Sita's Choice PDF Download

Author: Athena Kashyap
Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
ISBN: 9781622889051
Category : Indian mythology
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
Athena Kashyap's newest collection, Sita's Choice, explores issues relating to women, especially in India. Taking off from Sita, the main female character in the Ramayana, explores her decision to leave her husband, Ram, and return to her mother, Earth. These mythical and magical poems examine the duality of nature, the sacrifices women make daily, and the deeper societal ills such as female foeticide, dowry deaths, violence against women, and the role of the media, "Ravan's hundred thousand eyes," in perpetuating this violence. The book also explores motherhood through poems that look at the mother-child bond, "the formless, uncharted shape of love," as well as the pain of childbirth, "It rises--multi-hued, magnificent."

Author: Vayu Naidu
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 8184757719
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
Sita has been sent to Valmiki's ashram, at Rama's command never to return. This extraordinary novel is her story---she who, as much as Rama, is the heart of Ramayana, one of the greatest living epics. It is also the story of Lakshmana, crushed by guilt on Sita's abduction; of Soorpanakka, shocked at Ravana's being struck by love, alien to the rakshasas' code; and of Rama's turmoil when confronted by public gossip about Sita, his beloved wife. Through the remembrances of these and other characters, Sita comes alive as a figure of womanhood. Inspired by myriad age-old and culturally diverse retellings, Vayu Naidu creates a rich, deeply moving and original work of fiction, Sita’s Ascent illuminates the physical and emotive landscape of a woman in exile, who crosses the desert of loss and ascends the abyss of abandonment with the power of love that transforms the narrators and the listeners.

Author: Indrani Karmakar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100057864X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
This book constitutes a feminist literary analysis of motherhood as presented in selected Indian women’s fictions across a diverse range of geographical, linguistic, class and caste contexts. Situated at the crossroads of motherhood studies and literary studies, this book offers a rigorous examination of the prosody and politics of motherhood in this corpus. In its five thematically focused chapters, the book scrutinises in depth such key concerns as maternal ambivalence; maternal agency and caste; mother–daughter relationships; motherhood and diaspora; and non-biological motherhood. It attempts to understand the literary ramifications of these issues in order to identify the ways in which fiction writers reconceive of the notion of motherhood and maternal identities from and against multiple perspectives. Another pressing concern is whether these Indian women writers’ visions furnish readers with any different understandings of motherhood as compared to dominant Western feminist discourses. Maternal Fictions advances feminist literary criticism in the specific area of Indian women’s writing and the overarching areas of motherhood and literature by acting as a launchpad into a complex constellation of ideas concerning motherhood. The fictional universe is at once ambivalent, diverse, contingent, grounded in a specific location, and yet well placed to converse with discourses emanating from other times and places.

Author: Bhanumathi Narasimhan
Publisher: Ebury Press
ISBN: 9780143455288
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Sita by Bhanumathi-ji is deeply stirring and weaves an intricate tapestry of sensitivity with strength and wisdom as the story unfolds

Author: Beena. G
Publisher: Notion Press
ISBN: 1645873420
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
How different would mythological narratives be, if women voiced their perspectives? Amidst great wars, superhuman heroes and their ‘glorious’ victories, is there a place for women? Are ‘great wars’ limited to armed conflicts between armies of men on the battlefields? Do women have their own battles before, after and beyond the confines of wars in the epic narratives of India? Both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have integrated into our social and cultural fabric, and permeated into the myriad layers of life across genres and media. It is a common practice to revisit mythological landscapes and realign the lenses to look at them afresh from different perspectives. Re-renderings often bring in multiple interpretations that are creative and critical, adding variety and currency to the original narratives. Vision and Re-vision traces the lives of seven marginalized women from revisionist works against the central motif of war. It follows the pursuits of Ganga, Surpanakha, Uruvi, Sita, Urmila, Satyavati and Draupadi to understand their struggles and victories as women. Analyzing textual spaces provided to women, it explores their marginalized voices and their resistance patterns. These, in turn, establish new narratives of subversion and reclaim the voices and identities of women from the margins. A sound theoretical framework enables a comprehensive understanding of feminism and its distinct Indo-centric identity.

Author: Samhita Arni
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781554981458
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Ramayana is an epic poem by the Hindu sage Valmiki, written in ancient Sanskrit sometime after 300 BC. It is an allegorical story that contains important Hindu teachings, and it has had great influence on Indian life and culture over the centuries. Children are often encouraged to emulate the virtues of the two main characters -- Rama and Sita. The Ramayana is frequently performed as theater or dance, and two Indian festivals -- Dussehra and Divali -- celebrate events in the story. This version of The Ramayana is told from the perspective of Sita, the queen. After she, her husband Rama and his brother are exiled from their kingdom, Sita is captured by the proud and arrogant king Ravana and imprisoned in a garden across the ocean. Ravana never stops trying to convince Sita to be his wife, but she steadfastly refuses his advances. Eventually Rama comes to her rescue with the help of the monkey Hanuman and his army. But Rama feels he can't trust Sita again. He forces Sita to undergo an ordeal by fire to prove herself to be true and pure. She is shocked and in grief and anger does so. She emerges unscathed and they return home to their kingdom as king and queen. However, suspicion haunts their relationship, and Sita once more finds herself in the forest, but this time she is pregnant. She has twins and continues to live in the forest with them. The story is exciting and dramatic, with many turns of plot. Magic animals, snakes, divine gods, demons, sorcerers and a vast cast of characters all play a part in the fierce battles fought to win Sita back. And in the process the story explores ideas of right vs. wrong, compassion, loyalty, trust, honor and the terrible price of war.

Author: Kate Millett
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252068874
Category : Feminists
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Presents moment-by-moment record of the fading of love, with all of its agony and false-dawn respites. This book follows the disintegration of the author's love affair with a woman who is ten years her senior, a veteran of several marriages, and the mother of grown children.

Author: Purnima Mankekar
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822323907
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
An ethnography of urban women television viewers in India, and their reception of particular shows, especially in relation to issues of gender and nation.

Author: Kavita Kane
Publisher: Rupa Publications India
ISBN: 9788129134844
Category : Indic fiction (English)
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
From the bestselling author of Karna's Wife, comes this book about Urmila, Sita's sister and the neglected wife of Lakshman, and one of the most overlooked characters in the Ramayana. As Sita prepares to go into exile, her younger sisters stay back at the doomed palace of Ayodhya, their smiles, hope and joy wiped away in a single stroke. And through the tears and the tragedy one woman of immense strength and conviction stands apart-Urmila, whose husband, Lakshman, has chosen to accompany his brother Ram to the forest rather than stay with his bride. She could have insisted on joining Lakshman, as did Sita with Ram. But she did not. Why did she agree to be left behind in the palace, waiting for her husband for fourteen painfully long years?

Author: Joanna Davidson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978830122
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Women around the world are opting out of marriage. Through nuanced ethnographic accounts of the ways that women are moving the needle on marital norms and practices, Opting Out reveals the conditions that make this widespread phenomenon possible in places where marriage has long been obligatory. Each chapter invites readers into the lives of particular women and the changing circumstances in which these lives unfold - sometimes painfully, sometimes humorously, and always unexpectedly. Taken together, the essays in this volume prompt the following questions: Why is marriage so consistently disappointing for women? When the rewards of economic stability and the social status that marriage confers are troubled, does marriage offer women anything compelling at all? Across diverse geographic contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this book offers sensitive and powerful portrayals of women as they escape or reshape marriage into a more rewarding arrangement.