Sita's "agni-pravEsam"

[Guest guest]

Dear Sri.S.H.Krishnan,

I quote from your recent post:

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"....Now if I am looking through Mata's angle all the episodes are painful.

Because of no mistake of hers, she had to leave the Bhagwan, How painfull

it would be, with the demons ! Then, to be TESTED for purity ! Above all,

finally to be forsaken by the God Himself !

At this point, the obvious thing which comes to mind is " Is Seetha Matha

who is none other than the Universal Mother always at the mercy of the

Lord? "

( In that case, it becomes the DUTY of the Pathi to protect His Patni under

ALL circumstances, which I, wrongly , somehow, feel Sri Rama was unable to

do , when She was taken away by the Rakshasa.)

Now, where is the Karunyam of the Lord towards Her ?.........

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Over the ages, dear Sri.Krishnan, many great minds, both religious and

literary, have reflected upon the "agni-pravEsam" of Sita-pirAtti. In terms

of sheer dramatic profundity that particular scene in the "yuddha-kAndam"

probably has no parallel anywhere in the literature of the world. The

pathos of that moment in Valmiki's Ramayana truly overwhelms the human

heart ..... It is a sombre moment when both the frailty and glory of the

human condition is starkly revealed .... the moment when humanity, as it so

often happens in the course of events in life, finds itself stranded and

desolate at moral cross-roads.....

 

Therefore it is not surprising, dear Sri.Krishnan, that like many before

you who have read and cherished the Ramayana, you too who have obviously

been thinking deeply about this wrenching episode in the Ramayana, cannot

help the dark and ambivalent feelings rumbling in your heart.... Believe

me, to this day I too feel the same way as you do... everytime I read the

"yuddha-kAndam"....

 

Readers' feelings of ambivalence alternating between indignation for Lord

Rama's act and sympathy for Sita's predicament are indeed understandable.

In fact they are all to be expected. Sage Valmiki, the great literatteur

that he certainly was, must have surely anticipated the intense and complex

feelings he would be arousing in the minds of readers as they followed the

dramatic sequence of events in this part of the "yuddha-kAndam". Truly

great literature of the world .... and the Ramayana is amongst the tallest

of them all .... all great literature of the world have this singular

capacity to produce amalgams of emotions in us which we can neither fathom

ourselves nor explain to others.

 

When we are filled with indignation, even moral revulsion for what Lord

Rama did to Sita, it is also natural for us to feel, in equal measure,

deeply guilty. Guilty, because we cannot bring ourselves to see Lord Rama,

the God verily descended amongst us on earth, appear in such poor light. It

makes us feel we have caught Him off-guard and have discovered his faint

but nonetheless "true colours"; that after all He too like us possesses

only feet of clay! We then feel cheated, short-changed and deeply betrayed

..... like we always do when we see as much as the pale shadow of human

frailty fall upon and eclipse, even if only partly, the lustre of what we

consider lofty, sacred and divine.

 

Similarly, when we find ourselves overwhelmed with feelings of sympathy for

Sita-pirAtti, we also sense a tinge of outrage simmering inside us that one

so noble and heroic in nature should yet have allowed herself to be reduced

to such abjectness ... to the fatalism and failure of common womanhood.

 

These are all feelings which naturally beset one as one reads the final

passages of the "yuddha-kAndam".

 

However, the enjoyment of truly great literature, dear Sri.Krishnan, should

not cease with mere indulgence in the natural feelings it evokes in the

human heart.

 

Instead we should seek in great literature, especially in a work of

"itihAsA" as hallowed as the Ramayana, we should seek in it instead the

means to transport ourselves from the plains of mere emotion to the summits

of moral truth.

 

The "agni-pravEsam" of Sita-pirAtti should stir up not only strong emotion

in us. More importantly it should awaken us to a higher order of moral

sense.... the higher order where "dharma" shapes human values and

enlightens man's consciousness.

 

We will continue in the next post.

 

adiyEn dAsAnu dAsan,

sudarshan