Abstract:
India has a rich heritage of epic literature which continues to mesmerize the hearts of the readers across centuries. The Ramayana, one of the national epics of the country, is a mirror that reflects the antiquity and diversity of Indian culture and is not limited within the boundary of a singular narrative. The mainstream writers have used the epic for the promotion of patriarchal ideologies but left certain gaps in their narratives, gaps which bear the possibilities of inquisition and counter narratives by authors in subsequent times. Chandrabati is the first significant female re-teller who has reshaped the Ramayana myth in a woman’s language to question and set right the patriarchal humiliation doled out to women, thereby creating opportunities within her counter-narrative for the articulation of female emotions that have been left out of the widely circulated patriarchal narratives. Though she has offered a fresh perspective of the epic through her unique portrayal of Sita and sharp criticism of Rama, she has not subverted the constructed roles which women are expected to follow in order to get the tag of a virtuous lady in terms of the patriarchal standard. The paper intends to analyse how Chandrabati worked on the very gaps left by the traditional male writers to produce her own version of the epic and how she re-evaluated patriarchal myths through a woman’s lens. The objective of the paper is to explore how she gives expression to the pain and anguish of women in her re-telling, especially that of Sita. The paper intends to investigate how a woman’s narrative raises crucial questions regarding wifehood, motherhood, female psyche, the various forms of oppression that women go through and the overall position of women in an ancient male dominated society.
Key Words: Ramayana, Chandrabati, reconstruction, womanhood, Sita, Kukuya.
The Ramayana, even centuries after its composition, is profoundly appreciated by readers, critics and scholars, as the epic not only reflects the conflict between Ram and Ravan symbolized as the good and the bad, but also promotes certain ideologies and seems to be a chronicle of the Indian value system. Valmiki, the first poet who is considered to have given the epic a written form, has been followed by a number of regional writers who have redecorated the epic with various embellishments from their own culture, in the light of their own analysis and interpretation. But the authoritative male versions of the Ramayana are systematic tales of hero worship and are centred around the life of Rama, as the very title suggests. Chandrabati is the first female re-teller who has remodelled the age-old story in a woman’s language to question and set right the patriarchal humiliation doled out to women, thereby creating opportunities within her counter-narrative for the articulation of female emotions that have been left out of the widely circulated patriarchal narratives. Amidst the conservative socio-cultural set up of the medieval period, she has displayed the spirit to challenge the patriarchal exploitation of myths as a tool of oppression of women through her unique portrayal of Sita and sharp criticism of Rama— “Chandrabati’s Ramayana is, in fact, an oral Sitayana” (Sen, Rewriting the Ramayana 175).
The mainstream writers of the Ramayana depict Rama as an epitome of all-righteousness and a great ruler who does not mind abandoning his own wife for the sake of his people. Sita is presented as an obedient wife and a devoted follower of Stree Dharma, a paragon of womanly virtues and a perfect role model for the Indian women to follow. While reconfiguring the epic in her own style, Chandrabati has not adopted any direct subversion mode in her characterization of Sita, but she has shifted her focus on Sita’s suffering from Rama’s heroism, thus re-positioning woman-centric elements from the margin to the centre and androcentric elements to the periphery. Though Chandrabati’s Sita is a pathetic figure and a victim of patriarchal prejudices, the narrator has spoken out against the injustice done to her, and has offered her a voice of her own. The paper intends to analyse how the re-teller has re-evaluated patriarchal myths through a woman’s perspective. The objective of this paper is manifold; first to explore how the woman narrator has reshaped the male-centric story and has given expression to the pain and anguish of women; second to analyse how her exploration of female psyche and unique story telling method have accorded a complete makeover to Valmiki’s epic; thirdly to investigate how a woman’s re-telling can delineate the journey of women in a patriarchal society.
