’s perspective. Anamika’s father, Professor S. N. P. Kishore, died while writing an epic poem about Sita, and she took up his unfinished work in memory of both her parents. Her Sita also grows out of her mother’s versions of the folk Ramayans, and out of Mithila, the region that claims Sita as its daughter.
Every autumn, North India relives the night Ayodhya lit its lamps for Ram. He had spent fourteen years in exile and fought a war in Lanka to recover his wife. The city filled its streets with oil and wick to light his way home. Sita walked beside him on that road, yet the festival gives her almost nothing to say. Her story continues in the Uttara Kanda, the last book of Valmiki’s Ramayan, after the lamps have gone out. The people of Ayodhya begin to whisper about the months she spent as Ravan’s captive, and Ram, anxious for his name as king, sends her back into the forest while she is carrying his children.
Diwali remembers the homecoming and saves the second exile for another season. That’s where Anamika’s novel begins.
The title comes from Tulsidas, whose sixteenth-century “Ramcharitmanas” gave Hindi-speaking India its household Ramayan. In the Sundar Kand, Ravan comes to the grove where he holds Sita captive and presses her to yield. She answers him with a blade of grass held up between them. “तृन धरि ओट कहति बैदेही,” Tulsidas writes, which means that Vaidehi speaks with a blade of grass as her screen. Generations of readers have taken the gesture as modesty, a married woman declining to face a strange man directly.
Anamika and her translator, Nishtha Gautam, read the gesture the other way round. In Gautam’s note the grass shields Ravan from Sita, who holds the power to nurture and the power to destroy, and it reminds him that he can keep her captive without ever reaching her. Sita, she writes, grows like grass and wears down the pride of “monumental masculinity.” The image comes naturally to a poet who named one of her collections “Doob-Dhan,” after the grass and rice of household blessings. In most accounts of Indian womanhood, a veil hides a woman from the world. Sita’s veil keeps its most powerful king at a distance of her choosing.
The book borrows the Ramayan’s architecture and fills it with another voice. It runs to three volumes divided into seven kaands. The first volume, “Secret Correspondence,” is a book of letters between Sita and Ram and between Sita and her sons, Luv and Kush. Valmiki, the sage who shelters her in his hermitage, urges her to write so that her voice can stand level with her husband’s. The middle volume, “Sitayan,” moves through the familiar episodes from her childhood in Mithila to the war in Lanka, though its attention keeps drifting from the battlefield to the inner lives of women and the textures of daily life. “Uttarayan,” the last volume, follows her after Ayodhya and ends with her return to the earth that bore her.
Gautam’s English keeps the original’s many tongues in view. Sita goes by Vandevi, Janaki and Siya, and the prose moves among Hindi, Maithili and Sanskrit in a way that reminds the reader how many communities have claimed her. At Jaipur, Gautam said that if Anamika comes from Sita’s land, she herself comes from Radha’s, and that the book needed its shringar, its adornment, because readers forget that Sita was a lover first.
Anamika’s Sita begins as a foundling, turned up from a furrow by King Janak’s plough, and she reads that origin as a release from caste. She chooses the forest when Ram is exiled, and the book lets her own the choice. Her failings are her own too. Compassion and a hunger for beauty draw her towards the golden deer that Ravan sends as bait, and Anamika treats the wish as a real flaw with real consequences. The book asks us to understand the abduction as abuse and Sita as its survivor, a frame that makes the later trial by fire harder to accept as a test of virtue.
After Ayodhya she becomes a scholar and a single mother who runs a school in the forest. Her pupils include her sons and the children of Adivasi and Rakshasa families. She sees education as the way out of cycles of revenge, and she understands Ram Rajya, the ideal kingdom, as a pursuit that has to keep changing as its people learn. “I’ve never followed anyone blindly, not even Rama,” she says, in a sentence that carries the whole character. The washerwoman who doubts Sita’s chastity still appears, and Anamika gives the crisis an unfamiliar turn when Ram, uncertain of his own moral fitness, announces that he will step down from the throne. Women whom the epic kept at its margins return with voices of their own, among them Sunayana, Sita’s mother, and Mandodari, Ravan’s queen.
Anamika calls the book’s politics an integrated feminism, or deshaj feminism, a feminism grown from local soil. It treats men as capable of change and invites them to become feminists themselves. Her Sita spends much of her energy freeing men from the hyper-masculinity their societies demand of them. In her author’s note Anamika laments that faith and Marxism alike have slid from dialogue into one-upmanship, and her publishers present the book as an answer to the political weaponising of the Ramayan.
At Jaipur, Anamika said she had modelled this Sita on women who fight for their rights. If men looked at the world through a mother’s eyes, she argued, they would feel less need to fight one another. Gautam described a moment in which Sita tells Ravan that she has spent her life teaching Ram to treat her as an equal and has no energy left to teach him. Anamika also resists giving the story a tidy, on-demand ending, which leaves readers room to argue with her. Gautam turned that argument back on the audience. “Is that a lens or a veil that we are imposing on her?” she asked.
Sita has been talking back for a long time. In sixteenth-century Bengal the poet Chandrabati composed a Ramayan centred on Sita’s sorrows, a rare premodern telling by a woman, and left it unfinished. The Telugu writer Volga imagined Sita finding a life of her own beyond Ram in “The Liberation of Sita,” and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni handed her the narration in “The Forest of Enchantments.” Amish Tripathi recast her as a warrior princess of Mithila, while Tilottoma Misra’s “Sita’s Voice in the Assamese Ramayana” presents a rebellious, angry Sita who challenges Ram’s definition of a wife’s dharma. A. K. Ramanujan made the multiplicity itself his subject in the essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” and Delhi University’s decision in 2011 to drop it from a syllabus showed how much that multiplicity can still unsettle people. Anamika enters this crowded company with a particular temperament. Her Sita argues without contempt, and she expects the men around her to grow.
A Sita who carries learning into the forest belongs to a long and uncomfortable tradition of benevolent instruction, and a feminism built on motherhood risks narrowing the women it means to free. Anamika’s wager is that the forest school can become a place where the teacher also learns, and each reader has to decide whether the final volume earns that turn.
In Valmiki’s telling, Sita’s life ends with a second test. Summoned back to Ram’s court to swear her purity before the assembled kingdom, she calls on her mother, the Earth, to receive her if she has been faithful, and the ground opens. Anamika keeps the return to the earth, and her book closes in a faith that the universe will find its own balance.
The lamps lit at Diwali are made of that same earth. Each diya is a pinch of clay shaped by hand, filled with oil and set out to guide someone home. As the wicks catch this year, it seems right to remember the woman who walked into Ayodhya beside the prince and later walked back into the ground. Anamika’s Sita asks the festival for attention and little else. She has kept her blade of grass between herself and power for more than four centuries of telling, and she is still speaking from behind it.
