Nandini Sahu
Some portions from the long poem, Sita (A Poem)
Canto I
Call her what you may – Sita, Janaki,
Vaidehi, Ramaa – she is Woman.
She is every woman, the propagated, interpolated role model.
The woman who adopted a self-imposed exile;
the woman whom time and again patriarchy finds safe
to evict in her emancipated consciousness.
But she has never been reticent. Never given up. Come back she has
from the segments of Mother Earth, to live in me, in you,
in the mass consciousness of the universe.
She is there since the commencement of a timeless history
since the unwritten agenda of the society
prevails to define me, you or her in altered
forms and repudiations. Sita dwells in
the Sitapurs, Rampurs, Udaipurs of India ;
she is on the Internet, in T.V. soaps,
in households, streets, call centers, universities, in temples
and churches, in Ceylon, in the back waters of Kerala, in
your concealed perception, and in the Indian Constitution.
She is the erstwhile woman Prime Minister
of India, and the woman President ; the
multi-tasking working mother and the
homemaker; the gang-raped girl
in the Delhi bus at night, and the
battered baby girl in the AIIMS trauma center.
She is in the hot, helpless tears of the poor, in the
hidden fears; yet again, she is the confident,
adamant, stalwart new woman, resilient as the Pegasus.
Sita-- Sati Sita--she is not just the hypothetical or the
historical substance of academics. She is truly animated to this
living, present living; she is pertinent.
She is the past and the present, she is the comprehensive
social, political or religious attitude
of the progressive Indian woman.
Sita (A Poem) is Nandini Sahu’s maiden foray into the long narrative genre; her subject takes off from our epic traditions and takes the discourse much further. Sita is, in no way, a retelling of The Ramayana. It is penned rather as a poetic memoir of the heroine of the epic, Sita, told in the first person narrative. The epic poem has 25 cantos, and only a portion of Canto 1 is reproduced above. More at: www.kavinandini.blogspot.com
Prof.Nandini Sahu, Professor of English and Director, School of Foreign Languages, IGNOU, New Delhi, India, is an established Indian English poet,creative writer,theorist and folklorist. She is the author/editor of fourteen books; has been widely published in India and outside. Prof.Sahu is a triple gold medalist in English Studies. Her areas of research interest cover New Literatures, Critical Theory, Folklore and Culture Studies, Children’s Literature and American Literature. www.kavinandini.blogspot.in
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