Valmiki has divided his epic into seven Kandas and has illustrated the adventures and ideals of his hero in an elaborated and extravagant manner. This structural orientation has been followed by regional writers such as Tulsidas, Krittibas, Kamban, Kandali and others. Together, they have formed a Ramayana matrix where patriarchal doctrines have been promoted by constructing gender based behavioral patterns, objectification of female body and over-emphasis on chastity and Stree Dharma. Though Chandrabati has not questioned the constructed roles which women are expected to follow in order to get the tag of a virtuous woman in terms of the patriarchal standard, she has certainly attempted to promote gender consciousness by retelling the tale from the perspective of a woman. She has not followed Valmiki’s pattern in so far as the structural pattern and narrative tone are concerned; her story can be considered to be an abridgement of the epic, divided into three books. Though Valmiki and his followers begin with Rama’s birth story and his family details, Chandrabati opens her story with a description of Ravan’s Lanka. She goes on to delineate Ravan’s prowess and his domination over other creatures followed by Mandodari’s distress caused by her husband’s licentiousness and her subsequent suicide attempt that initiates the birth of Sita. The way Chandrabati narrates baby Sita’s journey from Lanka to Mithila and how she has been adopted by Janaka’s queen makes it clear that Sita is her first and foremost priority; Sita is the central character of her Ramayana, not Rama. In the second book, an account of the major events from Ayodha Kanda to Yudha Kanda of Valmiki’s epic has been given in a nutshell. Chandrabati has adopted a unique style in this context—Baromasi—which is a woman’s song and an important part of Bengali folk culture. In her Baromasi, Sita talks about her maidenhood, her married life, her devotion to Rama, her abduction by Ravan and how she has been rescued by her beloved husband, along with a spontaneous description of the natural world which is, however, a metaphorical mirror of her inner world.
The woman re-teller neither intends to provide a detailed description of warfare nor wishes to promote Ram’s greatness and divinity. She has also excluded many important episodes of the original epic such as Taraka’s death, Rama’s meeting with Ahalya, Surpanakha’s mutilation and Sita’s fire ordeal in Lanka. Also, the concept of Lakshman Rekha which is a metaphor of gender boundary and has been mentioned by a number of post Valmiki re-tellers including Bengali poet Krittibas, finds no existence in her narrative. (Bose, Designing Women 108-109)
In the third book, Chandrabati narrates episodes that include Ram’s banishment of Sita caused by Kukuya’s evil scheme and Sita’s Patal Prabesh which arouses the reader’s sympathy for her. In her story, Sita is a helpless woman whose destiny is not in her favour and Rama is a jealous husband who, driven by false suspicion and erotic envy, banishes the wife who has always been loyal to him. Nabaneeta Dev Sen, explaining Chandrabati’s attitude towards Rama, in her essay, When Women Retell the Ramayana, states that—
Chandrabati calls Ram a deranged wimp, and to make the picture clearer, described him in a way that makes him appear closer to a dragon than a king. She also holds him responsible for the fall of Ayodha (20).
Eminent critics such as Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Mandakranta Bose and others have thrown light on Chandrabati’s personal life in their respective essays and they have clearly pointed out that her life was full of pathos; her lover abandoned her and married someone else; a heartbroken Chandrabati remained unmarried all her life and focused on studies. Perhaps she could relate her suffering to that of Sita; her personal tragedy and her protagonist’s grief seem to have merged somewhere and have become synonymous.
In her narrative, Sita is born from Mandodari’s womb in the form of an egg. As she is a threat to the entire demon clan, as warned by an astrologer, the demons wish to either break the egg or burn it in order to ensure their safety. At Mandodari’s request, Ravan casts the egg into the sea in a casket instead of destroying it directly. A fisherman living in Mithila discovers the casket entangled in his fishing net; his wife Sata delivers the egg to Janaka’s queen as has been instructed to her by baby Sita in a dream. In Valmiki’s version of the epic, Sita is only the adopted daughter of Janaka with no significant mother figure in her life, no such previous birth story of Sita has been mentioned there. However, Chandrabati’s account of Sita’s birth shares a few similarities to that of Adbhuta Ramayana and Ananda Ramayana.
