Abstract: This paper explores Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Forest of Enchantments as a transformative feminist rewriting of Valmiki’s Ramayana. While the traditional epic focuses on Rama's heroic journey, it marginalizes Sita’s immense suffering during her abduction, her trial by fire, and her subsequent banishment while pregnant. Divakaruni restores narrative balance by retelling the epic from Sita’s own standpoint, portraying her not merely as a victim of patriarchal oversight, but as a multi-dimensional woman—mother, daughter, sister, and wife—endowed with profound moral clarity, virtue, and resilience. By challenging perennial hierarchies of power and gender, the study demonstrates how the novel reclaims the feminine sphere as a source of strength and wisdom. Ultimately, the paper repositions Sita from the margins of conventional patriarchy into an empowered, autonomous, and pragmatic agent of change.
Subhadeep Roy (Mon,) studied this question.