Dear Ms Paley,
I walked into the classroom in an absolutely drowsy state with a tired body after a long and
hectic day with multiple classes. Your movie Sita Sings the Blues is played on screen. The very
first bout of music and then the first scene where Sita emerges from the sea and eventually
starts grooving to the music piqued my interest. The blues music, along with the cut-out and the
electronic production alerted my senses. I had not envisioned the Ramayan the way you
recreated it.
Being born in India the Ramayan inevitably became a story I was retold many times. My
memory of Ramayan extends beyond the oral narrations. As I write to you, Ms Paley, I recollect
7-8 different books and movies through which I engaged with the Ramayan. I am sure I have
watched the Ramayan in other movies of it and read it in other books.
As I watched your movie, the first thing to catch my attention was the choice of music, whether it
is the music playing in the background, the transitions or the songs Sita sings. The blues music
which finds its origin in the late 19th early 20th century by the African-Americans started off as a
medium of expression of the struggles of the black life in America. Blues was both the medium
and vocalisation of the African-American dissent against their treatment. Ramayan, being a
quintessential Indian myth, similarly does a great job of depicting patriarchy, supernatural
elements, sacrifice, parental domination among other prevalent themes. The juxtapositioning of
blues and the Ramayan, as far fetched as it may seem, is absolutely fitting in Sita Sings the
Blue.
Sita Sings the Blues is not the only version of Ramayan, that I have engaged with, that breaks
from the Valmiki’s version of it. I have strong visual recollections of the only time I attended a
Jain dharmic class out of compulsion and the teacher, or the guruji as everyone referred to him,
started talking of the Jain version of Ramayan. This version of Ramayan portrays Ram as a
sinner, someone who is condemned to hell for his deeds. Ravan, in the same version of
Ramayan, is an extremely sacrosanct creature who will become a Tirthankara in the next set of
Tirthankaras, the messengers of the Jain philosophy, by washing away his bad deeds through
austerity and good karma.
Every state in India has its own version of Ramayan. In fact, dividing the different versions state-
wise is an inaccurate way of categorising given the distribution of ethnicities and cultural groups
across India and how almost all of them have their own version of Ramayan. These versions
barely adhere to the usual version of Ramayan. One depicts Ramayan as a spiritual saga where
Ram is a personification of the inner soul and Ravan of the ego.
But then, what is mythology? A story with some central characters and a brief central plot which
has varying interpretations of itself across different cultures, religions and geographies.
Ramayan is no exception. A. K. Ramanujan in an essay titled three-hundred Ramayans used 5
versions of Ramayan to dissect and understand this aspect unique to any mythological story.
