Sītā’s Joy

While the war raged upon the shore and the walls, there was another kind of warfare being waged within the city, in the Ashokavana, against a single captive, and it was a warfare of cruelty and deception aimed at breaking Sītā’s spirit, and its story is one that Vishṇu Sreenivas had passed over in his condensed telling, and that is restored here, for it shows both the depth of Rāvaṇa’s cruelty and the depth of Sītā’s love.

For Rāvaṇa, unable to win Sītā by temptation or to break her by menace, and now pressed by the war, conceived a new and crueler stratagem to shatter her will: he would break her not through her fear for herself but through her love for Rāma; he would make her believe that Rāma was dead. If she believed her husband slain, Rāvaṇa reasoned, then all her hope would die with him, all her reason to resist, and in the desolation of her grief she might at last yield, having nothing left to be faithful to.

And so he worked a cruel deception by sorcery. He had his demons conjure, by their magic arts, a horrifying illusion: the severed head of Rāma, and his bow, brought and displayed before Sītā, so lifelike, so exact, that she could not tell it from the true head of her husband. Look, the demons told her, or Rāvaṇa told her; your Rāma is dead; here is his head, struck off in the night; here is his bow; his army is destroyed and he is slain; there is no more hope for you, no more husband to be faithful to, no more rescue to wait for.

Yield now to Rāvaṇa, for the one you waited for is dead. And they set the illusory head and bow before her, the very image of her slaughtered husband, to break her heart and her will together.

And it nearly worked, for the illusion was perfect, and Sītā, seeing what she took to be the severed head of Rāma, was plunged into the uttermost abyss of grief. She believed it. She saw her husband’s head, knew it, or thought she knew it, and the whole world went dark for her, and all her long endurance, all her steadfast hope, collapsed into a grief so total that she wished only to die.

She lamented over the illusion; she called upon death to take her; she resolved that she would not live now that Rāma was dead, that she would end her own life, for there was nothing left to live for, no husband, no hope, no reason to endure her captivity another hour. The cruel stratagem had reached its mark: Sītā, who had withstood every temptation and every menace, was broken at last by the belief that her beloved was dead, and stood at the very edge of despair and self-destruction.

Let us feel the cruelty of this, for the tellers mean us to, and it reveals the true blackness of Rāvaṇa’s heart. He had failed to move Sītā by offering her the world; he had failed to break her by threatening her with death; and so he stooped to this, to the cruelest stratagem of all, to torture her not through any fear for herself but through the very love and fidelity that were her greatness, to turn her own devotion into the instrument of her destruction by making her believe its object dead.

It was a cruelty aimed with terrible precision at exactly the noblest thing in her, her love for Rāma, and it shows how far Rāvaṇa had fallen, that he would torment a helpless captive so, would counterfeit her husband’s murder to break her heart, would use her own love as a weapon against her. There is no lower cruelty than this, the deliberate breaking of a faithful heart through a lie about the beloved, and Rāvaṇa stooped to it without shame.

But Sītā was not left in her despair, for there was mercy even in that place, and it came, as mercy in Lankā always came, from an unexpected quarter, from among the demons themselves. For there was a rākshasī named Saramā, kind-hearted like Trijaṭā, who had come to love and pity the captive queen, and Saramā could not bear to see Sītā destroyed by a lie.

She came to Sītā in her despair, and she told her the truth: that the head and the bow were an illusion, a sorcery, a cruel trick of Rāvaṇa’s, that Rāma was not dead at all but alive and well and encamped with his army upon the very shore of Lankā, that the war was raging and Rāma at the head of his host, that the whole ghastly display had been a deception meant to break her, and that she must not believe it, must not despair, must not yield, for her husband lived and his rescue was near.

Do not grieve, Saramā comforted her; it is a lie; Rāma lives; he is here, across the city, with his army; the head you saw was conjured by sorcery to deceive you; take heart, for your deliverance is at hand and your husband is alive.

And Sītā, hearing this, hardly daring to believe and then believing, was lifted in a single moment from the uttermost depth of grief to a joy as great as her grief had been, and this sudden reversal, this plunge into despair and this instant rescue from it, is the reason the chapter is named for her joy rather than her grief.

For the grief had been a lie, and the truth was joy: Rāma lived; the head was a deception; the rescue was near; and Sītā’s despair, which had brought her to the very edge of death, gave way to a flood of relief and hope and joy that was all the greater for the depth from which it rose.

She had believed her husband dead and wished to die; and now she knew him living and near, and her whole heart sang with the knowledge, and the cruel stratagem that had meant to break her forever had failed, defeated by the mercy of a single kind demon-woman who would not let a lie destroy an innocent heart.

There is a pattern here that the tellers have woven all through Sītā’s captivity, and it is worth marking as we near its end: that again and again, in the darkest place, among the enemy themselves, mercy arose to sustain her, first Trijaṭā with her prophetic dream, now Saramā with her saving truth.

Even in Lankā, even in the household of Rāvaṇa, even among the rākshasīs set to guard and torment her, there were hearts that pitied her and inclined to the right and rose to help her, and these unexpected mercies, these righteous souls in the very citadel of evil, sustained Sītā through her long ordeal and kept her from being destroyed by the cruelties of her captor.

It is a hopeful truth, and the story insists on it: that goodness is never wholly absent, even in the darkest places; that mercy can arise even among the enemy; that no citadel of evil is so complete that no righteous heart survives in it; and that the innocent, even in the deepest captivity, are never wholly without friends, for the divine provides them, in the unlikeliest places, with the mercies they need to endure.

So Sītā was restored to hope, her joy the greater for the grief that had preceded it, and she waited now with a kindled heart for the rescue that Saramā had promised was near, while beyond the walls of her garden the war raged on toward the deliverance she now knew was coming.