Sita's Ascent Read online

  The origin of a character is often seen to have little relevance to the unfolding of a story. I found that in many cultures parents tell their children about how they were born, what their strengths were. It would be interesting if a child were to reverse that process and inquire about the story of the mother. So, in the chapter ‘Mandodari’, I have combined narratives about Sita’s origins and birth—or migrations of spirit and body—from an English translation of the Sanskrit Adbhuta Ramayana and from the Thai Ramakian in Garrett Kam’s Ramayana in The Arts of Asia.

  Lakshmana’s end is influenced by the Kirtivasa Ramayana from Bengal. The laughter of Lakshmana, as a result of Nidra’s visit, is inspired from an account in ‘A Ramayana of Their Own: Women’s Oral Narrative in Telugu’ by Velcheru Narayana Rao in Many Ramayanas. Urmilla’s role as a midwife who describes Sita’s labour here has been directly influenced by the traditional songs that sing of women, particularly Kausalya, giving birth.

  While many Ramayanas have been researched and presented and published, my interest as a storyteller lay in being inspired by these sources that acted as a catalyst in writing the story of Sita, beyond Ramayana. The exploration of these sources shaped my direct experience of storytelling—identifying with a story and making meaning of the past by seeing it as a metaphor for the present.

  As part of world literature, Sita’s courage is indomitable and takes on epic dimensions in the emotional and geographical landscapes she traverses. We rarely see her in the safe interiors of palaces for very long; wilderness and abandon is where she triumphs.

  This came to me while preparing Ramayana in two different stages and contexts. The first, Deepavali in India. It was celebrated both at home and in whichever city, town or outpost my father’s military posting had located us during the 1960s. Amamma, my maternal grandmother visited us during the season, and always took the trouble to bring the wooden dolls of Tirupathi, dressing them up for the Pattabhishekaham coronation, and stage the story of Rama and Sita. As an oral poet her compositions in Telugu were lyrical and her improvisations, theatrical. In her telling, Sita embodied the narrative of the canonized version, but her interpolations added a human dimension to Sita’s character. Her Sita had the spirit of Agni, or fire, which was very liberating for Amamma as a storyteller and indeed for her generation. Sita’s DNA of fire could be expressed in a myriad emotions that ranged from irritation to love, rage against injustice to fortitude and compassion. A range of emotions any sixteen-year-old young woman could relate to till she was thirty, in response to her life and the choices she made that created new challenges for her. It was this that made Sita awe-inspiring for me.

  The second, 1988 in England. The Victoria and Albert Museum had an exhibition of Ramayana that was touring Cartwright Hall, Bradford. These were sixteenth-century Mughal miniatures. As a student who had just arrived from India to pursue a PhD at The Workshop Theatre, department of drama in the School of English, University of Leeds, I met the curator Dr Nima Smith with some enthusiasm. Over our shared interest in postcolonial literature, I was invited to give a lecture on the Hindu epic. I was with an English colleague from my department who then proceeded to ask, ‘And, what is Ramayana?’ It was an incredible moment like the Big Bang in my career of storytelling. Unknown to myself, I had a cultural gene that was from that moment propelled into a cross-fertilization of histories of ideas. Context was imperative for retelling.

  The story of Rama and Sita and their adventures has always been a tale told and listened to in India. Having heard Ramayana from the age of three, I had never felt the need to categorize the ethnicity, culture, religion or nationality of the spaces and audiences when I heard it in different places. In fact, when I was leaving Madras for Leeds to study, Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana, the TV series, had set a world record in viewership. For the first time, everything came to a standstill—public transport, daily routines, visits—during the time the weekly thirty-five-minute episode was on. Hindus and non-Hindus were gripped by the dramatization and the epic brought India under its spell in its televised avatar.

  I suddenly realized my entire context was different—Ramayana was a symbol; its characters functioned as points of reference in any professional, public or domestic situation while I was in India. Here, in Leeds, let alone England, it was unknown, unloved, and discussed fairly clinically among curators and scholars of archived South Asian collections. As a reflex, I thought the best place to start explaining to my colleague was to mention that the epic was compelling as it had possibly inspired some of the characters for George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977). 3 It was sheer postcolonial reflex to bridge cultural gulfs with cinema, and that too, with Hollywood.

  I did a twenty-minute overview of the popular version of the Ramayana to explain why there were Mughal miniatures from the ateliers of Persian schools about a Hindu epic, collated by English collectors—I had crossed the desert of my mind in assuming that Ramayana was owned exclusively by India; India was only its birthplace. The migration of the story, the cross-fertilization of versions, the myriad manifestations through oral and written literature, the forms of dissemination in performing and visual arts and crafts had indeed made it a world story. The linearity of the story and those who had reinvented it in their writings through the ages had made it the first novel in world literature. When I finished, my colleague said, ‘Instead of the lecture, why not tell the story?’ And that’s just what I did, with the miniatures functioning as a traditional scroll.