In Adbhuta Ramayana, when Brahma refuses to fulfil Ravan’s desire for immortality, Ravan says that he will be ready to embrace death only if he ever gets sexually attracted to his own daughter and desires her against her wish. Within a few days of this incident, a depressed Mandodari attempts to commit suicide, but she gets pregnant instead. As she did not have sex with Ravan for a long time, she feels ashamed, aborts the foetus and buries it deep into the ground. Though apparently similar, many differences between the two narratives can be located—in Chandrabati’s story, the astrologer informs Ravan of his impending death because of Sita; in the second case, Ravan himself chooses how he is going to die. Chandrabati vividly paints Mandodari’s lamentable state as she is incapable of saving her daughter’s life —“Hearing the news her mother’s heart cried out/ Tears flowed over, flooding her breasts.” (Sen, Chandrabati’s Ramayan 23). However, in Adbhuta Ramayana, Mandodari’s maternal instinct is clouded by her fear of social judgement, she kills the embryo without even informing her husband of her pregnancy.
In Ananda Ramayana, Mandodari is not Sita’s mother and it is she who suggests to throw the baby girl into the jungle. According to this narrative, King Padmaksha’s daughter Padma jumps into fire to save herself from Ravan’s lust; Ravan collects five gems from her funeral pyre from which Sita is born. However, what attributes uniqueness to Chandrabati’s narrative is that her heroine is blessed with three mother figures—she is born from Mandodari, finds shelter temporarily in Sata’s home and is finally adopted by Janaka’s queen. She has two fathers as well—Madhab and Janaka. But Chandrabati seems to have no interest in exploring their paternal affection for Sita; she intends to write about the misfortunes of womenfolk. Ravan cannot be called Sita’s father as she has been born as a result of Mandodari’s poison consumption, not because of her (Mandodari) physical union with him. Ironically, Ravan’s attempt to save his life by trying to get rid of the baby girl sows the seed of the events, the consequences of which lead him to his destruction.
Chandrabati’s inclusion of Sita’s Baromasi is undoubtedly a bold step taken by her. First of all, it adds to the novelty of her story and sets it apart from the mainstream narratives. Secondly, it has attributed to the story a greater mobility and dynamism. Thirdly, it has created a fusion of two genres—epic and folk literature. In her Baromasi, Sita offers a cheerful account of her marriage and the romantic moments that she has spent with her husband, though her earlier happiness has been overshadowed by the misery Ravan caused to her. Chandrabati has slightly broken away from the Baromasi tradition in a sense that her heroine begins with a description of the exultant moments of her life while Baromasi is generally considered to be a song of grief and hardship. In the words of Mandakranta Bose—
Here again her baromasi varies from others, for it begins with a long reconstruction of pleasures past. This is the only period of unalloyed joy in her life and it is commemorated as an idyll, freed from the cares of court life, living in an Edenic state that is soon to be lost and never regained. (A Woman’s Ramayana 25)
Though Chandrabati’s Sita is aware of her being adopted by Janaka and his queen, she doesn't know who her actual mother is. She recounts the blissful days she spent with her family when she used to be the pampered princess of Mithila. She was happy to have Rama as her husband, but the irony of her fate did not allow her to stay at her in-law’s house for long. When Kaikeyi and Manthara deprived Rama of his kingdom and sent him to exile, Sita accompanied him. She had no trouble in leaving the palace and living in a hut, she did not mind eating fruits to satisfy her hunger. As she found fulfilment in her husband’s love, luxury meant nothing to her—“Far more luxurious than a hundred kingdoms were my lord’s feet” (Sen, Chandrabati’s Ramayan 50)
In their attempt to construct Rama-Sita as the ‘ideal couple’, Valmiki and his followers choose not to discuss their love life or sex life. Chandrabati’s pen has breathed life into the so-called idealistic but cold relationship between the two. Without adding any erotic element that sexually stimulates the reader, she has depicted Rama-Sita’s romance in a way that attracts a woman’s attention. Rama nursing his beloved wife who gets injured and bleeds while walking in the scorching heat of summer, Sita making a garland of wild flowers to put it around her husband’s neck, Sita sleeping peacefully after resting her head on Rama’s shoulder, the couple spending lovey-dovey moments while enjoying the splendid beauty of the forest—such fascinating pictures have been