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When you trusted him...

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Source: Chitrakar, Moyna. (2018). Sita's Ramayana. Print.

Introduction
One message that I found in Sita’s Ramayana was the message of trust. This message alone could be interpreted in different ways such as trust among each other or distrust due to actions. But before I get into talking about the message of trust, a quick summary of Sita’s Ramayana. The story of Ramayana which is a Hindu mythology tale is about “the saga of a heroic war” except that Sita’s Ramayana is from the perspective of Sita, the main character and the heroine of the tale (Arni 2018). In the tale, the readers see through her perspective of her experience during the war that her “husband” Rama was in against Ravana, the demon king. Although it does change from the present to the past, the graphic novel is focused around the Sita perspective of how the war had an after affect on her and her life. There are multiple messages in the graphic novel as it is even stated in the book how “it explores ideas of right vs wrong, compassion, loyalty, trust (,etc)” (Anri 2018, Book Cover). 
Message of Truth
The first time that the readers are introduced to the message of trust is when Sita is first going into the forest. At first, the forest was questioning who Sita was and why she was in the forest, leading to the thought that the forest did not trust her (Arni 2018, 9). Once Sita starts the tale of the war and the events that happened before the war and after, she had gained the trust of the forest, plants, flowers, and the animals living within. The next time that the message of trust comes up is towards the end of the tale as the war was over with and Sita went to Rama. Unlike being happy to see Sita, Rama had a distrust towards her and said that “Ravana must have touched you. I can’t take you back” (Arni 2018, 116). Sita thought that Rama had trust in her as she even left with him when he exiled at the beginning of the tale. She trusted that he was going to give them a new life, that he was going to come get her, and that they were going to be happy in the end. That idea collapse once Rama said that to her, and she literally was going to burn herself alive until the god of fire came and said “Sita’s purity burn more fiercely than any fire”. You would think this would stop the distrust between them, but it didn’t as Rama fell for the gossip towards his Queen and abandoned her in the forest. Towards the end of the graphic novel, when Rama sees that his sons were the ones who took him down and saw Sita again, he asked for forgiveness and told her to become his queen again. Unlike how she was at the end of the war, Sita had changed and lost her trust towards Rama. She even stated that “I have been doubted once, twice, and I do not care to be doubted again” (Anri 2018, 145). 

Source: Chitrakar, Moyna. (2018). Sita's Ramayana. Print.

Pictures and Text
The way that the graphic novel portrayed the message was mostly equal between the artwork and the text. The text was Sita’s telling the tale as the artwork did more of the telling of the tale. Especially in telling the message about truth, the use of text helped whenever Rama told Sita that she was freed and that he basically didn’t trust her anymore. If the text wasn’t there, readers could not really tell what Rama was telling her or what exactly was going on as some pages did not have any movement lines. To better explain how both the text and the artwork was used to convey the message, look towards Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. In McCloud’s book, he explains the different elements of graphic novels that some readers might not fully understand. In chapter six of the book, he talks about the combination of pictures and words from the history to even providing a chart of how we went from mostly pictures to just words. He even states how “words and pictures have great powers to tell stories” (McCloud 2015, 152). There are three categories in which could be used to talk about the combination of pictures and words, and Sita’s Ramayana actually uses the “duo-specific” which “both words and pictures send essentially the same message” (McCloud 2015, 153). Anri and Chitrakar used both the text and artwork to display the message of trust in the Hindu myth. This use of equal combination of the picture and text helps readers, especially readers who are not part of the Hindu religion or who have only read western graphic novel, to understand Sita’s perspective and the message of trust in Sita’s Ramayana.

Works Cited
Anri, Samhita and Chitrakar, Moyna. Sita’s Ramayana. Groundwood Books. 2018. 
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins, 1993.

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