Sita-centric Revisionism in Sita’s Ramayana, Androcentric Encoding and Conceptualizing the Diasporic abla nari

ABSTRACT

Sita’s Ramayana is a graphic retelling of the ancient Indian Ramayana epic. The self-explanatory title suggests the representation of the epic narrative from Sita’s perspective, highlighting the gender aspect and the need for Sita-centric retelling. The ideological flipping is not a new one as this study will show and the graphic rendition modality is contributory to the genre. Through encoding androcentric and patriarchal cultural signs, the Ramayana’s plot has usually been expressed from the point of view of men or ‘society’ – via the deployment of such terms as pativratas, Shakti and abla nari. It also gestures at the frequent stereotypical gendered approach to the entire subject. In this study, I explore the conceptual possibilities of how Arni and Chitrakar rearticulate and flip the representation of the Ramayana epic through a revisionist approach and a Sita-centric retelling. I also look at the theoretically contended genre that generates scope to render the plot both through the printed word and through deploying the Bengali Patua painting form.

KEYWORDS:

• Graphic novels
• patriarchy
• ramayana
• south asian culture
• feminist retellings
• patua painting

Acknowledgments

I am thankful to Tara Books Pvt Ltd, for kindly allowing me to use the pictures from Sita’s Ramayana. (Art by Moyna Chitrakar, for Sita’s Ramayana, Original Edition ©Tara Books Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India. www.tarabooks.com)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Samhita Arni interviewed by Zakeer (2012).

2. See Varsha Jha’s ‘Writing the Picture: Ramayana Narrative in a Graphic Novel Form’ for a study on Ramayana and the graphic novel form.

3. Charu Gupta quotes the works by Maithilisaran Gupt, Arvind Prasad Srivastava, Jyoti Prasad Misra, Chaturvedi Ramchandra Sharma Vidyarthi and others in her research study. The works belonging to the domain of Hindi literature gesture as the helplessness of women who were compelled to migrate to the plantation farms of the British during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

4. In her recent ‘Seeing Shiva, Seeing Ram: Visual Representations of Deities in the Genre of Mythology-inspired Fiction, an Analysis of the Book Covers of Amish Tripathi’s Novels’ Dawson Varughese (2019), Dawson Varughese explores the cover pages of Amish Tripathi’s mythology fiction and states that the genre “is understood within Indian publishing circles to refer to works of fiction whose subject matter is anchored in the Indian Hindu epics […].” (173) and that such fiction has played a role in ‘revisioning of India and its identities’ (173). This notion gestures at the interest among creative authors to revisit and reinterpret Indian epics for their propensity to redefine personal and national identities.

5. Dawson Varughese (2018) in her study on the wall art across Tulsi Pipe Road, Mumbai suggests ‘The idea that the Indian female is in theory “free”, yet simultaneously “bound” is an urgent and timely one.’(184).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shilpa Daithota Bhat

Dr. Shilpa Daithota Bhat is assistant professor (Communication Area) at Ahmedabad University. Her areas of interest are South Asian literature, diaspora and postcolonial theories