graphically portrayed by Chandrabati who turns Rama-Sita from a so-called perfect but passionless pair into a couple in love. However, Sita’s euphoric state has soon been replaced by gloom after her abduction by Ravan. Chandrabati has made Sita her mouthpiece to present a capsule summary of the epic. She has bestowed upon Sita a dream vision through which she delineates key events such as the arrival of monkey troops in Lanka and the deaths of major figures like Indrajit, Kumvakarna and Ravan. Clearly, the narrator is interested neither in bloodshed nor in exaggerating Rama’s valour like her male contemporaries. She not only rejects the epic tradition of providing comprehensive details of warfare but also discards the serious tone of this genre while depicting Rama-Sita romantic scenes. The couple playing dice surrounded by Sita’s Sakhis, Rama taking off his own ring and putting it into Sita’s finger, Rama kissing Sita after putting her on his lap, Sita blushing and turning red— Chandrabati thus brings before the readers sweet and intense scenes of Rama-Sita romance in a playful manner, hence describing the last happy hour of her heroine’s life which is soon going to be devastated by Kukuya’s malicious design and Rama’s subsequent wrong judgement that lead Sita to her death. Chandrabati’s Rama is a narrow-minded person who lacks clarity and wisdom and whose callousness not only destroys his conjugal bliss but also ruins the welfare of his state and his people. To quote Mandakranta Bose—
The sequences on which Candrabati lays the heaviest emphasis are all focused on Sita, in effect tracing her life from birth to death. Candravati’s narrative choice seems deliberately designed to shift the focus from Rama to Sita and to weave the plot around her life. (Designing Women 109)
However, following the male writers, Chandrabati has also constructed the dichotomy of ‘good woman’ and ‘bad woman’ to denote two contrasting groups who are characteristically different from one another. Though, in mainstream Ramayanas, Sita-Surpanakha dichotomy has been formed to glorify the good and condemn the bad, Surpanakha has no such role to play in Chandrabati’s narrative. But, without the presence of a negative character, the dramatic idealization of Sita’s personality will remain incomplete. Therefore, she has created a unique character, Kukuya, who is the personification of evil and the binary opposite of Sita; if Sita is Lakshmi, she is Alakshmi. Mandakranta Bose was right when she stated—
Candravati’s Ramayana is a story of a woman’s betrayal reflected in other women’s lives and thus— and only thus— universalised. It turns from battles to their victims and mourns them instead of applauding the war heroes. (Designing Women 113)
Chandrabati’s brilliant fabrication of Kukuya, who does not exist in any other version of the epic, has attributed exceptionality to her story. Having been instigated by Manthara’s persuasion, Kaikeyi eats mango seeds as a consequence of which a baby girl is born; after Kaikeyi Manthara names her Kukuya. The narrator has given a number of evil omens suggesting the terror of the world of nature and animals at the birth of Kukuya—“The cows in shed began to moo in apprehension/Suddenly the sun hid itself in the sky/ There was total darkness at two in the afternoon” (Sen, Chandrabati’s Ramayan 40)
Kukuya’s hideous physical features go hand in hand with her disagreeable manners—“A black cobra, full of deadly venom, was Kukuya '' (Bose, A Woman’s Ramayana 78). Saturated with the wickedness that has been imparted to her by Manthara, her favourite pastime is ruining her closed ones and preparing grounds for their doom. Kukuya’s husband lost his mental balance as she forced him to drink a poisonous potion. Her in-laws and neighbours despised her for her quarrelsome nature. Though her husband is alive, she lives like a widow and stays in her father’s house for the last ten years. After destroying her family life by her own hand, she vows to devastate Sita’s marital bliss as she is jealous of Rama’s love for Sita and her status as the queen of Ayodha.
In the last part of the narrative, it is Kukuya who takes control of the whole plot. She takes advantage of Sita’s simplicity and forces her to draw a picture of Ravan. She finally succeeds in brainwashing Rama by her venomous talk. She convinces him to believe that Sita is unchaste, in love with another man, a stain on Raghu dynasty, and deserves to be banished forever. However, the narrator makes sure Kukuya gets punished for her wrongdoings, thus establishing poetic justice. At the time of Sita’s fire ordeal, an overenthusiastic Kukuya lights the fire herself, but it is she who gets hurt by the fire that burns her face and hair; it is only by the mercy of Sita that she gets saved from her impending death.
