Sita’s Suicide: How the Ideology of Pativrata Sati Destroys Indian Women
by Ankur Betageri (July 2015)
To the memory of my great-great-grandmother, Hakmi Bai,
who was whipped to death by her husband for eating paan (betel leaf).
O foolish race of mortals, that gave gods such jobs to do,
Then went and made them fierce with anger into the bargain too!
What groans you purchased for yourselves, what grievous injury
For us, what tears you fashioned for the children yet to be!
—Lucretius, The Nature of Things[i]
Trans. by A.E. Stallings
The relationship of Rama and Sita in Valmiki’s Ramayana, though not a happy and harmonious one by any stretch of imagination, has always been projected as the ideal husband-wife relationship in Hindu society. What was their relationship really like? Contrary to the evidence present in Ramayana, Rama is seen as a monogamist, and not just as a monogamist, but as a loving and devoted husband. Since he is a glorified maryada purushottama, the embodiment of decency and the best among men, he is an ideal to all Hindu men – just as Muhammad is to Muslim men – and following him they become not only patriarchal husbands eternally peeved by their wives’ independence but also possessive husbands paranoid about their wives’ chastity—roles that Rama performed to perfection in the Ramayana.
[ii] But all these narratives are disturbing evidence of the systematic attempts made by the patriarchal Indian society to establish self-denial as the supreme virtue of the wife and the act of sacrificing herself by burning to death on the husband’s pyre as the highest expression of this virtue.
Most readers would know the word sati through its Anglicized form of ‘suttee’ which perhaps brings to mind horrid images of the long-abolished practice of self-immolation of women on the husband’s pyre. Though the practice of sati was legally abolished in British India through the Sati Regulation Act of 1829, largely due to the efforts of the Renaissance man Rammohun Roy, the funeral ritual continued to be practiced, most notably in the state of Rajasthan, which made the Rajasthan Government pass the Sati (Prevention) Act in 1987. The main reason for this was the immolation in 1987 of Roop Kanwar, the eighteen-year-old widow of Maal Singh Shekhawat, belonging to the Rajput community of Rajasthan. While the sati immolation was horrifying in itself what disturbed most people was the sickening and obscene glorification of this act not only by those who had witnessed it but also by those who were under the influence of the television Ramayana series telecast at around the same time. Anand Patwardhan in his brilliant 1995 documentary film, Father, Son, and Holy War, brings us face to face with this medieval horror when he shows a bearded middle-aged man, the coordinator of a Kshatriya organisation in Delhi, justifying the practice of sati as a matter of aan, baan and shaan (honour, glory and prestige) for the Rajputs.
The key to Sita’s condition is in her very name, and whose daughter she is said to be. Sita is so named because King Janaka, her adopted father, found her in a Sita, a furrow. This makes her the daughter of Bhumi or Mother Earth. Now, no name could make a more direct reference to feudal agricultural society and the kind of female fantasy that this society engenders. This makes the obvious sexual connotation of the name all the more powerful. Sita is the furrow made to take the plough, swallow the seeds and produce crops. Sita, in other words, is a fertility deity, whose one glorified function is to have sex and reproduce. If the whole of female personality is reduced to her sexual and reproductive function, given the passive sexual role that is accorded to woman in an agricultural society, she becomes the one who is dominated, and not merely dominated which is still ‘understandable’, but one who is aggressively violated. This is the ideological creation of a woman who is primordially helpless in relation to man and who is the eternal victim of his blind ‘agricultural’ lust. It is this deep-rooted anti-woman stereotype which has naturalized crimes against women in the Indian feudal society.
Let us now look at the Rama-Sita story as narrated in Valmiki’s Ramayana, the earliest existing version of the Rama legend.
Rama, who is said to have been devoted and loyal to his wife, is the jealous and insecure husband par excellence for he is bound more by the societal code of honour – being the typical male subject of what Ruth Benedict calls ‘culture of shame’ of the East (as opposed to ‘culture of guilt’ of the West) – than by the principle of truth and integrity. The relationship of Rama and Sita is not an equal relationship. Rama is always more powerful than Sita, and Sita, as the willingly dominated wife, celebrates as her extraordinary virtue this very willingness to be dominated, punished and psychologically and socially abused until she finally rebels by committing suicide.
When Rama finally reaches Lanka and defeats Ravana– after his loyal devotee Hanuman has burned down a good part of Lankapuri, the capital of Lanka – he, instead of directly going to Ashoka-van where his beloved and long-suffering wife is held captive, spends time in the coronation ceremony of Vibhishana, the brother of Ravanawho has sided with Rama in the war. So much for Rama being a loving and anguished husband!
