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Gender Roles in Sita's Ramayana

By Anonymous
First looking at the title of Sita's Ramayana on the syllabus, I was confused. Both of the words were brand new for me. Taking this class has really opened me up to new everything - new cultures, new words, new worlds. However, this one really confused me - Sita was probably a name but what was Ramayana? I did what any millennial/Gen-Z/whatever-they're-calling-my-generation-now scholar would do: I turned to Google.

The Ramayana is an epic poem depicting Prince Rama trying to save his wife Sita from Rava, who has ten heads and twenty arms. It's very important in Indian culture since it was written in Sanskrit and it teaches ancient Hindu teachings. After learning all this, the title made more sense. Instead of her being an object to fight over and rescue, what would it be like through Sita's eyes? The story was her's, yet it was rarely ever discussed her version of events or how it felt to have a war fought over her.

Reading Sita's Ramayana was extremely eye-opening for me. It was like no other graphic novel that I had read before. The drawing style was very similar to the authentic style used when the Ramayana was first written. Bright colors, bold colors of skin, culturally appropriate clothes - everything visually was stunning. The text is either in a speech bubble in a long-drawn bubble out of the frame or in a stand-alone box with dashed lines surrounding it. 
Image result for sita's ramayana
Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is a graphic novel about graphic novels - a textbook of the history and concepts of graphic novels in the form of graphic novels. In his work, McCloud discusses the importance of frame and the negative spaces used between frames and how that gives a sense of time. In the passage I want to discuss, the frame above shows how sudden everything is happening. There's no white space with room for time to pass. Everything happens so quickly, there's no time or room for anything else to happen.

I also chose this passage because of the way the text is written. Normally, in the original Ramayana, the viewpoint is through the men's eyes - Rava and Rama, namely. Throughout Sita's Ramayana, Sita is obviously the main character and the events are told in her perspective. What really intrigues me about this passage in particular though is when the text goes from normal lower-case lettering to it being entirely in capital letters. It shows her distress and emotional turmoil as she waits to see what will happen next.

Using the visual and textual concepts that Sita's Ramayana gives us, I think that it leaves the reader feeling a type of sorrow for all that Sita is lacking - a voice to stop this war, a choice to be an object or not, a main character in a story that is about her. At least, that's what I took away from it. Because Sita is a woman (in ancient Indian culture), she has no rights to her own life and how it played out. 

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