The Many Shades Of Sita

Like many retellings of the Ramayana, the Sitas in Bollywood films tell divergent stories

- Tanul Thakur

HINDU mythology and Indian cinema share a mother-son relationship: the former produced the latter. In 1910, at a Christmas cinema show, Dadasaheb Phalke watched Life of Christ (1907). Before he reached home, an idea solidified into a resolve: making a movie on Lord Krishna. Even though it didn’t materialise, he persisted with a mythological, Raja Harishchandra (1913), for his debut.

Four years later, he found his biggest success in Lanka Dahan, where an effeminate waiter, Anna Salunke, played both Rama and Sita. The movie ran from seven in the morning to twelve in the night at the West End Cinema in Bombay, where devotees from nearby towns and villages flocked to the theatre; in Poona, the crowds bashed against the doors; in Madras, the earnings had to be taken in a bullock cart protected by cops. Such zeal, intensifying in the subsequent decades, reinforced a crucial fact about cinema: that it performed, according to professor John Lyden, a “religious function”.

“Cinema has a mystical quality,” writes film scholar Rachel Dwyer in Filming the Gods, “in that we may not understand films but we feel them and respond to their emotions.” So a myth-making art form had to meet the literal myths, defying logic, deifying actors, sanctifying beliefs. Only a mythological could compel Mohandas Gandhi to watch his only film, Ram Rajya (1943). Such dramas remained a prominent presence in Hindi cinema post-independence, but they truly came to the fore in the late ’80s, when the serials Ramayana and Mahabharata aired on Doordarshan. Many Bollywood filmmakers, too, have adapted the Ramayana and derived inspiration from it, turning Sita into a literal and a metaphorical figure, showing the varied possibilities of female divinity in an industry dominated by men.