And when he finally goes to claim Sita, instead of embracing her and showering her face with tears and kisses, as one would expect a long-separated, pining husband to do, Rama-of-the-long-arms makes the most obscene demand imaginable: he suspects Sita of infidelity with Ravanaand asks her to prove her chastity. Now how does a married woman prove her chastity? In the days before birth-control the fact that she is not pregnant or has not had children should be sufficient proof. But no, Rama wants a more exacting proof: he wants her to undergo an agnipareeksha, a fire-ordeal. And Ramayana tells us that Sita underwent this ordeal, walked into a blaze of fire and came out unscathed, as she was indeed a pure and chaste pativrata. This convinces Rama for the time being and the forest-exile now being over, he takes her back to Ayodhya as his wife and the legitimate chaste queen.
But poor Sita cannot enjoy this status for long. One day while walking the streets of Ayodhya city Rama overhears people gossiping about him: How disgraceful of the king to have taken back a fallen woman—a woman abducted and almost certainly ravished by Ravana. Rama is sucked into a vortex of shame and humiliation and suddenly the trial by fire, which the citizens of Ayodhya have not witnessed, is no longer proof of Sita’s chastity. But who or what is the source of Rama’s disgrace? No, it is not the ignorant, malicious and misogynist public of Ayodhya, not their destructive rumour-mongering and character assassination. It is Sita, his wife, who made the horrendous life-altering mistake of crossing the line of female limits, the Lakshman-rekha. So Rama does the unthinkable: he instructs Lakshmana to take the pregnant Sita and abandon her in the forest, to die of starvation or to become food to wild animals. But Sita is lucky, at least for a brief period. She is saved by the forest hermit Valmiki, the author of Ramayana, and it is in his care and in his hermitage that Sita gives birth to the twins Lava and Kusha, and brings them up with all the tribulations of a single parent. But Sita is not to enjoy for long this little happiness that she has created for herself in the midst of wilderness.
***
This is not just a story. Like the legend of Sati, this is a myth, an urplot that has unfolded, with different variations and endings, in the lives of millions of Hindu women. It has not only reinforced the patriarchal stereotype of the submissive, self-sacrificing wife, thereby destroying the freedom and agency of the Indian woman, it has also made agnipareeksha, the trial by ordeal, a routine traditional practice adopted to test the chastity and truthfulness of women. Abbe Dubois, the nineteenth century French Catholic missionary who lived in Tamil Nadu, presents the following case in his Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies[iv] which is emblematic of the condition of the traditional Hindu housewife.
A certain young woman who lived close to my home became the victim of her husband’s jealous suspicions. To prove her innocence, he forced to plunge her arm up to her elbow into a bath of boiling oil. The unhappy woman, sure of her inviolable virtue, did not hesitate to obey, and the result was that she was most frightfully scalded. The wound became inflamed, and blistered, finally mortified, and caused the unhappy woman’s death.
No doubt the disregard of the sanctity of an oath prevailing among the Hindus has, to a certain extent, necessitated the adoption of this system of trial by ordeal.
***
[v] without bothering to inform that it occupies that place because it is considered the most rudimentary form of philosophy and that it is refuted in the very next chapter on the Bauddha System, it is also okay not to mention that it is Advaita Vedanta, not dealt with in that book, which is celebrated as the crest-jewel of all Indian philosophies.[vi] Amartya Sen’s brand of secularism is not the answer to Hindu supremacist tyranny nor is his manner of preaching to the choir the way to counter it. It is also no way to approach the problem of religion-sanctioned social injustice that is still oppressing such a large section of Indian population. Power and hegemony have been systematically coded in the Hindu religion and only a remarkable mental resistance would make a person not see how these hegemonic structures are played out in Indian social life and politics.
[i] Lucretius. The Nature of Things. Trans. A.E. Stallings. London: Penguin Books, 2007, p.186
[ii] Naik, Lalitha. Banjara Hejjegurutugalu. Bangalore: Karnataka Rajya Patragara Ilakhe, 2009, pp.97-101 (in Kannada)
[iii] Women are considered Shudra because they do not have the right to undergo upanayana ceremony and wear yajnopaveeta (cross-string). While Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya men are considered dwijas, or twice-borns, because they can observe the upanayana ceremony. Manu in his Dharmashastra clearly states that marriage is the only rite a woman can undergo. See: Kane, P.V. History of Dharmasastra: Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law, Volume 2 Part 1. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1941, pp.292-295.
[iv] Dubois Abbe J.A. Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies. Trans. by Henry K. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959, p.662. For a critical analysis of Rama’s personality see B.R. Ambedkar’s brilliant essay “The Riddle of Rama and Krishna” in Riddles in Hinduism.
[v] Acharya, Madhava. The Sarva-darshana-samgraha. Trans. by E.B. Cowell and A.E. Gough. London: Trubner and Co, 1882.
[vi] Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity. London: Penguin Books, 2005. ________________________________ Ankur Betageri is poet, fiction writer and visual artist. His books include The Bliss and Madness of Being Human (Poetrywala, 2013) and Bhog and Other Stories (Pilli, 2010). He is a currently a PhD candidate at IIT-Delhi working on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. To comment on this article, please click here. To help New English Review continue to publish interesting and insightful articles such as this, please click here. If you have enjoyed this article and wish to read more by Ankur Betageri please click here.