Reclaiming the Lived Body: A Merleau-Pontian Reading of Sita in The Valmiki Ramayana and The Forest of Enchantments

Abstract

What happens when the woman who has been looked at begins to look through her own body?This article explores the transformation of Sita's corporeal identity from a body constituted by external perception to a body that perceives, experiences, and creates meaning.While scholarship on twenty-firstcentury women-oriented mythological retellings has extensively examined agency, resistance, subjectivity, and feminist revisionism, the role of embodiment in the formation of feminine consciousness remains comparatively underexplored.Through a comparative reading of Sita in Valmiki's Ramayana and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Forest of Enchantments, this study foregrounds the body as a crucial site of identity formation.Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, particularly his concepts of the lived body, embodied intentionality, and the primacy of perception, the article examines how Sita's corporeality is differently imagined across the two narratives.In Valmiki's epic, her body is predominantly rendered through external descriptions of beauty, auspiciousness, chastity, vulnerability, and marital honour, making it a site upon which cultural ideals of femininity are inscribed and evaluated.Divakaruni's retelling, however, relocates corporeal meaning within Sita's own experiential consciousness.Her encounters with the sacred bow, martial training, tactile relationship with nature, bodily desires, pain, fear, and resistance reveal the body as a medium of perception, knowledge, agency, and self-understanding.The article argues that Divakaruni's intervention lies not merely in giving Sita a voice but in reconfiguring the body from an object of representation into a subject of experience.It consequently proposes embodiment as a significant, yet insufficiently explored, dimension of feminine consciousness in contemporary mythological rewriting.