Topic: For my topic, I have decided to choose Sita for my storybook. It was a difficult choice, but I think I can do some really interesting things with it! One person seems to e very adamant that I am a feminist - call me whatever you want, but I am really interested in socially assigned gender roles, characteristics, and gender equality. I would really love to interpret that into my project about Sita. I'd like to do one story about Maya Sita and Helen of Troy as parallel to each other. Two women with the same fate. I'd also like to retell the story of Sita and Rama's meeting with switch rolls (Rama as a woman, Sita as a man) and possibly play with the idea of whether their fates would be different. This can be based either on Narayan's version or Buck's version, depending. A third story I'd like to write would be about Sita as a child, a young girl, going through an experience foreshadowing her future as Rama's wife and her ultimate death. Lastly, I'd like to write about Lakshmi and Sita. The Ramayana says that Sita is the reincarnation of Lakshmi, so I would like to write a story about Lakshmi and how it might influence herself as Sita.
Bibligraphy
'Helen' by Euripides
Narayan, R. K. (1972) The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic.
Story of Lakshmi by Abhilash, author of Hindu Blog
Story of Vishnu and Lakshmi via Sacred-texts.com
Photos: Left: Lakshmi (Source) Right: Helen of Troy by De Morgan (Source)
Styles Brainstorm:
Alternate Realities - Seeing as a lot of the stories I want to explore have to do with Sita as either a different person or at a different time, setting the storybook in the frame of time travel seems to make sense. But perhaps further than that, rather than going into different times it would be to alternate realities. The setup would be someone who read about Sita and judged her to just be a weak person. Somehow, they get transported to an alternate time and reality where THEY are Sita, and thus live through her story themselves.
Stories told in the Afterlife - this sounds perfect for my storybook! I can see it now: Sita is in purgatory, and they are trying to decide whether she should be sent to Heaven or Hell. So they look back at all her past lives in order to decide.
Detective - So there is this detective who is called in for a case. The police have in custody four different people (all some version of Sita). The detective has to figure out which one is the 'real' Sita, and so he takes each one into the interrogation room and has them tell their stories. I'm not sure how it would end yet. This would be more of a comic style - think very old school, over the top P.I. !
Story Told In a Bar - oh who among us hasn't gotten a little too typsy and ended up spilling our guts to some stranger at a bar? This again would be more of a comical telling, maybe even dark comedy. Sita is at the bar, and she's lost everything. So she tells her story. Some of them are from her different lives, but they all end up the same.
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