Sita

Sita is filed here as the sole occupant of a category that exists because the atlas split a role by gender. The classification note for that heading says as much, and Sita's own material shows why the split does damage: she is not a lesser version of a hero, she is one of the two central figures of the largest narrative tradition in South Asia, and putting her in a heading of her own separates her from Rama rather than pairing them.

In Valmiki, she is the daughter found in a furrow by King Janaka, her name means furrow, won by Rama at a bow-bending contest, and she insists on following him into forest exile rather than remaining in comfort. She is abducted by Ravana and held in the ashoka grove at Lanka, where she refuses him. The war is fought to recover her.

What happens after the war is the part that has been argued about for two thousand years. Rama, on recovering her, does not embrace her. He tells her publicly that he fought to restore his own honour, not for her sake, and that she is free to go where she likes. She calls for a fire and enters it, and is returned unburnt, the agni pariksha, the ordeal by fire.

Even that is not the end. In the seventh book, Rama, hearing that his subjects doubt her, banishes her while pregnant. She bears twin sons in Valmiki's hermitage, and when finally asked to swear her fidelity again in public, she calls on the earth to take her back, and the ground opens.

She does not forgive him. The epic does not make her.

The seventh book, the Uttara Kanda, which contains the banishment and the swallowing by the earth, is regarded by most scholars as a later addition to Valmiki's epic, along with the first book. That is a text-critical judgement, not a devotional one, and it is not a way of making the problem go away: the fire ordeal is in the sixth book, in the older layer.

The retellings handle the ending very differently. Tulsidas, in the sixteenth-century Awadhi version most of north India knows, uses a device that removes the ordeal's sting: the Sita abducted by Ravana is a shadow or illusory Sita, the real one having been hidden in fire beforehand, so the fire ordeal returns the true Sita rather than testing her. Some regional versions omit the banishment entirely. Others, particularly in Telugu, Tamil and Bengali women's oral traditions, expand her side of it, songs sung by women at weddings and while working that give Sita complaints, anger, and a voice the Sanskrit does not.

That body of women's oral Ramayana material is substantial and has been collected and studied since the mid twentieth century. It is a corrective to the assumption that the tradition speaks with one voice about her, and it long predates the modern feminist readings that reached the same conclusions from outside.

The Jain versions restructure the story more drastically still. In several, Sita becomes a Jain nun at the end, which resolves the difficulty by taking her out of the marriage rather than out of the world.