Paper Details

Name: Shipra Singh
Country: India

Year: 2026
Volume: Vol-13, issue-2, Year-2026 (July-December)
Page Number: 9-19
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22270843

ABSTRACT
The Ramayana has never existed as a single, culturally uniform narrative in South Asia. Its characters and episodes have been repeatedly appropriated by communities occupying different social, regional, religious, and gendered locations. This paper examines how Bhojpuri women's folksongs reconfigure the figure of Sita and, through her, create an imaginative space for articulating women's desires, judgements, and negotiations with patriarchy. Drawing upon four Ram-Sita-based songs recorded during fieldwork in Hurmujpur, Ghazipur district, the paper focuses on four stages of Sita's life: marriage, pregnancy, abandonment, and refusal of reconciliation. In the first song, Sita instructs her father to seek Ram as her husband, thereby transforming the svayamvar motif into an assertion of female choice. In the second, a pregnant Sita voices her craving for Rohu fish and obliges Ram to respond to her desire, relocating the epic within the everyday material world of Bhojpuri women. The final two songs radically revise the aftermath of Sita's abandonment: rather than returning to Ram's kingdom, Sita chooses to enter the earth or declares that she would rather become an ascetic than return to him. Drawing upon Paula Richman's concept of multiple Ramayana traditions, Nabaneeta Dev Sen's analysis of women's Ramayana retellings, Smita Tewari Jassal's ethnography of North Indian women's folksongs, and feminist conceptualisations of agency by Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu-Lughod, the paper argues that these songs should not be read simply as oppositional or “resistant” texts. Their significance lies in the ways they negotiate patriarchal structures from within culturally familiar frameworks. The Bhojpuri Sita is neither simply the obedient wife nor an uncomplicated rebel; she is a daughter who chooses, a wife who desires, a woman who remembers injustice, and a wife who can refuse reconciliation. Myth consequently becomes a vernacular resource through which women transform inherited cultural authority into a language of agency.

Keywords: Bhojpuri folksongs, Sita, Ramayana, women's agency, oral tradition, mythology, gender, folk culture