Cultural Ethics and Moral Imagination in Amit Majmudar’s "Sitayana"

Epic characters have a profound influence on the reader’s perceptions, therefore, analyzing the characters’ actions, behavior, and beliefs is essential. Evaluating Sita’s character in the retellings has been judged many times through Western ethical criticism theories, but as the character is from one of the greatest Indian epics, analyzing it only through Western theories has some interpretive limitations. Sita has been portrayed as a sufferer of injustice and victim of patriarchy. Examining her character through an indigenous ethical framework has received limited scholarly attention. The aim of this research is to examine Sitayana by Amit Majmudar using the Karma–Dharma framework and to examine the applicability of Western ethical criticism to an Indian literary text. This study offers a culturally rooted ethical interpretation of the text. The comparative textual analysis of Sitayana is conducted using Western ethical criticism and the Karma–Dharma framework. The analysis reveals that ethical criticism presents Sita as ethically wronged while the Karma–Dharma framework reframes her role not merely in terms of victimization or random injustice but as ethically complex and structured within a cosmic moral order. This study contributes to contemporary discussions of Indian ethical systems by viewing Sita as a locus of moral discourse, not just an icon of sacrifice. With this understanding, this study contributes to the discourses around gender, ethics, and philosophy.