You open the book. After a couple of delightful pages with small oval portraits of the cast of characters set against the black paper, the next page is blank. Both pages facing you are solid black. A field of black, dark charcoal. As your eyes move over the two empty pages you notice, in the lower right hand corner, a small white rectangle as if cut out from a typed sheet and pasted onto the black page. The text reads: “For a thousand years the Dandaka forest slept.” A shiver of anticipation. This is going to be great, you think. You turn the page, the story begins, and you are not disappointed.
This is Sita’s Ramayana, a retelling of the Ramayan, India’s great national epic, in graphic novel form. Based on a 16th century Ramayan by a Bengali female storyteller, Sita tells her version of the Rama and Sita story, their exile, her abduction by the demon Ravanna, Rama’s long battle to get her back, and then, after victory, his rejection of her.
Published by Tara Books, this graphic novel is a highly successful blending of image, text and design. Bengali artist/storyteller Moyna Chitrakar’s paintings, Samhita Arni’s text and Jonathan Yamamaki’s design come together to create a dramatic, exciting, and poignant story that invigorates an epic most people familiar with the tradition think they already know.
Below is Sita in captivity, longing for Rama.
Visually the image is arresting. Sita, like a sorrowful angel in some early Italian painting, her sari billowing against a starry sky of white buds on somber trees, anxiously waits for Rama to rescue her. The black expanse of the page adds to the dark mood. Against that black page, the white rectangles lead you down step-like to that final sentence :
“He would come, I told myself, every day.”
“He had to come.”
“I couldn’t bear to think otherwise.”
You feel the intensity of her emotion and understand her near despair. Arni’s precise use of everyday language along with Yamamaki’s graphic design give Chitrakar’s traditional painting a modern sense that makes this a compelling scene for the contemporary reader.
Here is Sita waiting for Rama after the defeat of the demon Ravanna.
Note again how effectively image, text and design work together to move the story along and show us Sita’s emotional state of mind. The two small panels prepare the reader for the long-awaited reunion with Rama while Arni’s few sentences signal that all is not well. Ravanna is defeated, but where is Rama. Why has he not come? He is busy crowning a new king. But then, Rama still does not come. Instead, his trusted messenger appears to summon her. Something is not right. At the top of the next panel, the chilling words: “It wasn’t anything like I imagined.” prepare the reader that the reunion will not turn out as expected. Short, succinct, intense, dramatic. You want to keep on reading.
As I assume you can tell by now, I thoroughly enjoyed Sita’s Ramayana. And although the work is obviously not in the Mithila art tradition, I found this graphic novel so fresh and exciting, and some of the images so memorable, that I wanted to bring it to your attention. The book is available in the US from Amazon, among others, and was, by the way, recently on the NY Times best seller list.
