Sitaसीता

Sita is the wife of Rama and the second subject of the Ramayana: the epic is named for him, but it turns on her. She is abducted, and the war is fought to recover her; she is recovered, and the story's hardest passages are about what is then done to her.

Her name is the ordinary Sanskrit word sītā, the furrow — the channel a plough opens. That is not decoration. In the Bala Kanda Janaka tells Rama how he came by her: she was raised up by the plough from the furrow of a field he was consecrating, and he calls her ayonijā, not born of a womb (Bala Kanda 66). She is therefore a daughter of the earth before she is a daughter of any king, and the tradition keeps both facts.

Two readings of her run side by side and both are old. In one she is the model of pativrata — constancy to a husband through fourteen years of forest, ten months of captivity and a public trial. In the other she is the one who argues, and wins: it is Sita who talks Rama into taking her to the forest at all, and Sita who refuses Hanuman's offer to carry her out of Lanka, on the grounds that Rama should come for her himself.

The name is older than the epic. Rigveda 4.53.6 invokes a Sītā who is a goddess of the furrow, asked to bless the fields — an agricultural deity, with no connection to Rama. Whether the epic figure grew out of her or simply inherited the name is unsettled, but the older layer is there in the text.

The furrow birth itself may be a later insertion. In the Ramopakhyana of the Mahabharata, and in Vimalasuri's Jain Paumacariya, Sita is simply Janaka's biological daughter, with no miracle involved. Fr. Camille Bulcke argued from this that the plainer account is the older one and that the furrow was written in afterwards. The Bala Kanda is in any case one of the two books most scholars treat as later than the epic's core — the same caution that applies to Rama's genealogy applies to her birth.

The identification with Lakshmi is later still, and is a Puranic development rather than an epic one. The Vishnu Purana and Padma Purana name her an avatar of Lakshmi, the Linga Purana a form of her. The Sita Upanishad, attached to the Atharvaveda, goes further and identifies her with Prakriti, primordial nature, whose three powers appear in the world as will (icchā), action (kriyā) and knowledge (jñāna). None of this is asserted in the middle books of Valmiki, where she is a woman.

Sita is almost never shown alone. The standard image is the Rama Panchayatana — Rama seated or standing at the centre, Sita at his right, Lakshmana and Bharata flanking, Hanuman below — and her placement at his right hand is fixed enough that it is how she is identified in a group where the brothers are not.

Where the texts describe her they give a golden complexion: the Aranya Kanda calls her flawless in every limb and golden-hued like polished gold. Hanuman's report in the Sundara Kanda adds dark hair, bimba-red lips, a slender waist and eyes like lotus petals. She wears a sari, often with a veil, and jewellery of metal, pearls or flowers.

Her symbol is the pink lotus, shared with Lakshmi, and — uniquely hers — the furrow and the plough. She carries no weapon. In sculpture she is frequently smaller in scale than Rama, a convention of relative status rather than a statement about her.

Sita has no cycle of independent forms in the way Devi does; she is worshipped as herself, under names that record where she is from and whose daughter she is.

• Jānakī — daughter of Janaka. The commonest devotional name.
• Maithilī — princess of Mithila.
• Vaidehī — of Videha, her father's kingdom, whose name also means one who transcends the body.
• Bhūmijā — born of Bhumi, the earth.
• Siyā — the Awadhi form, standard in the Ramcharitmanas and in the greeting Siya-Ram.

The pairing Sita-Rama is treated as a single object of worship rather than two, and in much of North India the name Sita-Ram functions as both greeting and mantra. Where a temple is called a Sita-Rama temple, she is not a subsidiary figure in it.

The bow, and the marriage. Janaka sets the bow of Shiva as the condition for marrying her. Rama strings it and it breaks. At the wedding her sister Urmila marries Lakshmana and her cousins Mandavi and Shrutakirti marry Bharata and Shatrughna, all in one ceremony (Bala Kanda 71–73).

The argument about the forest. Rama intends to go into exile alone. Sita's case for going with him is one of the longest speeches given to her in the epic, and she wins it.

The abduction. Ravana takes her from Panchavati in the Aranya Kanda. The line drawn to protect her — the Lakshmana rekha — is not in Valmiki; see Lakshmana's entry.

Lanka. Hanuman finds her in the Sundara Kanda and offers to carry her back. She refuses: it would rob Rama of the recovery, and she will not be carried by another man.

The fire. After the war Rama receives her coldly and she enters fire to answer the charge. Agni returns her from the flames and testifies that she is without fault (Yuddha Kanda).

The second exile. In the Uttara Kanda, public rumour resurfaces and Rama sends her away while she is pregnant. She bears Kusha and Lava at Valmiki's ashram (Uttara Kanda 66), and the sage raises them on the poem itself. When Rama finally asks her to prove herself again, she calls on her mother the earth instead, and Bhumi opens and takes her back.

Sita Navami, also called Janaki Navami, marks her appearance: the ninth day of the waxing moon in Vaishakha (April–May). Married women fast on it for their husbands' long life, and the day is kept most seriously in Mithila and Bihar.

Vivaha Panchami, the fifth day of the waxing moon in Agrahayana (November–December), is her wedding day, celebrated on a large scale at Janakpur in Nepal with a procession that re-enacts the marriage.

She is central to observances not named for her. Ramlila in the nine nights before Dussehra stages her abduction and recovery; Vijayadashami marks Ravana's defeat, which is her rescue; Diwali in the north celebrates the return to Ayodhya, which is her homecoming as much as Rama's. Her name comes first in the greeting Siya-Ram and in Jai Siya Ram.

Recitation of the Sundara Kanda — the book in which she is found — is a devotional practice in its own right, kept especially on Saturdays and in the month of Shravana.

Janaki Mandir, Janakpur (Nepal) is the largest temple dedicated to her, built in 1910 in a Rajput-Mughal style on the site the tradition identifies as Janaka's palace, and the centre of the Vivaha Panchami celebration.

Punaura Dham and Sita Kund, Sitamarhi (Bihar) mark the traditional site of her appearance from the furrow; the district takes its name from her. Panth Pakar, nearby, is held to be a resting place on her wedding journey.

Sita Samahit Sthal, Bhadohi (Uttar Pradesh) marks the place where the earth is said to have received her back.

Seetha Amman Temple, near Nuwara Eliya (Sri Lanka), is a rare temple to her outside the subcontinent, at the site local tradition identifies with her captivity. Sitabani Temple in the Nainital district (Uttarakhand) is associated with her forest exile, and Sita Mai Temple in Karnal (Haryana) is a further independent shrine.

Beyond these she is present in every Rama temple — at Ayodhya, Bhadrachalam, Rameswaram and Sitamarhi alike — installed at his right.

Sita is the figure through whom the Ramayana asks its hardest question. Rama's dilemma as king and his conduct as a husband collide over her, twice, and the epic does not resolve it in his favour so much as record it. The Uttara Kanda's second banishment has been argued over for two thousand years, and it is the passage most often cited by readers who find the epic's ideal of kingship unbearable.

That argument is why she is not only a model of endurance. Later women's traditions in Maithili, Telugu and Marathi song read her as a woman wronged by a good man, and sing the parts of her story the Sanskrit text passes over quickly. Both readings are inside the tradition, not outside it.

Her other line of significance is the older one. She comes from a furrow and returns to the ground, and between those two events she is a queen. That arc keeps a Vedic earth-goddess alive inside a dynastic epic, and it is why she is invoked at sowing as readily as at a wedding.