Instead of challenging the male constructed definition of chastity, the narrator has further promoted this very concept by presenting Sita as the ultimate specimen of purity, the Sati Naari whose virtues are set as the benchmark against which the cultural evaluation of an Indian woman can be made. Her Sita is not vocal, she doesn't know how to protest and question the system, rather she is a silent sufferer whose endless pain arouses the reader’s pity for her. Mandakranta Bose, in A Woman’s Ramayana, has aptly stated—
Candravati’s Sita has no such queenly temper. Rather, she fits the image of her cultivated in popular belief as an infinitely submissive wife. By foregrounding her virtuous resignation, Candravati so glaringly spotlights Sita’s victimhood that seen against it Rama’s tyranny shows in the darkest belief. (32)
Sita’s unjust abandonment proves to be fatal for Ayodha— disease consumes people, scholars and sages leave the court, people begin to get involved in sinful activities. The narrator openly blames Rama for ruining his state and his people in this way. “Instead of praising Rama, Chandrabati often intrudes into the narrative to comment on Rama’s foolishness, to advise and guide him and to accuse him of the devastation that awaits Ayodha” (Sen, Retelling the Ramayana 171).
In most of the mainstream male narratives, Rama is assured of Sita’s restrained sexuality, yet he sends her to Valmiki’s ashram as his people are doubtful of her chastity. Valmiki and his followers have portrayed Rama as the ideal king who does not even hesitate to sacrifice his wife and domestic peace for his subjects. But Chandrabati’s Rama is a typical suspicious husband sceptical about his wife’s loyalty to him. While having a conversation with Lakshman, he refers to Sita as a dangerous woman responsible for the destruction of Lanka and Kishkindhya, adding that he fears the same for Ayodha and therefore he does not wish to see her face anymore, “Which god has created Sita with which poison who knows/ I am burning, burning, burning in that poison, my insides burn/ Only the ascetics’ hermitage can bear this poison” (Sen, Chandrabati’s Ramayan 76).
In sharp contrast to Rama, Sita does not utter a single abusive word against him, rather she blames her destiny and mourns her sorrowful life. Even after her banishment by Rama, she offers her greetings to him and requests Lakshman to keep her sister Urmila happy, suggesting that Urmila should never be subjected to the suffering that she is going through.
Valmiki, Krittibas and other traditional male writers have mentioned Sita’s fire test twice in their respective narratives. Though Sita jumps into fire and passes the test after Rama defeated Ravan at Lanka, the people of Ayodha are unsure about the validity of a test that took place in a faraway country. Rama, who is bound to his duty as a ruler, requests Sita to face another test to prove her acceptability as a queen to the citizens of Ayodha. Chandrabati has omitted the first fire ordeal probably because she wanted to add more dramatic elements in Sita’s Patal Prabesh scene, or maybe she wanted to avoid unnecessary complications in her plot since her narrative is one tenth or even shorter than Valmiki’s epic. In the third book of Chandrabati’s Ramayana, Rama, who is unapologetically rude to his wife, proposes the fire test for clearing his own doubts about her. Having found his offensive words unbearable, Sita resolves to quit her life in a dignified manner.
I know not who my parents were, nor who my brother might be/ Luckless since birth this woman lives by your grace alone/ Fire cannot touch me, chaste woman that I am/ But if I do enter fire today, I do not wish to return. (Sen, Chandrabati’s Ramayan 93)
Sita’s Patal Prabesh is her way of protesting against patriarchy, true, but there is no rebellious spark in Chandrabati’s Sita. Instead of questioning Rama for the physical and emotional torture that she is being subjected to, she considers herself to be a victim of her fate. This silent submissive attitude of Sita goes missing in Krittibas’s depiction of the same episode. Though the male narrator has been an advocate of patriarchal doctrines, he allows Sita to give vent to her anger in her last speech directed towards Rama in which she expresses her disillusionment with married life and accuses Rama of humiliating her without any fault of her own.
