The Fire-Ordeal, the Exile, and the Many Ramayanas

What follows the rescue is the part of the story that Indian tradition has never been comfortable with. Rama, publicly, requires proof of Sita's purity, and she passes through a fire-ordeal (agni-pariksha); later, when palace gossip questions her still, Rama exiles the pregnant Sita to the forest, where she bears their sons and raises them at the sage Valmiki's hermitage.

Asked at last to swear her purity once more, she instead calls on her mother the Earth to take her back, and the ground opens and receives her. This ending has been contested for centuries: many regional and women's retellings press hard on the injustice done to Sita, and Valmiki's version is only one of hundreds of Ramayanas across South and Southeast Asia, some of which soften or rewrite it. Sita is thus both an ideal held up to women and, increasingly, a figure through whom the tradition examines that ideal.