26-01-2016 Tuesday
Holy Mother By Swami Nikhilananda: 023

Introduction: Women of India - 20

Now began the grueling period of anguish for Sita. Ravana tried to seduce her with jewels, fine apparel, and other luxuries. He also threatened her with torture and destruction. Nothing could disturb her fidelity to Rama.

In the meantime Rama gathered an army and attacked Ceylon. In the battle that followed, Ravana was killed and Sita rescued. As she was brought to Rama’s presence, Rama told her before the assembled crowd that he could not take her back because she had spent such a long time in Ravana’s palace. How would the world know what sort of life she had lived there?

He further explained that he had killed Ravana to vindicate the honour of his family and said that now she was free to live where she liked. Rama wanted to set an example to his people. Sita, stunned to hear these cruel words and not wishing to live, ordered a funeral pyre to be made. Pleading her innocence, she entered the fire and prayed that is she was chaste the might protect her. Even the hair of her body remained untouched, and Sita walked out triumphant from the ordeal.

Rama returned to his ancestral capital with Sita and there was jubilation among the people. But this happiness was short-lived. A whisper went around about Rama’s having taken back his wife though she lived long in a stranger’s palace. Though himself fully convinced of her purity, he brushed aside his deep love for the queen in obedience to his duty as a king who must be a model for his subjects to follow. He banished Sita, who was now pregnant, to the hermitage of Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana. She understood the predicament of her husband and did not bear any ill feeling against him. In the hermitage she gave birth to twin sons.

Soon a reconciliation brought about and Sita returned to the palace. But the cup of suffering was not yet full. Rama wanted to convince skeptics of Sita’s chastity and asked her to go through a second ordeal of fire. This was too much for the proud queen. She felt, further, that the purpose of her companionship with Rama was fulfilled; for his line was assured through the twin sons, who in due course would inherit the throne. Again proclaiming her purity before the assembled people, she prayed to Mother Earth to accept her into her bosom. The earth parted and Sita disappeared.

As a wife who resisted torture and temptation to preserve her marriage vows, and as a royal consort who sacrificed life itself in order to uphold her husband before the world as an ideal King, Sita is, in indeed, without peer in the history of Indian womanhood.

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Holy Mother - Being the Life of Sri Sarada Devi Wife of Sri Ramakrishna And Helpmate in his Mission By Swami Nikhilananda p: 15 – 16

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