Far from being a miserable creature, Valmiki’s Sita is also a dignified woman who angrily calls the earth-goddess to liberate her from the pangs of mortal life. But Chandrabati heightens her protagonist’s despair to such an extent that Devi Vasumati herself arrives for her rescue without any invocation on Sita’s part. In this context, it can be mentioned that Vasumati and Vasumata are two separate identities in her narrative, the latter being Valmiki’s wife. However, in Valmiki’s epic, Rama temporarily loses control over his mind after Sita’s demise. He laments and threatens to kill the goddess if she does not return his beloved wife. Brahma and other Gods console him and he resumes his duty as a ruler. Chandrabati, however, replaces Rama’s lamentation with her own mourning. Also, her narrative ends with Sita’s Patal Prabesh, she does not bother to inform the reader about what happens with Rama afterwards.
It is evident that Chandrabati has shifted her focus from Ram-Ravan battle to Sita- Kukuya conflict, where Sita’s Patal Prabesh signifies the ultimate triumph of virtue over vice. The narrator equally excels in her portrayal of the minor characters as well. One such character is Mandodari who, like Sita, is a personification of melancholy and a victim of her husband’s unjustness. She feels dejected as Ravan is a womaniser and does not love her the way she deserves. But her suicide attempt does not end her life, rather it initiates the birth of another life who subsequently becomes the cause of Ravan’s death, thus unknowingly taking revenge on Mandodari’s behalf. She is even unluckier than Sita in the sense that she is forced to cast aside her new-born baby against her will.
Talking about other women characters, Chandrabati has not given any detailed sketch of the three queens of Dasaratha, but she has suggested in the Mango episode that they are not on good terms with each other and Kaikeyi acts under the influence of her maid Manthara. Just as there is a silent competition among Dasaratha’s queens for winning his love and attention, similarly a power struggle exists between Mandodari and Ravan’s other women because in ancient or medieval Indian context the life of a virtuous woman is centred round her husband whose favour also strengthens her position in the household.
In Chandrabati’s narrative, all royal women with the exception of Janaka’s queen share one thing in common—grief. No matter whether she is a bechari like Sita or Mandodari, or a bitch like Kukuya—they share an equally miserable fate, none of them ever experiences pure and uninterrupted happiness. On the other hand, Valmiki and his wife Vasumata seem to have been leading a contented married life as Valmiki is portrayed as a pleasant personality and they live peacefully in an ashram amidst the backdrop of wonderful natural beauty which can be regarded to be a metaphor of the beautiful relationship that they share.
Chandrabati’s characterization of Sata, the wife of a poor fisherman in Mithila, has accorded a new dimension to her narrative. Her presence is significant because, unlike the mythological women, she is blessed with a loving husband and is genuinely happy in her life. Despite her brief appearance, her importance in giving the story its momentum is undeniable.
Sata is an ideal wife who washes the mud on her husband’s feet after he comes home from fishing, she fans him with palm leaf to save him from summer heat, wraps him with her own Sari in winter, she eats the leftover on his plate —“She was happy at her husband’s happiness, sad at her husband’s sorrows'' (Sen, Chandrabati’s Ramayan 23). Though she spends her days fasting, wears jute sarees and sells fishes in the houses of Mithila, she never complains of poverty—“If a chaste woman has an honest husband at home, she suffers no pain from the lack of food or clothes”(26).
After Sita’s arrival, Sata’s material hardship comes to an end as a reward of her honesty and goodness. Sata chewing Pan-Supari in a gangajali sari and Ram-Lakshman bangles reminds the reader of the lifestyle of an affluent housewife in rural Bengal. She has no greed for expensive ornaments, she readily refuses when Janaka’s queen offers her a gajamoti necklace in exchange for Sita. Rather, Sata gives Sita her name as she desires to be an inextricable part of Sita’s existence.
Chandrabati has successfully established the point that the foundation of any successful relationship is mutual understanding and wealth has no direct link with happiness. Ravan’s promiscuousness, Rama’s distrust of Sita, Kukuya’s maliciousness and Dasaratha’s polygamous nature ruin their relationships with their respective spouses. On the other hand, Madhav-Sata and Valmiki-Vasumata are portrayed as happy couples, though poverty is their constant companion.
