Sita - Warrior of Mithila by Amish Tripathi

Amish started with the Siva trilogy ‘The Immortals of Meluha’ and bang, it was an amazing read; but with his Ram Chandra Series, I am not sure why the would writer repeat stories and sequences from the previous book in a book that is clearly one book in series.

This just made the book fat and he hopes to sell it individually as well. Makes sense for people who just read Sita, but a waste of time for people who have already read the first part on Ram. I have never seen a book written in a series with so much repetition, felt like the writer did not have anything new to add on in this book so he picked up from the previous book.

Everyone knows the story of Lord Ram, his childhood, his youth, and what all he went through before and after he married the Goddess Sita. However, the story of Goddess Sita is little known – apart from a few things like she was the daughter of the king Janak and wife of Lord Ram and was abducted by Raavan, the king of Lanka.

On the cover of the book, Sita is depicted as a warrior with a weapon in her hand. The cover is contrary to the image of Sita that everyone has in their mind. The cover itself speaks a lot about the story.

The deviation is allowed up to a level where one can think of its presence in any other version of the writing, but when you unnecessarily add things that are just for fun and meant to make you bestseller instead of retelling the facts; you messed up the whole work. A different perspective can go very well but you can’t change the fact that something is there and something is not and vice-versa. From the very starting, there are things that are not written in any version of Ramayan; be it the original Maharishi Valmiki’s or Kambaramayanam or Saptakanda Ramayana or Vilanka Ramayana or any other among many.

A whole lot of characters have changed their roles according to the whim of the author which falls in line with the places of occurrence and gives the reader a totally altered view about every character in Ramayana.

− The old Manthara whos the maid of Kaikeyi from Kekaya is a wealthy merchant of Ayodhya who wants to avenge Ram not for calling her hunch-backed but for not providing a lawful execution of the victims of her daughter's rape and murder who does not exist in Ramayana.

− Hanuman meets Sita only in Lanka but here, he is apparently a Naga, born with a deformity of tail and monkey features and a Malayaputra who is one among the tribes who nurture Vishnu's of said period. Also, Hanuman knows Sita since she was a kid of 11 years.

− Concept of making someone “Lord Vishnu”, again was wholesomely wrong. As written; ‘Yes, I am the chief of the Malayaputras. But I cannot be the Vishnu. My task is to decide who the next Vishnu will be.’ was not happened to be Vishwamitra’s decision to make/create or decide who the next ‘Vishnu’ will be. Lord Vishnu took incarnation himself, he was ‘not created’ by anyone.

− Sunaina died even before Sita’s Marriage. Sita called a ‘troubled child’,

It is definitely a gripping read but totally misleading for people who do not know the head and tail of Ramayana. Better to know about Ramayana before and after you read this series.

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