New Delhi, India
At The Forest of Enchantment, women understand women, support women, and write about women because no other gender can. It is no surprise that men can never understand women and their feelings and can never write about women and how their lives unfold from infant to woman. “Why do you write only about Rama in your Ramayana, sage Valmiki?“ He was perplexed when Sita asked her about such a void in his writing without her perspective.
Sage Valmiki simply told Sita that a man cannot write about a woman as he has no idea about her feelings, experiences, and perspective. He told Sita to write her story in a way that the world could understand her perspective too, in the Sitayana.
This is where we know that the worlds of women and men are different.
Men write for men, about men, to support men. Then, who is going to write for women, about women, to support women? The question is stagnating, but a valid one. A woman was the answer.
When I read The Forest of Enchantment, I fell in love with the resilience, womanly experiences, and opinions of a strong, independent woman, Sita. She married Rama, the son of King Dashratha, but Sita is Sita. Her presence and character stand as the valor of an independent soul. She is complete on her own.
She faced the most challenging times a woman can face but stood as a woman with all her womanly power within her.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni wrote Sitayana with the name “The Forest of Enchantment (Amazon Link),” a place where she went from a lover to a woman. Let’s dig into the book and find out what made the story of Sita, every woman’s story, and how we must know our strength despite having relations to string together in a beaded necklace.
The Forest of Enchantment—A Story of Sita: A Woman With A Tender Heart
Janaki, the daughter of King Janak, is lovingly known as Sita. She got married to Rama, the prince of the Kaushala Kingdom. As a new bride, she was in deep love with Rama. She was living a beautiful life with her sisters, Urmila, Shrutkirti, and Mandavi—now her sisters-in-law in the Kaushal Kingdom. But her happiness did not remain for long.
Queen Kaikayi wanted her boons to be fulfilled. On a night, she remained in her isolated palace, famously known as “Kop Bhavan,” and used a woman’s other secret power, “Woman Tantrums” or “Stri-hut,” to make her son, Bharat the King, and send Rama to the forest as a forest dweller for 14 years. Sita joined her husband in exile to play the role of an ideal wife in society.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni then began to narrate a story of a woman no one ever read in a way—she inked in a way where heartless can cry with tears rolling down, heartaches, and feeling the pain of Sita, a girl who became a woman. A newly married bride to a wife. A wife to a queen and a queen to a woman.
Sita’s Abduction and Abandonment in the Forest of Enchantment
For 13 years in the forest as a dweller, Sita spent time as an adventurer with her husband, Rama, and brother-in-law, Laxman. The last year, the 14th year, was a year of separation from her love and pain as a prisoner of Lanka. She reconnected with her origin as a daughter of Bhudevi. She stood up for herself against Ravana’s wrongdoings and remained dignified throughout the year, facing humiliation, insult, and scars on a married woman’s character.
Rama became Lord Rama, rescuing Sita, a prisoner in the Lanka Kingdom.
To accept Sita as a wife, he asked her to prove her chastity.
But destiny had something else in store for Sita when she returned to the Kaushal Kingdom—not as Rama’s wife but as Lanka’s prisoner, the ink-blacked, unchaste woman who remained in another man’s kingdom for a whole year.
This is when the real journey of an abandoned woman began in the man-made society.
Read More: The Palace of Illusion by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.