  On my arrival in Leeds, writer and essayist Caryl Phillips had suggested a writing exercise—to think of all the things that struck me as new and different before I got used to them. It could have been public transport, escalators, dialects of English. The question ‘What is Ramayana?’ had that effect on me, of seeing the familiar from an unfamiliar viewpoint. This was the epic that had been seasoned by Amamma’s recitals, that had inspired the Indian independence movement, that boosted the economy during Hindu festivals, that was embedded in political and social contexts and one that had kept the oral tradition of performance alive throughout the world.

  In an age when England was becoming serious about addressing its multiculturalism—schools in Bradford, Birmingham and Leicester, besides the boroughs in London, had 40 per cent black and Asian students in classrooms—my Ramayana was leading the way across curriculums in primary and secondary schools, and as performance in venues for art and in concert halls, with the greeting of ‘Diwali Mubarak’. I was learning at each telling how to interpolate contemporary references from British news within the story; in turn, audiences related to the contexts within an Indian epic that was fundamentally about the human struggle to live by certain ideals. Story or epic, the Ramayana became a window to a cultural sensibility or to an Indian way of thinking.

  And, finally, the first thing: my fascination for exploring a literary form to tell a woman’s story.

  What is at the heart of Sita’s Ascent? It is an exploration of the psychological dimension that reveals Sita’s human condition. It allows identification and empathy with Sita, instead of viewing her as a victim. Had Sita been a victim she would not have survived.

  In 1998, Kathleen Hamilton, CEO of Leicester Haymarket Theatre Trust commissioned me to write and perform Ramayana, in a city with 30 per cent Asians of Indian, Pakistani and East African origin and predominantly Gujarati speakers. This was directed by Chris Banfield (who was at the time the deputy head of the department of theatre studies at the University of Birmingham, having directed the works of Girish Karnad and Badal Sircar and those of other contemporary Indian dramatists). He integrated the music of internationally renowned percussionist Colin Seddon. The storytelling performance was now two hours long and had a simple but evocative set and lighting design by Jenny Campbell.

  In the years before, the episodic action of Rama and Sita’s life had been the driving force behind my performances. For the first time, working with a theatre director made it possible for me to chart the many narratives from Paula R
ichman’s work as well as use my own encounters with the regional versions. I wanted to adapt these for a staged, dramatic version for viewers who were both familiar and unfamiliar with the cultural contexts, that is, East African Asians and British audiences.

  This was when I first started focusing on the psychological aspects of the characters in Ramayana, which led them to their actions. My interest was caught by the thread of Sita’s story, in spite of her absence in Ramayana till she makes her decision to accompany Rama into exile. Yes, she is crucial to the plot and structure of the epic. But a remembrance of her, a search for her and her absence make her essential qualities come alive.

  In Ramayana, it is the women who propel the action—Ahalya, Manthara, Kaikeyi, Soorpanakka and Sita. And the stories backstage, the hidden women—Urmilla, Mandodari—began to gain a voice that told me more about Sita. But live performances never allow for that kind of time and space, not with theatre time directives. What the performance and dramatization did allow was to get the characters to exchange dialogue, revealing their relationships, longings, struggles, joys and their empathy with the human condition, even though they were worshipped as gods in another culture. Among the different Indian philosophies and systems of thinking, being and becoming, there is one that talks about unlocking the divine in the human. Here was an opportunity to discover what it meant to be human, in all its colours of despair, love beyond abandonment, rage and compassion. Most empathetic parents want to leave behind a story for their children. I doubt they do it out of the need to achieve immortality as much as out of their unconditional love which they feel should remain a constant thread for their children despite the changes in the world. That, for me, is Sita’s ascent—the heaviness of what she endures illumines and embraces the human condition with triumph. It is not about victory, conquest or martyrdom; it is about resourcing a daily energy to overcome with lightness and love.

  In one sense, Sita is an inheritance and a legacy for many women, not an imposition. While reimagining Sita and her story, it was an enriching journey to enter into the idea that Sita is exiled and adopted—both literally and metaphorically—by the country endorsed as ‘marriage’. In our times, endurance in women is precariously interpreted as the attribute of a ‘victim’, but Sita has resourcefulness, fortitude, cheerfulness and an ocean of love despite being placed in circumstances not of her choosing, as an orphan and an exile.

  Tithiksha, or forbearance, affords the simultaneous ability to experience the immediate without losing sight of what endures against all odds. Sita here radiates across time, challenging every author to write the story she directs. She is never dour or tragic, and she is increasingly spontaneous and defiantly compassionate.

  Sita’s Ascent is a storyteller’s imagining of a character from an epic that has been told and retold over millennia. From the familiar it plunges into the labyrinth of the unfamiliar, casting a new light on a quality that goes out of fashion because of its ‘moral’ overtones in the past. This retelling is about getting into the fibre, life and essence of a person who is an icon.

