Samhita Arni tells Indulekha Aravind about her journey from literary festivals to a successful graphic novelist.
She grew up surrounded by the epics; so it was not surprising that the first book she published should have been about one. That was at the venerable age of 12. Now, 15 years later, the graphic novel Bangalore-based Samhita Arni wrote, Sita’s Ramayana, has made it to the New York Times’ weekly list of top 10 hardcover graphic novels. That is hardly an unimpressive list of achievements and one half-expects to meet someone intimidatingly erudite, maybe even obnoxiously so. Instead, Arni turns out to be pleasantly grounded, even a tad diffident. Perhaps that has something to do with the time she spent at literary festivals, trying to get publishers interested in her forthcoming novel,a thriller based on the Ramayana. “I would be walking around mournfully, clutching my manuscript,” says 27-year-old Arni, with a laugh.
Sita’s Ramayana was the result of a chance meeting at one such festival, where she ran into the publishers of her first book, The Mahabharata — A Child’s View. “We got talking about the Ramayana, me about the research for my novel and they about the folk Ramayana of Bengal’s patua artists, which they wanted to do a graphic novel with. And by the end of the day, I had agreed to come on board and write the text for the graphic novel,” says Arni. Patua artist Moyna Chitrakar did the vivid illustrations first, and then Arni the text. (The patua community uses a form of scroll painting to narrate myths and historical stories and, interestingly, includes both Hindus and Muslims.)
The graphic novel, which took two years to complete with all the back-and-forth between the artist, the writer and the publisher, begins with a pregnant, tired Sita wandering in the forest, and is told from her point of view. Sita here is someone who raises questions about what war does to women, and who is disturbed by the arson and carnage that she has been the cause of. This is also a Sita who is angry with Rama when he does not take her back after the battle in Lanka until Agni, the god of fire, intervenes.
“The kind of Sita that has been taught to us is not someone who would appeal to anybody from a post-feminist generation, it is not someone we can identify with. But when I reread the Ramayana after I returned to India (on finishing a degree in film and religion from Mount Holyoke College, Massachussetts), I started seeing Sita from a different perspective,” says Arni. Sita evolves from a meek wife to a single mother bringing up two sons, and who asserts her identity in the end by choosing to return to the Earth, rather than Rama, she points out.
Arni’s interest in the epics was fostered during a childhood she describes as “lonely”, mainly due to the multiple uprooting caused by her father’s postings, spread over Pakistan, Thailand and Indonesia. Books were a natural companion, and “for some reason, a lot of the books at home seem to have been versions of The Mahabharata.” The Mahabharata thus became something of a fetish, and at one point she had read 11 versions of it. Her interest in Sita, however, came later and was accompanied by the realisation that there were many versions of the Ramayana — “there is even a version where Sita is so strong that she can lift the bow herself, which is why Janaka wants her to marry someone who can string it.”
This discussion on the tradition of plurality naturally brings us to the debate over Delhi University’s infamous ban on A K Ramanujan’s essay “Three Hundred
Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.” “They are doing a great disservice by not allowing students to read the essay. The Ramayana itself is something that belongs to all of us, and not any particular religion or community. Why do they want to narrow its scope,” she says. Apart from writing an essay against the ban, giving interviews like this one and her other jobs as scriptwriter and editor at online magazine Out of Print, Arni is now gearing up for the 2012 release of her novel based on the Ramayana, which was finally picked up by Zubaan. Will all her work be centred around the epics and mythology? “No, I want to try something different... let’s see how that works out,” she says.