Thousand faces: ‘In Search of Sita’ edited by Malashri Lal & Namita Gokhale

My mother's name is Sati. It is, of course, not a name that she would have given to herself. But a name being one of the many matters that parents impose on their children, she learned to accept it, at first grudgingly and later graciously. It is a name that often got her children in trouble: in history class, when teachers would condemn the practice of a widow jumping into her husband's funeral pyre, her son would find it difficult to write an answer condemning sati. Her daughter, meanwhile, would inevitably misspell her name – it is now a part of family folklore that, as a child, I would always write Sita for Sati.

Growing up should have helped to clear the distance between the two names, but marriage, and the noise of its symbolism, ensured that I continued to languor in the lazy substitutability of 'Sita' and 'Sati'. There could be no better cheerleader for that cruel totem of self-sacrifice than Lord Ram's wife – virtuous, innocent, giving – she who sacrificed her youth, comfort and even her dignity for a cruel and foolish husband. Reading this fine new anthology of essays, fiction and art was therefore a double delight: first, to discover a history of reception about a cult figure is an adventure in itself; and, second, to clarify, if only for the lapses of one's childhood spelling error, how the bold and courageous Sita has, over centuries of misinterpretation and angular storytelling, come to be seen as the quintessential doormat.