"Rama, Must I Remind You of Your Divinity?": Locating a Sexualized, Feminist, and Queer Dharma in the Ramayana

Seven years ago, during his son's wedding feast in India, my uncle advised the new bride that she should not begin eating before her husband did. He continued that her dharmic (ethical) duty as a wife was to be like Sita, the idolized female protagonist of the ancient Hindu epic, the Ramayana (circa 300 BC); Sita famously worshipped her husband as a god, devoting herself completely to his needs. My uncle's reference to a character from the Ramayana on as momentous an occasion as a wedding was not surprising; the Ramayana pervades the cultural consciousness of India and much of Asia and its popularity has not waned over the centuries. It is taught in most schools and, as a result, there is hardly a child or adult not conversant with the epic. It has also resurfaced repeatedly in films, the visual arts, comic books, mass-produced calendars, and television serials. Its appeal became especially evident between 1987 and 1989 when, at 9:30 a.m., the Indian nation would come to a standstill as people everywhere gathered to watch Ramanand Sagar's state-sponsored television serial, Ramayan, based on the Ramayana.¹ Churches rescheduled services and trains waited at stations while commuters and officials alike stopped to watch Ramayan, regarding the viewing as an act of worship. When viewers discovered that the serial would not cover the final book of the Ramayana, workers all over the country went on strike until the government sponsored Sagar to finish it.² My uncle's reference to Sita in his instructions to his new daughter-in-law was also not surprising because, as the Indian academic Madhu Kishwar has shown, the epic, and particularly Sita's conjugal experiences and actions, wields significant influence in the consciousness of most Hindu women [234-49]. I argue, however, that contemporary retellings of the Ramayana, including Sagar's television serial, have desexualized the epic so that it reflects extremely conservative attitudes towards marriage, sex, and sexuality—attitudes that have been harnessed by nationalist and patriarchal discourses to limit women's ways of being in the world. My act of sexing, feministing, and queering the Ramayana disavows the notion of an inherently inflexible and intolerant Hinduism, divorces the epic from its history of nationalist appropriation, and highlights its feminist messages and the ways it sanctions alternative sexualities.

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First, after a brief summary of the epic and a clarification of methodology, I trace the genealogy of its interpretations to Hindu nationalist ideology. I then argue that the Sanskrit Valmiki Ramayana, upon which most retellings of the epic are selectively based, is a highly sexualized text that enables feminist and queer interpretations.³ A sexualized lens enables feminist interpretations by highlighting women as key players in the enactment of their own sexualities—as sexual subjects rather than objects—and by emphasizing justice for both men and women through an exploration of the treatment of Sita by her husband. It facilitates a queer reading because it enables the text to be read as sanctioning not just heterosexual conjugality, but a wide range of sexual experience. Such a queer reading highlights the text's deviations from fixed gender and sexual identities, deviations that become a political move against heteronormativity while refusing to engage in essentialist identity politics.⁴ Furthermore, this sexualized lens enables a view of sexual love (kama), in all its diversity, as a vital step towards achieving moksha, or spiritual salvation, thereby reworking the idea of the kind of dharma (a Hindu religious term denoting a system of morality/ethics/righteousness) that leads to moksha.

Although the Ramayana has been retold countless times with regional variations throughout India and all over the world, it almost always focuses on the life of Rama, a human manifestation of the divine Vishnu, and his wife Sita. While certain events happen differently in different retellings, in the Valmiki version, the story goes like this: Rama is born the eldest son and heir to the throne of Ayodhya's King Dasharatha. Rama's stepmother...