On the ‘Éowynization’ of Sita in Ashok Banker’s and Amish Tripathi’s Ramayana-based Fantasies

The global popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings following Peter Jackson’s film adaptations led some English-language authors to adaptively retell Hindu religio-mythological epic narratives like the Ramayana in a Tolkienian fantasy vein. Ashok K. Banker’s eight-volumed Ramayana series, published from 2003 to 2012, is the first such fantasy series that displays a marked ‘Tolkienization’ of the Ramayana story. Both Tolkien’s and Banker’s respective fantasy series further left their discernable trace in Amish Tripathi’s four-volumed Ram Chandra Series, published from 2015 to 2022. This presentation focuses on the trajectory of a Tolkienian transformation of the Ramayana story’s figure of Sita in Banker’s and Tripathi’s respective fantasy series. I follow this trajectory by first offering glimpses of how the Ramayana tradition has generally depicted Sita, focusing our attention chiefly on Valmiki’s Ramayana and a few other women-centric versions. Against such a textual backdrop, I then foreground Banker’s mapping of some of Éowyn’s well-known character traits onto his own version of Sita. I also highlight how Tripathi’s series further reinforces Banker’s ‘Éowynization’ of Sita. I conclude by outlining the socio-political context of Banker’s and Tripathi’s ‘Éowynized’ Sitas.