Chandrabati has not only left her mark in the portrayal of individual characters but also in her representation of the group of demon women of Lanka. In her narrative, the demon women are magnificently charming, they enhance their hair with parijat flowers, they are even more gorgeous than the pearls and the diamonds that they wear, they sleep on beds made of gold and drink ambrosia—clearly the re-teller has subverted the stereotypical portrayal of the demon women where they are used to symbolize ugliness, violence and abhorrence.
Another point that deserves attention is Chandrabati’s exquisite delineation of certain rituals of Bengali women. When baby Sita comes to Sata's home in the form of an egg in a casket, Sata decorates the floor with an alpana, places the casket on an Asan and welcomes baby Sita with Sindur and Durba grass. The re-teller pictures another scene where the womenfolk of Ayodha ululate in the rejoice of Rama’s birth and worship deities like Mangal Chandi, Subachari Devi, Bana Durga Devi, Shitala. Shasthi, Mansa and Neta devi; goddesses who are generally worshipped in rural Bengal. She also frequently refers to various tales from Bengali folk literature, especially stories of Manasa Mangal find special importance in her narrative. As Chandrabati spent her entire life in a village in East Bengal, it is quite natural that she spontaneously reflects the rituals of the women of rural Bengal in her Ramayana.
The mainstream authors have made the Ramayana so magnificently comprehensive that they have left some gaps in their narratives which bear the possibility of exploration, inquisition and counter-narratives by authors in subsequent times. Chandrabati is the first woman re-teller who has wisely deciphered some of these very gaps and worked on them to produce her own version of the epic. She has adopted a liberal attitude in the portrayal of her characters without exaggerated glorification of so-called male heroes; the struggle between the binary opposite groups has been developed in an interesting manner. Just as traditional mythologists have formed Sita-Surpanakha dichotomy to differentiate between chaste woman and unchaste woman, similarly Chandrabati has constructed Sita-Kukuya dichotomy to differentiate between virtue and vice. She also questions the institution of marriage that signifies the sole dominance of the husband over his wife’s sexuality. Rama’s banishment of Sita makes it clear that men had the authority to end their relationships with their wives on certain grounds; especially when her chastity is in question. Though women are supposed to practice monogamy to secure herself from punishment and social condemnation, the opposite is not true. There is not a singular incident in Chandrabati’s retelling where the wife abandons her husband. Though Ravan is a pervert, an abuser of women, Mandodari is an embodiment of tolerance, she remains the loyal wife of a disloyal husband, shedding tears in silence. The mistreatment of women, especially Rama’s attitude towards Sita certainly infuriates Chandrabati, not because Sita’s social unacceptability results from her supposed physical impurity, but because Rama unjustly doubts Sita who is an ideal wife material. The woman re-teller has not subverted the pre-established concept of chastity which is a chauvinistic strategy to judge and evaluate women and to limit them within spaces relegated to them. Though she presents a shocking picture of women’s sufferings at the hands of their husbands and questions the position of women in a male dominated society, most of her women characters are dumb, mute and compliant creatures trapped in unhappy marriages and subjected to domestic violence in some form or the other. Moreover, in order to glorify the concept of female virtue, Chandrabati, following the examples of the mainstream writers, has attempted to manifest a direct link between physical purity of Sita and supernatural power acquired by her as a result of her endless devotion and loyalty to Rama. She remains intact even after she is thrown into fire and gets a permanent place in the abode of the earth-goddess. To conclude, it can be said that Chandrabati has glorified the tolerance and sufferings of Sita, her subservience to Rama and her limitless self-imposed penance—thus representing her as a symbol of purity, but has silenced her voice when situation demanded her to be vocal, as if she is born only to exemplify characteristic facets of ideal womanhood which fitted well with the requirements of patriarchal social structure. To quote Nabaneeta Dev Sen—
It is time to judge Chandrabati's Ramayana for what it is—a long poem composed in the oral tradition, drawing heavily on available rural women's songs on Sita. She strung the songs together, added her own outraged comments on Rama, and gave them a single corporate identity under the name "Ramayana". In one way however, Chandrabati did accommodate the dominant ideology in her poem: in the figure of her main character and narrator Sita. Sita never rebels. In Chandrabati's text we hear two voices—one rebellious and sharp, which is her own, and the other, conventional and soothing, the voice of Sita. (Rewriting the Ramayana 176-177)
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