Finding Sita's Voice in Two Medieval Assamese Ramayanas

The last decade has seen a renewed engagement with canonical texts, in Sanskrit and, perhaps more importantly, the many other Indian languages. These engagements typically take the form of a translation, and sometimes, thankfully, a helpful and necessary critical overview of the text. To both be able to translate in a spirit that adheres to the original, as well as provide a psychological and historical overview of the text, is often achieved only by two separate scholars.

In this context, the scholar and novelist Tilottoma Misra’s Sita’s Voice in the Assamese Ramayana: Selected Verses from the Ramayana of Madhava Kandali and the Uttarakanda of Sankaradeva is most welcome. Misra has translated the sections that have Sita’s voice in the two canonical medieval Assamese texts. Though the title is a mouthful, it is necessary for revealing the complexity of the textual tradition in India. The Ramayana of Madhava Kandali and the Uttarakanda of Sankaradeva are versions of the Ramayana written between the 14th and 15th century CE.

As these texts were not carefully preserved, the last century has seen immense scholarship in terms of the collation of numerous manuscripts with different systems of spelling and of different provenance. Misra builds on the deep scholarship.

This is important as there is often a reflex regional or national pride in tradition today, without a sufficient appreciation of the variations in manuscripts of the texts we hold in our hands – one cannot be proud of tradition without concretely understanding the age and context of the texts involved.

One sees how the Rama-tradition spans the body of work of individual writers, to become an integral part of an Indic fabric. Later poets have insisted that they cannot hope to match the ancients such as Valmiki in the telling of the Ramayana. Yet, despite this avowed humility, the centre of gravity shifts with each telling.

In the Madhava Kandali text, for example, Hanuman feels that the togetherness of their forest life, amidst poverty and unsafety, was better than the marital strife that finally ends the marriage. The song of the sons awakens Rama to his duties as father and husband, not just as king. This is even as “anger, insult and shame had so wounded Janaki’s heart”, that she chooses to walk out of the marriage and motherhood, and return to her mother (Earth’s) home.

Even as there is continuity, there is difference. Each retelling necessarily wrinkles the tale to contour new dimensions.

The opening scenes, of Rama and Sita discussing exile, mark how distinct Madhava Kandali’s text is. One can visualise Sita remarking on the unhappy Rama at this moment of banishment – he has no ornaments on his body, he is unaccompanied by his favoured elephant or his royal eight-horsed chariot. Rama does not hold back his anger toward Kaikeyi, though he composes himself soon enough. So too does Sita, after a moment of dread and paralysis, which strains the delicate lines of her throat, and makes her ‘heron-voiced anklets tremble’ as she quakes at the immensity of the moment. There seems to already be a greater inter-mixture of visual and psychological play than in Valmiki’s narrative.

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The male voice of Rama (and allied voices like his mother Kausalya) is more predictably paternalist – he worries about a court-born lady living in the forest. Rama worries that in the forest – as both of them are reduced to bone and skin – their affection might be strained. It is Sita’s voice that is more unusual, plangent and firm in its resolve. This is true throughout the text, where Sita, as it were, steps out of her own narrative, and asserts a free expressiveness, an exultant courage: she jumps into the fire with “a happy and fearless face”.

It would seem that with the many retellings of the Rama-story, both Rama and Sita are aware of the story in advance – thus, Rama seems to know that the golden deer is a bait, and yet he surrenders to the story. There is an increasing fatalism in the Rama-traditions by the second millennium – otherwise, why would Rama, whose warriorship is anyway underplayed by the Ramayana tellings of this period, and who would not even “hurt an ant unnecessarily”, feel the compulsion to banish his beloved?

This is a quality that becomes increasingly evident in the medieval Ramayanas, such as the 16th century Tulsidas Ramayana in Awadhi. Yet, unlike Tulsidas, Madhava Kandali’s text is less conservative – it is accepted that it is the real Sita (and not a simulacrum as in Tulsidas) who is carried away, and that Ravana indeed touches her to lift her. Her continual stream of angry words to Ravana is real.

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The text has many fine witticisms, such as “Wisdom is often determined by action, not action by wisdom”. This is piquantly said with reference to the error of judgment by a god (Rama in hunting the bejewelled deer). Nature makes fewer such errors – the birds and wind turn deathly silent when Ravana in the guise of a mendicant comes for the 16-year-old Sita, and utters his sweet words of invitation.

Misra has to translate across time and literary register – little links the high Assamese of the 14th century to Assamese today, not to speak of the written English of the present. The solution to all translations must necessarily be many translations by many translators, such that the emotional tone of the whole may somehow be evoked, even if only fleetingly. In time, one hopes for a full metrical translation of these key Assamese poets, but for now, Misra has taken a giant first stride with this joyful translation.

Nikhil Govind is the author, most recently, of The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata (Bloomsbury, 2023).