![]() ![]() ![]() A newbie journalist’s quest for Sita becomes an investigation not only into the present whereabouts of Sita but into many of the hallowed incidents of the Ramayana. ![]() ![]() In this Ayodhya, it is commonly believed that Sita was banished to soothe doubts about her chastity in the public mind. The Missing Queen is set in a very creatively imagined Ayodhya where Rama is King-Autocrat, a tortured soul imprisoned by his determination to uphold Dharma, and Sita has become she-who-is-not-named. Generations of Indians have continued to ask and answer that question in their own way, from folk ballads that tell the anguish of Sita to Samhita Arni’s The Missing Queen, which goes into speculative fiction mode to ask, but where is Sita? The reader may be forgiven for asking, what kind of a love story is this? This is the tale of a love where one of the two lovers goes missing at the end. Here is a great love story, a story in which a man climbs mountains, allies with monkeys, fords the mighty ocean, devastates an army and almost loses his own life and that of his brother for the sake of the woman he loves, and yet, at the end, there is no happily ever after. Sita’s story presents itself as fertile ground for endless re-imagining, centuries after the original was sung. ![]()
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