Snehalata Reddy's 'SITA'

BM Bhalla

Snehalata Reddy had in her a great “Socialistic fire”. Snehalata has writtern in English a controversial and radical play, “Sita” on the theme of exploitation of women in our society.

“Sita”, a play in two acts is a comment on the problem of the man-woman relationship as embodied in the mythical ideal pair, Rama and Sita. For millions of years Hindu women have modelled themselves on Sita and aspired to the ideals of purity and devotion emboided in Sita’s life and character.

Snehalata’s play deals with the treatment of Sita at the hands of Rama after she is rescued from Ravana’s clutches. Sita is portrayed as a victim of male prerogative. The conflict in the play centres round Rama’s duty as a husband and lover, his duty as a king in the illustrious line of Raghu, or in the other words his duty in his personal life as husband and his duty in his public life as a king.

Rama, as we all know from our epics, sacrificed his private happiness for his kingly duty, and in the process also sacrificed the happiness and even the dignity of his wife.

Snehalata Reddy protrays Rama and Sita as individual human beings in our own modern terms and not as symbolic and mythic characters out of an epic. The play endeavours to uphold the rights of Sita as a wife, as an individual and as a woman.

Sita speaks like a modern woman’s libber. She is really bitter.

“Yes ! Of course ! We are either goodesses or slaves - objects of sex or domesticity — always, as symbols of sex-never beyond our sexuality — never as human beings with hearts and minds that thrill and pulsate as yours do.”

Sita is too bitterly contentious. Snehalata Reddy claims. “I feel strongly about these things and though I’m not a ‘women’s libber’ in the general sense and I have nothing against Rama, except that he was a limited personality, I truly believe that men and women must help to liberate one another.’ But, in ‘Sita’ I have spoken on behalf of the Indian woman in particular — her meek submission to norms she has never questioned.”

Influenced by the ideas of Ram Manohar Lohia and Simone Beauvior, Snehalata Reddy does speak in the play as a ‘women’s libber’ by making Sita revolt against Rama and his dharma in bitterness and anger. Sita rejects Rama as a husband and lover and as a father of her unborn children in the end — in order to expose masculine pomposity, absurdity and injustice.” She then burns herself on Ravana's pyre.

(Courtesy: Hat's Off Pattabhi)