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The introduction sets up the basic question of the book: when are goddesses as role models potentially empowering or oppressive for women? It situates this question within contemporary feminist debates. It contrasts the role models of Sita and Radha and counters a monolithic understanding of these goddesses, arguing for a historically nuanced study of how their stories change over time as told in classical Sanskrit sources, the bhakti or devotional tradition, and the popular culture frameworks of television series and movies. Three hypotheses will be tested. First, are bhakti texts in privileging love above duty and celebrating women's subjectivity liberating for women? Second, does the modernity of the medium of television and film result in a more progressive view? Finally, how is the increasing influence of Hindutva in the public sphere reflected on screen? The introduction establishes the methodology of “siting” Sita and Radha, introduces the sources used and outlines the overall organization.

This chapter studies narrative design. Gender roles are studied, in which three versions of the wedding of Rāma and Sītā as they appear in Valmiki's Rāmāyana, in Tulsidas's Ramcaritmanas, and the TV version by Rāmanand Sagar are compared. It shows how the classical, medieval, and contemporary portrayals differ from each other, and speculates about what meanings the refocusing of the narrative may hold for the cultural authority of contemporary mass media. It is argued that looking at the different periods from which each version of the tale was created, the focus has shifted from duty to devotion and from devotion to entertainment, although the message of wifely devotion has, if anything, gained greater currency and has solidified conventional gender paradigms.

This chapter looks at how a fictional character's identity can change when the character is recreated through multiple versions of the narrative. In comparison to other legendary women of India, such as Draupadi of the Mahabharata, the gopis of the Bhagavata Purana, and the women characters of the Katha-sarit-sagara, Sītā has emerged as the epitome of wifely devotion and self-sacrifice, especially in the 20th century. Drawing upon several retellings of the Rāmayna and the more recent tradition of “anti-Rāmāyana” texts, an attempt is made to discover what holds together the idea of Sītā even as the portrayal of her character changes.

This chapter comes back to women's dharma: now depicted not so much through maternal generations as in its enactment by each epic's chief heroine. Rather than being portrayed biographically, the heroine appears episodically. She is introduced through brief and indirect glimpses of her scenes of birth, youth, and marriage, and emerges centrally only in her handling of each epic's decisive crisis, which involves specifically her violation: Draupadī's hairpulling and disrobing at the Mahābhārata dice match and Sītā's abduction. Focusing on Draupadī and Sītā as dharmapatnīs or “legal wives” brings into relief what each makes of her svadharma, and of a woman's dharma in crisis, exile, and especially in Sītā's case, captivity. In both cases, the heroine intimates a perception of being the pawn and victim of a divine plan beyond her own devising.

In an attempt to ground this volume solidly in India's past, this chapter discusses Sita Devi, one sanctioned, premodern South Asian female guru, to demonstrate that the current seeming profusion of female gurus in the West is not merely the product of contemporary feminist indignation, nor entirely culturally anomalous, but a phenomenon backed by centuries of history. This chapter clearly indicates Sita Devi's affiliation with an important lineage in a widely recognized tradition, legitimizing her status as a religious leader despite gender issues.

This chapter analyzes Sita's Ramayana, a graphic novel published in 2011 by the Indian publisher Tara Books in partnership with Groundwood Books in the United States and Canada. Illustrated by Moyna Chitrakar, a female folk artist from West Bengal, and written by Samhita Arni, a young, cosmopolitan female Indian author, Sita's Ramayana has been marketed as a feminist retelling of the epic. It has been primarily targeted at a young adult readership and has been critically acclaimed as well as commercially successful both in India and abroad. The chapter shows how the graphic novel version of the popular Indian epic Ramayana is strikingly different visually from the other myriad picture books and comic book adaptations of the tale, because of its use of the centuries-old patua folk art form.

This chapter focuses on Sītā and Draupadī's dharma biographies, which introduce two exemplary strands of women's spirituality. Their spiritual life comes to be intertwined with bhakti, “devotion”—and devotion not only to one's husband but to God. Sītā would be bringing her two types of spirituality together in her devotion to one figure: her husband Rāma, whom neither he nor she can really know to be god, at least on the scale of his being the incarnation of Viṣṇu. On the other hand, Draupadī can keep her two types of spirituality separate: her five husbands are gods of one kind; her special friend Kṛṣṇa is something else.

