Sītā in the Ashoka Park

Hanumān came at last to the Ashokavana, the grove of ashoka trees set apart within the palace grounds, and there, beneath a tree, he saw her, and he knew her at once, for grief has its own unmistakable form, and the woman he saw was the very image of faithful sorrow.

She was seated on the bare ground beneath the tree, and she was pale and thin and worn, her beauty dimmed by suffering as the moon is dimmed by cloud, her fine garments soiled and travel-worn, her ornaments gone, her hair unkempt, her whole aspect that of one who has grieved long and eaten little and slept less.

She was surrounded by a ring of hideous rākshasīs, the demon- women set to guard and torment her, monstrous shapes that hemmed her in on every side; and in the midst of that ring of horror sat Sītā, small, worn, sorrowful, but unbroken, her spirit shining through her wasted body like a lamp through a thin screen.

Hanumān, hidden in the branches of the tree above her, looked down upon her and was moved to the depths of his soul, and the tellers dwell on the sight, for it is meant to wring the heart.

Here was the queen of the great house of Ayodhyā, the beloved wife of Rāma, the daughter of a king, brought to this: seated on the bare earth in a demon’s garden, ringed by monsters, wasted with grief, a captive far from home and husband, not knowing whether Rāma lived, not knowing whether any help would ever come, enduring day after day the menaces of her keepers and the loneliness of her sorrow.

The contrast between what she had been and what she was now, between the honoured queen and the wasted captive, was almost unbearable, and Hanumān, seeing it, wept in the branches for her suffering and for the wrong that had been done her.

And yet, and this is the thing the tellers most want us to see, Sītā in her wretchedness was not defeated. Her body was wasted, but her spirit was whole. For all her grief, for all her suffering, she had not yielded, had not despaired into surrender, had not for one moment wavered in her devotion to Rāma or in her refusal of Rāvaṇa.

Her mind was fixed, wholly and unshakably, upon Rāma; her whole being was turned toward him in love and in longing; and no torment of her keepers, no menace, no offer, no length of captivity, had been able to move her from that fixed devotion by so much as a hair.

She sat in the demon’s garden like a captive queen who was still, in the only way that finally mattered, entirely free, for the one thing her captors wanted, her consent, her yielding, her turning from Rāma to Rāvaṇa, they could not take and she would not give, and in that unbreakable refusal she was mistress of herself still, and stronger than all the power of Lankā arrayed to break her.

Let us honour Sītā’s strength here, for it is a different strength from Rāma’s or Hanumān’s, and no less great. Theirs is the strength of action, of the leap and the battle and the mighty deed. Hers is the strength of endurance, of holding fast, of remaining unbroken under a suffering she cannot end and a captivity she cannot escape. She cannot fight her way out; she cannot leap the ocean; she cannot destroy her guards. All the active powers of the story are denied her.

She can do only one thing, and it is the hardest thing, and she does it perfectly: she can endure, and remain herself, and refuse to be broken, and keep faith, through suffering without end and without visible hope. And this endurance is not passive weakness but the most active kind of strength, the strength that holds a fortress when the walls are down and no relief is in sight, the strength that keeps faith in the dark with no promise that the dawn will ever come.

Sītā’s fidelity in the Ashokavana, unwavering through all her suffering, is one of the great feats of the epic, as great in its way as Hanumān’s leap, and the story means us to see it so: that to endure faithfully is as heroic as to act mightily, and sometimes harder.

The tellers linger, too, on the particular image of her: like a crescent moon veiled by cloud, like a flame nearly smothered but not out, like a garden withered by drought that yet holds its life in the root waiting for rain. She was diminished but not destroyed; dimmed but not extinguished; her greatness was hidden under her suffering but it was there, entire, waiting only for deliverance to shine forth again.

And Hanumān, watching her from the tree, understood that he had found not a broken woman to be pitied only, but a queen whose spirit had survived everything the enemy could do, and his pity was mixed now with a deep reverence, for he saw in her endurance a strength that matched, in its own way, the strength of Rāma himself.

But Hanumān did not yet reveal himself, for the moment was delicate and dangerous. Sītā was ringed by demon guards; a sudden appearance might alarm her into a cry that would bring the whole force of Lankā down upon them; and worse, Sītā, having been so cruelly deceived once already by Rāvaṇa’s disguise as an ascetic, might well take any stranger, even a friendly- seeming one, for another of the demon’s tricks, another shape-shifting torment sent to break her.

Hanumān saw that he must approach her with the greatest care, must find a way to win her trust before he startled her, must prove himself a true messenger of Rāma and not another demon deception. And so he waited, hidden in the tree, watching, choosing his moment, and while he waited and watched, before he could find his opening, the moment was taken from him, for another came to the grove, and it was Rāvaṇa himself, come to press once more his suit upon the captive queen.

Hanumān, hidden above, would witness now, from his place in the branches, the confrontation between the demon king and the captive queen, and he would see with his own eyes the full measure of Sītā’s strength, her defiance of Rāvaṇa to his face, in the very hour of her helplessness, and the sight would show him, and shows us, exactly what manner of woman it was that Rāma had lost and that all this vast labour was to recover.