Sita Sings the Blues

Nina Paley created the unapologetically quirky, irreverent,

and unconventionally animated film Sita Sings the
Blues after her own divorce from her husband. She saw in
the tale of Ramayana, which the film juxtaposes with the
story of Nina’s own divorce, “the greatest break-up story
ever told.” The film tells the tragic story of Sita, who was
first kidnapped by Ravana and then cast away (twice) by her
husband Rama on suspicions of infidelity.

However, this tale of woe is narrated anything but tragically.

Sita’s story is peppered with the wildly anachronistic jazz
songs of 1920s singer Annette Hanshaw. An impossibly
curvy Sita thus sings of her woes to the upbeat tempo of
Hanshaw’s numbers, like when she sultrily croons “My Man
Don’t Love Me No More” when Rama abandons her. Paley’s
Sita reacts to her tragedy with trills instead of tears,
abandoning a woe-is-me approach in favour of waist-shaking
foot-tapping jazz numbers, which are, let’s face it, way more
fun. (Also, this film gave me the rather valuable information
that calling one’s lover “daddy” is not a modern-day sexy
black woman thing, because Annette Hanshaw beat
Beyoncé to it by decades. Paley’s Sita parrots Hanshaw in a
plaintive song titled “Daddy, Won’t You Please Come Home?”
whilst waiting for Rama to rescue her from Lanka.)

Now we all know that the Ramayana is no feminist

masterpiece. Sita follows her husband Rama to the forest,
and then remains devoted to him despite the horrible way he
treats her, volunteering for an agni pariksha (trial-by-fire) to
prove her purity when he questions her faithfulness to him.
(She does kind of kick ass as a single mom in the forest
though, when she raises the two sons of the husband who
banished her when she was pregnant.) Rama however, in
popular cultural opinion, is held up as the absolute icon
of dharma and virtuousness. His flaws as a husband are
excused as the sacrifices required for kingship, where of
course, treating women kindly isn’t a priority. And Sita’s
submissive nature has long been held up as a model of
wifeliness in India. Nationalist leaders have often urged
Indian women to adopt her virtues of pativrata (devotion to
husband) in order to attain that “Perfect Wife” status that
Sita endorsed so well in her multiple sacrifices for her
husband.

However, Paley, like millions of other women in India, found

in Sita a resonance of her own marital frustration. In a
culture where divorce is hardly ever an option, and women
are often given little to no power in the fate of their
marriages, Sita occupies the status of an everywoman. Like
the many women who have retold the Ramayana, Paley
deals with her grief at her hurtful husband by channelling a
fierce sympathy for Sita’s treatment at the hands of Rama.

Paley does this by subtly criticizing Rama, stripping him of

his much-touted “divine virtue”. Well, actually not so subtly.
Rather hilariously, Rama’s estranged sons, Lava and Kusha
sing a song in praise of their absentee father, as taught to
them by the poet-sage Valmiki. This song, starting out nice
and well with “Rama’s great, Rama’s good, Rama does what
Rama should,” quickly descends into a nursery-rhyme style
singalong where the twins dutifully intone:

“Sing his love, sing his praise,

Rama set his wife ablaze.
Got her home, kicked her out,
To allay his people’s doubt.”
Paley’s light-hearted jabs at Rama are an act of resistance
towards male-dominated narratives of the Ramayana that
paint Rama as the ultimate man of dharma. By making an
antagonist out of the usually infallible Rama, Paley launches
a critique of his deeply patriarchal and unfair behaviour
towards Sita.

But Paley’s critique of the Ramayana goes beyond simply

championing Sita’s story over Rama’s. In the gentle,
irreverent, humorous way she tells this story, she’s also
criticizing the monolithic, heavy-handed and hegemonic
version of the Ramayana that have been espoused by the
Hindu right in the country. The Ramayana is a myth, passed
on through oral traditions, from grandmother to grandchild in
countless households in India. Yet, when scholar A. K.
Ramanujam wrote an essay on the 300 Ramayanas that he
believed existed in the Indian subcontinent, it was banned
by the Hindutva right for being sacrilegious. The very nature
of mythologies is its plurality. They arise from hundreds of
different sources and interweave with local beliefs and
traditions in delightfully interesting manifestations. The
enforcement of a unitary notion of the Ramayana strips
away at these multitudes.

Sita Sings the Blues loosely follows the dominant Valmiki

version of the epic. However, the story is narrated and
commented upon by three faceless narrators, who recount
the story of the epic from memory – completely unscripted.
These narrators sound much like my friends and me – urban,
educated Indians having a chat over cups of chai and Marie
biscuits. And much like my friends and me, they are often
iffy about the details of the epic. The film starts with them
arguing over when the Ramayana was supposed to have
happened. One says the 14th century, while the other scoffs
at her and says that that’s when the Mughals were probably
in India, so it must have been in the BC. Eventually, they
settle on “a long, long, time ago.”
They jokingly allude to this sacrosanct nature of the
Ramayana that they might accidentally be defiling with their
ignorance. One of the narrators says, “I’m messing up the
names… God, they’re going to be after me!” And on another
occasion, the narrators all wonder why Sita couldn’t just go
back with Hanuman, instead of waiting for Rama to come
save her, thereby avoiding this huge, messy war. They end
with, “Don’t challenge these stories, yaar!” (And if Hindutva
hell is a thing, these narrators definitely earned their place
in it when they wondered if Rama and Sita were part of the
Mile-High Club, considering Sita became pregnant so quickly
after her airborne voyage back home from Lanka.)

The story itself, when not being narrated, is told with these
2-D animations, wherein the animation styles keep varying –
sometimes psychedelic, sometimes old-school Indian art,
sometimes cartoon-like. In these animations, the characters
of the Ramayana speak to each other in painfully ornate
tones, keeping in character of ‘a long, long, time ago’, but
occasionally break character to deliver golden lines like,
“Your ass is grass.” For example, when Dasaratha banishes
Rama, he delivers a long, sonorous speech on how he must
keep his word to his wife Kaikeyi. After he’s done, Kaikeyi
dryly adds, “Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out!”

Paley’s irreverence with the handling of this epic gently

mocks the strict unilateral understanding of the Ramayana
championed by right-wing groups. Far from being
blasphemous, what Paley does is reclaim the narrative for
herself. She dislodges it from its status as religious doctrine
and brings it back to the realm of myth, which is malleable
to imagination. She takes this reclamation one step further,
reclaiming it not just for herself, but every single viewer.
The film’s opening credits read, “Your Name Here
presents…” and then goes on to display its producers,
“Funded by You”. The audience thus become stakeholders in
the narrative. Paley actively encourages the audience to
make the story our own, reminding us that the Ramayana
can be ours as much as it was Valmiki’s or Tulsidas’.