Sita

On the soil of Lanka a pyre is burning. Ravana is dead, the war is won, and the woman for whom a bridge was flung across the ocean walks toward the fire with her own lord’s harsh words still in her ears. There is no lament and no question. In sarga 116 of Valmiki’s Yuddha Kanda she bows to the gods and the Brahmins, joins her hands, and says to the flames, “As my heart never turns from Rama, so let the fire, the witness of the world, guard me on every side.” She walks once around the blaze and steps into it with a mind free of all doubt. Rakshasas and vanaras cry out together in a single voice, and the fire-god rises out of the pyre with her in his arms, her garlands unwithered, and sets her in Rama’s lap.

Sita’s story begins with a festival in Mithila. In the Bala Kanda, sarga 66, Valmiki tells how she rose from the furrow as Janaka plowed the field set apart for a sacrifice, and from that furrow she took her name, Sita, the line the plow cuts. Janaka’s terms for her were his own. He set her aside as a bride whose price was valor and put the bow of Shiva before every king who sued for her, and none could so much as stir it. Rama strung the bow and broke it. Even as the bride of Ayodhya, Sita remained Janaka’s daughter, the learned woman before whose reasoning Rama himself had to yield. When the order of exile came, Rama pressed her to stay behind, and her answer runs through sargas 27 to 30 of the Ayodhya Kanda. A wife alone shares her husband’s fortune, she tells him in 27, and she will walk ahead of him and crush the thorns under her feet. He counts the forest’s perils in 28; in 29 she takes each one as a blessing. In 30 she turns on him: “When my father Janaka got you for a son-in-law, did he understand that he was getting a woman in the shape of a man?” His resolve, Rama admits, has gone weak. Later, at Panchavati, the wish for the golden deer was hers as well, and Valmiki is honest enough as a poet to set down this lapse of his heroine. Sita is a woman who has lived, who wants, who errs, and who then pays the full price of her own choosing.

Unshaken in the Ashoka’s Shade

Valmiki gives the Sita of the aftermath in the Sundara Kanda, in the Ashoka grove, ringed by rakshasa women, in a single soiled garment, worn thin by grief. Ravana comes to her in soft words: his kingdom laid at her feet, Rama a wanderer in bark cloth who may already be dead. Sita answers from behind a blade of grass, in sarga 21. She lays a stalk on the ground between them and speaks to that: “Turn your mind away from me, and let it rest among your own women.” She tells the king of Lanka, among his own guards, that his city will burn for the crime of one man. Ravana gives her two months of the twelve he set and leaves her to the ogresses. She breaks. She takes the cord of her braid to make a noose and reaches for a branch of the ashoka, and in that moment, from the shinshapa tree above her, a voice begins to tell the story of Rama. Hanuman comes down, the signet ring is placed in her hands, and she tells him that the tenth month is passing and two months remain. He shows her his mountainous form and asks her to climb onto his back. Sita refuses. She might faint over the sea; the ogres would give chase; a rescue by a messenger would lessen Rama’s fame; and of her own will she will touch no man’s body except Rama’s. “If Rama himself comes, kills Ravana with his ogres, and takes me from here, that alone will be worthy of him.” She is a captive in Lanka, and the terms are still hers to set.

After the ordeal she comes home to Ayodhya, and the coronation follows. One day Rama sees the signs of the child she carries and asks which wish of hers he may grant, and she asks for a single night in the penance-groves on the Ganga. The Uttara Kanda tells in sargas 42 to 47 what that wish becomes. The town’s talk reaches the king, and Rama orders Lakshmana to leave her near Valmiki’s hermitage on the far bank, under cover of her own wish to see the hermits. She learns the truth only when Lakshmana falls at her feet on the far shore and asks for death. She will not drown herself in the Ganga, because the line in her womb would end with her, and the message she sends back to the king is a promise: the reproach that has fallen on him she will remove herself. In Valmiki’s ashram the twins Kusha and Lava are born, and there they learn the very poem that is the story of their mother and father. Years later, at the horse-sacrifice, the two boys sing it before the king, and Rama, who hears from the song itself whose sons they are, sends for Sita to take one more oath.

Here Sita does what no one else in the Ramayana manages. She refuses Rama. Sarga 97 of the Uttara Kanda sets the scene: sages, kings, vanaras, rakshasas, people of every varna, all standing still as stone as she walks in behind Valmiki in ochre cloth with her eyes on the ground. Rama tells them he knew her sinless and cast her off for fear of the people. Then Sita folds her hands, lowers her face, and takes the oath, and the oath asks for the ground. “As I have never in my mind thought of any but Raghava, so let the goddess Madhavi, Mother Earth, grant me a place to enter.” Three times she swears it. A throne borne on the heads of nagas rises out of the earth, the goddess Dharani takes Maithili in both arms and seats her, flowers rain down, the gods cry “well done,” and Rama is left to watch. She who had come from the earth returns to the earth, in the moment she herself has chosen.

Her Path

Mithila and the Breaking of Shiva’s Bow · Janaka’s ground of sacrifice, a bow that five thousand men can barely wheel in, and the wedding that bound two houses together and, through them, two ages.

The Departure for the Forest · Ayodhya wept on, and Sita, who had sworn to walk ahead and crush the thorns under her feet, chose the forest over the palaces.

The Golden Deer and the Abduction of Sita · One longing at the edge of the hermitage, a deceit that arrived in a mendicant’s robes, and the emptying of Panchavati.

The Ashoka Grove and the Signet Ring · Sita within the ring of her guards, a blade of grass laid on the ground, and the first note of hope coming down from the shinshapa.

The Trial by Fire and the Return to Ayodhya · Sita returning untouched from within the flames, and the flight from Lanka to Ayodhya on the Pushpaka.

The Banishment of Sita · A wish to see the hermits on the Ganga, a chariot that leaves at dawn, and the bride of the House of Raghu left on the far bank.

Valmiki’s Ashram and Lava and Kusha · Two voices growing up in a forest hut, who will one day sing their own father the story that is his.

Sita’s Entry into the Earth · The final oath, the opening earth, and the daughter of Janaka taking her leave on her own terms.

She Who Would Not Bow

Read with care, Valmiki’s Sita is a chain of decisions. The decision to enter the forest was hers; Rama had pressed her to stay. The choice to answer Ravana from behind a blade of grass was hers. The refusal of an easy release on Hanuman’s back was hers, and so, at the end, was the passage into the earth. Each time she chose the harder course, the one that answered to her own measure. The banishment, read in that light, stands as the harshest decree of Rama’s reign, and she met it as she had met everything else, by setting the terms of her reply. Her lesson about fear is that a siege decides nothing: Lanka held her for ten months and never once compelled her. Her lesson about maryada, the bounds of honor, runs deeper still. In love everything can be borne, and when proof is demanded a second time the dharma of love is to rise and take its leave. Her final refusal is a whole and considered answer, made in full possession of herself, and the poem honors it so completely that the earth itself rises to receive her. The world comes, in its own time, to honor the limits of those who know their own.