Counter-narrating: Re-constructing “Sita” in Amish's Sita: Warrior of Mithila

Counter-narration re-casts existing narratives and foregrounds the marginalised by giving them agency and performativity. They are narratives that challenge and provide resistance against dominant and hegemonic grand narratives which have been instrumental in formulating a social ideology over a long period of time making them normative. The Ramayana, an ancient epic is a multi-layered story of Prince Rama and Princess Sita and their role in the politics of power, state and patriarchy. It is a grand or master narrative that presupposes the passivity of the female as normative. It portrays Sita, King Rama’s wife, as someone who experiences marginalization and oppression and is a victim of the dominant narrative of patriarchy. This paper will use the theory of counternarrative and analyse Amish Tripathi’s novel Sita: Warrior of Mithila (2017) in order to show how he has recast Sita deconstructing the myth of passivity. Here, Sita resists prescriptive norms of the dominant narrative, wherein she has been projected as the silent receptor and problematizes the patriarchal ideology propagated through the master narrative. This paper will show how counter storytelling or counter narrating by Amish Tripathi has challenged and defied the narrative silence and hegemony in The Ramayana, while making the female powerful and capable in education, warfare and state governance.