Against the Current: Sita and Her Foils in - Bad Request

today, albeit to a much lesser extent. Many whose mother tongue is Tamil live in
Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh), while a large number of Telugu speakers live throughout
Tamilnadu, in places ranging from Chennai and Coimbatore to Tanjore district.
Furthermore, both Tamil and Telugu writers experienced an anti-Brahmin movement in
the early 20 th century.
7 A.K. Ramanujan, “Two Realms of Kannada Folklore,” in Another Harmony: New
Essays on the Folklore of India, ed., Stuart H. Blackburn and Ramanujan (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986), p. 63.
8 Philip Lutgendorf., The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p. 213.
9 Kathleen Erndl, “The Mutilation of Surpanakha,” in Richman, ed. Many Ramayanas,
pp. 67-88.
10 That task is beyond the scope of this paper but for stories in Malayalam and Kannada
see Telling Ramayanas in Modern South India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2005).
11 Most authoritative tellings present Sita primarily in ways that relate to the glorification
of Rama and or Hanuman or lead up to the battle with Ravana. For example, little
information is given in Valmiki or Tulsidas about Sita’s childhood. In contrast, women’s
tellings such as the Bengali one by Chandrabati do include extensive material on Sita’s
birth. See Nabaneeta Dev Sen, “Rewirting the Ramayana: Chandrabati and Molla,” in
Crossing Boundaries (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1997), pp. 162-177. Folksongs also
tell of Sita’s youth. For example, see the discussion of a Kannada folktale in which Sita
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