‘Forest of Enchantments’ by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

karanbir singh
4 min readFeb 22, 2022

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s latest novel, ‘The Forest of Enchantments’, is a modern-day retelling of the ancient Indian epic, Ramayan, just this time it has been sung under Sita’s breath, hence she refers to it as her ‘Sitayan’. This inversion is a gift for the epic, which had long been narrated, exposed and supported the male entitlement while the women in the epic had been accorded as an ancillary.

Sita, who was adopted by King Janak of Mithila, is married to the conscientious, principled, punctilious and honourable ‘Ram’, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu and soon-to-be the King of Ayodhya. But soon after, due to a demand made by one of the wives of King Dashrath, Ram’s father, is coerced into banishing Ram into exile in the forests for fourteen years. As Ram prepares to honour his father’s wishes in the highest traditions of the Raghu clan, to which they belong, Sita refuses to be left behind in the luxuries of the royal palace.

In the traditional narrations of the epic, Sita’s will to stand by her husband through his harsh exile for fourteen years, giving up all the luxuries of life had always been portrayed with great monotony. This subjugated subservient portrayal of a woman is rebuked by Chitra Banerjee as she threads her words to paint her women as strong, relatable, inspirational, unique and formidable by unravelling the intricate feelings, desires and perspectives of these women characters. The author’s retelling is a treat as she not only rebrands her protagonist (Sita) but also gives space and time to other women characters which the tradition had always overlooked. “Hear our stories, too,” the women characters say in the novel.

If the women are portrayed with an elaborate sense of sensibility, the men are dignified with equal maturity, especially when Ram’s younger brother Lakshman who forbids his wife from joining them in their banishment stands and patrols their hut every night when Ram and Sita take time for themselves.

What kept me spell-bound to the book is that her words are imbedded with human sentiments even though they are the moving images of Gods — their personalities, feelings and errors are portrayed with as much humility and humanity as any other earthly being, particularly when Sita battles her desire to become a mother and draws it onto the plants she nourishes and later to the deer she is infatuated with, for which both the brothers leave at once at her request. The illusion of fate reveals itself as her nightmares turn into reality and she is abducted by Ravan, the most revered devotee of Lord Shiva and the King of Lanka, whose sister, Surpanakha, was humiliated by the two bothers when she expressed her desire for Ram and was wronged after Lakshman injured her nose with his arrow. Even though Sita was astonished at Surpanakha’s will to publicly proclaim her desire for a man in front of his wife, she is rooted with the sensibility to not judge her for her actions as she knew that the way of life in the forest is different from that in the city.

It is no surprise that the reader can only absorb and unearth as deeply as their own experiences and understanding allow them to. Men and women, naysayers, seekers, agnostics, halfwits and the wise — there is skin for all perspectives in the book and an effort to explore the story from multiple observations and explanations that are both enthralling and riveting.

Finally, after surpassing gargantuan odds, Ram traces Sita with the assistance of the monkey-God, Hanuman, and fights a final battle with Ravan to rescue her. Even in his dying breath, Ravan is rescued from his shame and crimes and is partly redeemed as his celestial identity as Jaya, the gatekeeper to the abode of Lord Vishnu called Vaikuntha (the place of eternal bliss) is revealed when Sita places her foot on his head at his request. However, as Sita is united by Ram, due to the pressure of society and his subjects, Ram caves in and asks Sita to undergo the humiliation of walking through fire unscathed to prove her chastity. According to the author, this question mark on her character and the test from which Ram was exempted highlights the male toxicity and patriarchy that not only disturbs Sita but also harms Ram.

Divakaruni uses these as a direct parallel to reflect and expose the discrimination in our society and rightly raises pertinent questions on inequality and disparity based on gender.

For even after enduring the test with all her strength and becoming the Queen of Ayodhya, she is later abandoned by Ram who in his allure for righteousness, believes that “the King’s reputation should be beyond reproach”. Thus, he bleeds before his own ethos after listening to the growing whispers of the people of Ayodhya who still challenged Sita’s purity and compared Ram to his father who was blinded by infatuation.

Despite the excruciating pain of this humiliation, Sita rises above the occasion and promises to guard her unborn kids with her last breath, “I am going to love you enough for both father and mother, I will teach you everything you need to know to be the kings you ought to be but more than that, to be good humans so that you’ll never do to a woman what your father has done to me”.

Even with his judgement and ethics in question, Divakaruni still meditates on Ram with love as even though, in his separation from Sita by his own virtue, Ram never gave up on his love for her. She brushes aside the air of judgement and biases, and leaves you with an understating that in most cases, no one is entirely right or entirely wrong –we all have our eccentricities, our idiosyncrasies, false fallacies and non-conformist, aberrant behaviours. We live according to our ideas and they are only as correct or misguided as life trains us to be.

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