Santos, Dinardo G.

2018-890412
LIT 103
The Character That We Don’t Want, But We Deserve

Ramayana is an epic from India telling the story of journey of Rama, a prince banished
from the Kingdom of Ayodhya by his own father, leaving his wife, Sita, in the kingdom alone.
Later on in the story, Sita follows Rama in the jungle which resulted to her abduction by Ravana.
Rama then did everything to save Sita. In the end, Sita gets saved and they go back to their
kingdom with Rama ruling as the new king. Good story, right? Well, it doesn’t end there. While
most of the story tellers of this story would end it here, the original text of Ramayana includes
another book for its ending telling the story of how Sita was banished by his own husband from
the kingdom because of the rumours that she was unfaithful to Rama. In the end, Sita proved
herself to be purer than everyone else and that she never have been unfaithful to Rama.

Why is this last book then often taken out of the whole story? To answer this, we must
take a look on how the patriarchal society affects our art, literature, media, etc. One of the most
pressing schools of thought in the field of critiquing art forms is interpreting art through the use
of its milieu. Milieu is the period in which the art was produced. This school of thought states
that an art could be more appreciated if we could interpret its social and cultural significance in
the period it was created. For example, work of arts during the Martial Law era were made
mostly for activism purposes as the nation was on its knees and the artists of their time were
using art as a way to ignite a revolution for the freedom of the country from the martial rule.

Now, let’s use milieu as a big factor in answering the question. Our society has been
patriarchal since time immemorial. Societies around the globe has been establishing communities
which are mostly patriarchal in nature –kings are preferred to rule the land than queens, fathers
as the head of the family, and the epic Ramayana’s cultural and societal background is the same
as portrayed by the India’s long traditions and customs of wives being dominated by their
husbands. One of the most gruesome examples of this is the practice of Sati in Hinduism where a
widow is burned to death along with the funeral pyre of his dead husband. This is because
Hindus believe that a wife shall follow his husband all his life and even in the afterlife as it is
their duty to do so. The epic has also portrayed this kind of wife in the character of Sita.

As time goes by, the society did not change its patriarchal nature until now but was even
more powerful as the power structures of different fields were all controlled in a patriarchal
system where men were preferred to have more power than women. Because of this growing
patriarchal mind-set, media has used this mind-set to easily sell their productions to a larger
audience. This is when the boom of the story trope of a knight in shining armour archetypal man
saves a damsel-in-distress archetypal woman happened. Men are being portrayed as a hero that
saves the woman that they love. Because of this change of focus of art in the satisfaction of the
audience, reproductions of Ramayana needed to be an epic of a strong warrior saving the woman
of his life, Sita, with a happy ending with Sita being saved and Rama being the hero with the
bravest heart of them all. Including the last book in which Rama will be portrayed as someone
who doubts his wife n to the point of banishing her from the kingdom will make the character of
Rama imperfect and unbecoming of a hero, a character we do not want, but we all deserve.