  As a storyteller I could opt for a path of recitation and/or interpolation. Both keep the folk and oral epic traditions alive. But it is the interpolators who have made their stories evolve across politics, resistances and history by placing the familiar characters in challenging circumstances, within the context of contemporary occurrences, to renew their endurance.

  In Sita’s Ascent the real storyteller is Hanuman who remains silent, watches the drama and takes action. He is able to enter Sita’s inner world and witness her ability to engage with the urgent and the immediate, while she simultaneously understands and expresses the call of what is constant in life.

  So much in life happens due to miscommunication, thoughts felt and left unexpressed, roles that have to be played—even when there is love. Because there is love, the greater is the pain of endurance when there is loss or absence, which offers us a spiral of reflection. Only the truly buoyant can weather it and come out of it radiant. Hanuman, in this novella, signals that for us—Sita’s ascent is more powerful because we see it coming.

  Acknowledgements

  It was a privilege when Kamini Mahadevan invited me to embark on the Sita story. Thanks to her and Penguin and the many readers who have seen it through. I thank Chris Banfield as a director for an inspirational process in keeping the epic alive across cultures, Lakshmi Holmström for her continued reading and observations; placing ‘The Ring of Memory’, among other essays, and her evocative translations from Ramayana in my path; and introducing me to Paula Richman, to whom I am indebted for her incredible research and generosity. Dr David Schulman, Dr Stuart Blackburn, Dr Velacheru Narayana Rao and Richard Blurton for endorsing my ‘English’ retelling of Ramayana. Dr Darryll Grantley, Dr Nicola Shaughnessy, Emily Parrish, Dan Thompson, Craig Jenkins and all my students from the University of Kent for participating in it; Ben Haggarty for festivalizing it; Di Cooper for using it in a session in Central School of Speech and Drama; Colin Seddon for his mammoth undertaking with the music; and Kathleen Hamilton with Leicester Theatre Trust, Kulbir Natt and the Barbican who created platforms for it across twenty-two years, which are still running. Dr Mukulika Banerjee, Judy McKnight, Dee Ashworth, Raji Krishnan, as trustees of the Vayu Naidu Storytelling Theatre Company, for championing it, the Arts and Humanities Research Council with the University of Kent, Canterbury, and Arts Council England for funding the research, development and founding of this platform of work.

  Last but not least, to my grandmother, Allarmelu Mangathai Calpakkam Karunanidhi Naidu, and my beloved mother, Jayarukmini Naidu, and father, Major General Aban Naidu, who are remembered as the great storytellers straddling cultures to keep the epic alive. Hari Sagar Naidu for his ocean of compassion, Upendra Sagar for his idealism and Viji Vasudev for her Ramayana for children. To my cousin Urmilla, who taught me the meaning of her name, and to Krishna for the note and your attentive reading.

  Swami Tripurananda is thanked for his discussions on Tithiksha and its relevance. Usha Aroor for being an early and constant guide in the complexities of epics and their characters and for placing Yuganta in my hands thirty years ago.

  To Chris, my husband of many lives, this is a simple dedication thanking you for your epic endurance and hospitality to all the characters in this novella who stayed for as long as they wanted in our home; to Unmai who always understands when it is time for silence and rest, and for alerting me to the compassion hidden in the strength of Hanuman.

  This work is for Thakur, with love, who is there when it all happens. And now, over to Sita.

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  First published by Penguin Books India 2012

  Copyright © Vayu Naidu 2012

  Cover image: Sita returns to Mother Earth, courtesy National Museum, New Delhi

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. All situations, incidents, dialogue and characters, based on some wel
l-known mythological figures, mentioned in this novella, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. They are not intended to depict actual events or gods or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-01-4341-528-2

  This digital edition published in 2012.

  e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-771-2

  A Note

  1 Cited in the Guardian Book Club by John Mullan,‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens, discussing the form of the novella. Accessed 16 December 2011.

  2 Paula Richman, Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

  3 Writing about The Jedi in the Lotus by Steven Rosen (Arktos: London, 2010), Charles S.J. White says:

  Rosen’s study shows the influence of Star Wars on Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade and other major scholars of mythology who were consulted by Lucas to develop his understanding. These scholars were steeped in the lore of the hero in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, as well as other aspects of the Indian tradition. Their theories impacted ‘the creator of Star Wars,’ who said, ‘I’m telling an old myth in a new way.’

  A striking outcome of Rosen’s analysis is possibly to heighten the interest of readers in the relevance of the mythic traditions of India to the sensibility of a modern cinematic artist. With that deeper insight they are given the opportunity through George Lucas’s films to journey imaginatively to participate with him in the reality of India’s ancient mythic experience. (Quoted from The Jedi in the Lotus Facebook fan page)