This chapter provides a translation of Karam il-Yatīm, a form of an Egyptian folk ballad. The translation in this chapter is one of the four songs sung by Yūsuf Šitā, recorded on commercially produced cassettes. Being characteristic of Egyptian narrative folksongs, this chapter examines the poet's concern with devising polysyllabic paronomasias, as well as his way of unfolding the stages of the narrative.

This chapter focuses on Sita-devi, an old woman who shared her favorite songs with the author. Like many accomplished singers of her generation, Sita-devi most valued songs carrying mythological events and metaphysical insights. To convey a sense of the vast knowledge that a person without written literacy can carry, the author provides a summary of the songs from their first meeting. For each song, she highlights the names of the deities involved, the legendary figures described, or the metaphysical principle being celebrated. She also mentions the genre that Sita-devi identified, which was often a devotional bhajan but inflected with other genres associated with life-cycle events.

Sita is a leading female icon of India, and Ramayana forms a key part of India’s epic heritage, yet her character remains largely unknown in popular films outside India. With three hundred variations of it, it can now be called a global text as the Ramayana transcends geographic boundaries. Year after year there are films made, inspired by or based on Ramayana, awaited and seen with a lot of interest and critiqued with equal gusto. With the Ramayana the issue is never what is shown, but always how each film in this way becomes an epic film, as Ramayana is a national tale with epic implications both in India and abroad. This chapter examines two adaptations of Sita in modern popular forms, Anand’s Laying Janaki to Rest and Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues, to challenge Westernised definitions of what it means to be epic, and to argue that the ancient mythical prototype lives and breathes even 3,000 years later and can inform modern epics.

Sati in British India came to simultaneously refer to the widow-burning rite as well as to the self-immolating widow. With growing imperialist interests in the Empire in India, the British administration detected in the sati issue a powerful opportunity to promote the image of a progressive, reform-minded, benevolent Raj. An endeavour to know how Indian women themselves portray sati in their writings is of unfailing interest. Caught between the loud crossfire of the two warring camps of pro- and anti-Sati campaigns, the Indian woman—both the subject and the object of the entire sati discourse—hardly gets a chance to claim for herself the attention of a perceptive audience. The silence of the sati victim is, of course, nearly insurmountable and only a voice, seeped through another agency, reaches us. This chapter concentrates on three such mediated voices (Cornelia Sorabji, Snehalata Sen, and Sita Devi) as presented in their fiction.

The impulse in Hinduism to attribute divinity to women is well demonstrated in the legend of Sītā. Her unconditional devotion to her husband Rāma qualifies her as worthy of devotion, particularly because as consort to Rāma who is Viṣṇu in human form, Sītā can be regarded as Lakṣmī, to be worshiped jointly with him. Her total surrender to Rāma’s will elevates her in Vaiṣṇava thought as the model for the soul’s passive dependence upon God and as mediator between Viṣṇu and worshipers. But offering a contrary view, Śākta narratives shift redemptive power from Rāma to Sītā. Yet another construction of Sītā, especially in folk culture, highlights her protest against her subjugation. In recent times this has turned her into a locus for the resistance of women to patriarchal oppression, which may free her from the matrix of devotion and refashion her as an icon of resistance worthy of veneration.

The Ramayana is the oldest surviving Hindu text and one of the world’s most popular epics. Composed by the sage Valmiki in Sanskrit in Northern India, sometime between the second century BCE and the second century CE, it tells the story of Rama the perfect prince, Sita his perfect wife, and Lakshmana his perfect brother who were all born to be paradigms of goodness. This chapter analyzes the story of the Ramayana, beginning with human characters who serve as doubles of other characters within the text. It then looks at animals, primarily the male monkeys, who function as the shadows of Bharata and Rama, and demons. Finally, it considers the character Ravana as a sexual predator.

The jewelry of princess Sita plays a key role in the ancient Indian epic, the Ramayana, and in a play about an Indian king who falls in love with a mystery woman identified only by her necklace. A ring is found in a fish in the tale of Shakuntala, a simple forest girl seduced by a king who pretends to forget her when she appears at court, pregnant with his child. When a court poet retold the story, he saved the king’s reputation by adding a ring with a curse on it, which erased the king’s memory of Shakuntala—until the ring was found in a fish served at the royal table. When we combine these stories with those of Solomon and Polycrates, we can excavate a broader mythology of rings found in fish, a mythology that expresses the hope that we can retrieve a lost past.