The Dignity and Strength of Sita

The episodes

Sita is sometimes remembered only as the one who suffered. Read the Ramayana closely and she is the one who decides.

When Ram is exiled he tells her to stay in the palace. She refuses, argues her case point by point, and wins. No one sends her to the forest; she chooses it. In Lanka, a prisoner for nearly a year, she is offered a queen's crown and threatened with death, and answers Ravana with open contempt, placing a blade of grass between them. When Hanuman offers to carry her home, she declines: let Ram come and win her back, for his honour and hers. Years later, sent away while carrying her children, she raises Luv and Kush alone in Valmiki's ashram into princes who can recite an epic and face an army. And when asked to prove herself a second time before the court, she does not plead. She calls on the Earth to take her, and goes.

The reasoning

Sita's strength is of a kind the world often overlooks because it does not carry a weapon. It is the strength to hold one's ground with no ally, no army and no certainty of rescue. Ravana could carry her off; he could not make her consent, and he knew it. The whole war happens because one woman would not be moved.

Her choices also show that loyalty and self-respect are not opposites. She follows her husband into hardship out of love, and when her dignity is questioned once too often, she leaves on her own terms. The epic gives her the last word, and the name people still chant puts her first: Siya-Ram.

How to practise it

• Know what you will not agree to, whatever is offered or threatened.
• Stand by the people you love in their bad years, by choice, not by compulsion.
• Raise children to be capable, as Sita did, whatever your circumstances.
• Do not keep proving yourself to those who will not be satisfied.
• Honour the women in your family as the Ramayana honours Sita, who is called Lakshmi herself.

In Ayodhya, Kanak Bhawan is remembered as Sita's own palace and Sita ki Rasoi as her kitchen. Return to all teachings, or read the Sundara Kanda, where her courage is at its clearest.