Sita

Janaka of Mithila was ploughing his sacrificial ground when the blade turned up a baby girl, whole and smiling in the soft dark earth as if she had been waiting to be found. In one telling he had taken up a golden hoe himself to open the first furrow of the sowing season, before the whole farming community, when tiny fingers rose out of the ground like new grass, and he lifted her out with his own hands. Recounting the same find years later at her marriage contest, Janaka said that ploughing the sacrificial ground to clear it, his blade had turned up a little girl, and that because she was not born of any human womb he had resolved she would be won in marriage only through a test of his own choosing. He named her Sita, the word for a furrow, and in one account she is remembered clutching handfuls of that same earth and throwing it at her own kicking feet the moment she was found. Other tellings say only that he was tilling the ground for a coming ritual when she appeared, a gift, one calls her, from Mother Earth.

Janaka raised her as his own daughter and told his court that in Mithila she was already spoken of as an incarnation of the goddess Lakshmi, and that the kingdom had known no such prosperity before her finding. She grew up gentle, clever and devoted to her parents, marked, Janaka said, by a grace that seemed to belong to no mortal child. Years afterwards, telling her own history to the sage Anasuya, Sita gave the same beginning in almost the same words: her father ploughing ground he had prepared for a yagna, and, in a cleft at the foot of his plough, a bright baby girl who was herself.

Ravana carried Sita off to his ashoka grove and set her a term: submit to him within twelve months, he told her, or his cooks would chop her up for his breakfast. He ordered the rakshasis guarding her to threaten and coax her by turns, the way wild elephants are broken in, and left her surrounded by creatures with two eyes or three, with tongues too long or missing altogether, armed with lances, swords and clubs. Overwhelmed with grief among them, Sita found no peace in a grove that was, in every other way, full of fruit trees and birdsong. A different telling of the same captivity, in the Mahabharata, has her wearing an ascetic's garb and growing thin on fasting and roots, watched night and day by the same gruesome guards.

Face to face with Ravana, Sita would not soften. She told him she would rather spend a hundred years with Rama in the forest than a single hour in his palace, and warned him that Rama would crush him and his kingdom as an elephant crushes an ant. On another occasion she held up a single blade of grass between them rather than look at him directly, and said that a faithful wife could never be tempted by a sinner such as him, no more than a swan swimming with her mate would turn to a dull cormorant on the riverbank. Ravana renewed his twelve-month threat each time, and each time she refused him. It was Trijata, one of the rakshasis set to guard her, who finally brought her hope: dreaming of Rama riding a great elephant through the forest with Lakshmana at his side, coming at last to find her. Hearing the dream, Sita wept for joy, certain for the first time in a long while that her rescue was close.

Once Lanka had fallen, Rama would not simply take Sita back. He told her before the assembled monkeys and rakshasas that he had killed Ravana only for the sake of his own honour, and that he had no use now for a wife who had lived in another man's house. Grieving and unable to bear the accusation, Sita asked Lakshmana to build her a pyre, saying there was nothing left for her but to walk into the fire. Lakshmana looked to his brother for some other answer and found none, and built it with a heavy heart. Sita circled Rama once with her hands folded, approached the flames, and declared aloud, so the whole gathering could hear, that if her heart had never strayed from him even in thought, then Agni, witness to the whole world, would protect her. Then, calm, she walked into the fire.

Agni himself lifted her out unburned, dressed in gold and red exactly as she had been before, her hair unsinged and her garlands fresh. Handing her to Rama, the fire god testified that she was pure, that she had never wavered in her loyalty to him in word or thought, not even by so much as a glance at another man, for all that Ravana had held her prisoner. Brahma and the other gods descended to praise Rama as he stood before them, and Rama answered that he had never truly doubted her, and had only staged the ordeal so that no one among his people could later say he had taken back a tainted queen. One version of this same trial gives Sita a far sharper voice: in the Tamil telling by the poet Kampan, she argues that if Rama had meant to cast her off, he ought never to have sent Hanuman to find her in captivity, and tells him, with open scorn, that his anger has made being a woman seem preferable to being him.

Called before the Ayodhya court a second time to answer the same doubt that had once sent her into the fire, Sita lowered her face before the assembled gods and people and spoke only a single sentence. Her heart, she said, had never once turned to any man besides Rama, and she asked the earth goddess to open and take her in if that was so. At the words, a marvel broke the stillness: the ground split, and an unearthly golden throne rose out of it, carried on the hoods of great serpents blazing with jewels.

On the throne sat the earth herself in the shape of a goddess, Madhavi, green with the forests in her hair and blue with the seas across her, her skin the brown of the sacred soil. She took her daughter's hands and drew Sita up to sit beside her as flowers fell from the sky with a fragrance not of this world. Then, slowly, before an assembly too stunned to move, the throne sank back into the ground, and the earth closed over it as if none of it had ever happened. One retelling of the same oath frames her last words differently: rather than swearing by Rama's name, Sita compares herself to the earth, which accepts every seed with love, and asks it to take her in if she has been as true to Rama as it is true to what it holds; when the ground opens in that version, Rama lunges to pull her back, and is left holding only the ends of her hair, turned to blades of grass in his hand.