Sita's Ramayana does away with the all-pervasive male voice and lets the women do the talking in a bid to offer a fresh perspective to the age-old mythological tale. Then again, author Samhita Arni has been doing precisely that since the age of 12, when she published a re-telling of the Mahabharatau00a0

We know the story by heart. We have read, heard and watched the Ramayana all our lives. Yet, how often have we taken a step back to think about the heroine of the epic? What did she feel about being abducted and imprisoned? Was she angry when Ram questioned her purity after rescuing her? Did she feel humiliated when she was asked to prove her chastity in public?


Panels from the book Sita's Ramayana depicting the women
characters in Ramayana, including Sita

Tara Books' latest graphic novel, Sita's Ramayana, tries to give us some answers, and proffering them is Samhita Arni, a Bengaluru-based writer, who had published a re-telling of the Mahabharata when she was just 12, nearly 15 years ago. Titled The Mahabharata: A Child's View, Arni played both writer and illustrator then.
This time, the illustrations have been done by Patua artist Moyna Chitrakar, based in Nirbhaypur village in west Medinipur district of West Bengal. Patua is a style of art native to West Bengal, where handmade paper pasted on cloth is painted with vegetable and mineral dyes in scroll form, depicting stories from epics as well as mythology. Patua artists are known to travel across villages with their scrolls, singing out the stories.
Arni's concise words lend a voice to Sita, and even a conscience -- a voice in her head makes Sita question the events unfolding around her.

A double major in Religion and Film from Mount Holyoke College in the United States, Arni has lived in Pakistan, Thailand and Italy among other countries. She is currently working on a thriller called Searching for Sita.
In an interview with MiD DAY, Arni tells us why the women of Ramayana deserve to come into their own, why she empathises with Ram (despite his flaws) and why she's obsessed with mythology.u00a0

How did Sita's Ramayana come about?
The genesis of this graphic novel lies in a thriller that I am working on. While researching, I came across a whole lot of interesting perspectives on the Ramayana. At the Jaipur Literature Festival in January, I met the publishers and they mentioned that a Patua artist named Moyna Chitrakar was already working on a narrative based on the Ramayana. The Patua version of the Ramayana looks at the epic from a feminist perspective. I decided to stay true to the artists' vision when I collaborated with her and interwove my words around Moyna's narrative.