Lokamata Janaki

Sita Navami falls exactly a month after Rama Navami. While Rama Navami is celebrated with great devotional fervour, celebrating Sita Navami is not very common. But we cannot think of Rama without Sita. This year Sita Navami falls on the 21st of May. Let us celebrate Sita Navami contemplating Mother Sita’s life.

- SULINI V NAIR

Among all the various conceptualizations of God none is as beautiful, as heart-warming, as all-embracing as the concept of God as Mother. Sanatana Dharma celebrates this Divine Motherhood of God through a multitude of manifestations; beautiful, compassionate, fierce, destructive — spanning the entire spectrum of bhavas. Among the various incarnations of the Divine Mother, that of Mother Sita reaches out to us closest, simply because of her intense expression of the human condition and an uncompromising espousal of great ideals. She, for the most part, revealed herself as a woman of great nobility than as the Divine Mother. A parallel we know more intimately is Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi. Perhaps the more humanly they express themselves, the closer we feel towards them and the more confident we are of aspiring towards what they point to. In fact, if we consider the avatars as embodiments of divinity and beyond our reach, we do not gain much. Hence, their humanness is also their greatest compassion, even if at times it also makes them be greatly misunderstood.

Maharshi Valmiki’s Sita is, simply put, unreachable. In her commingles loveliness, softness of heart, compassion, faithfulness, wisdom, valour and forbearance.

Swami Vivekananda says, “…You may exhaust the literature of the world that is past, and I may assure you that you will have to exhaust the literature of the world of the future, before finding another Sita. Sita is unique; that character was depicted once and for all… She who suffered that life of suffering without a murmur, she the ever-chaste and ever-pure wife, she the ideal of the people, the ideal of the gods, the great Sita, our national God she must always remain…”1