Acclaimed animated feature film Sita Sings The Blues , directed by Nina Paley, has been getting a lot of traction on and offline [786,280 views and counting on YouTube alone, since it was uploaded in 2009] for being one of the most audacious takes on the Ramayana ever and thanks to it being released free for download.
Now, after a 12-year gap, the redoubtable Nina, a well-known American cartoonist, animator and free culture activist, is back in the city where it all began – or unravelled – for her and for her Sita too.
“In 2002 I came to Thiruvananthapuram to join my now ex-husband, who was working on a short-term contract in an animation firm in Technopark. It was here that I first read the Ramayana and encountered Sita. In fact, the first drawing of Sita – the pyre scene – was made here,” says Nina, who just landed on the red eye from New York, where she is based. “It’s so good to be back in Kerala, even though I am yet to step out of the hotel. The hot, humid air is pungent with the smell of Kerala food – my favourite! I am hankering for a crispy dosa with chutney. You only get a sorry excuse for a chutney back in the States. I’m looking forward to spending the week here,” she says, as we sit down for a chat.
After a short pause she adds: “ Sita… is my personal take on the story. I believe that there is a Sita in everyone. It took me five years to make the film but it was something I had to do, to get me through the divorce, to get closure.”
Her last experience of Kerala was nothing short of traumatic, albeit “mind expanding” and “life changing.” Nina found herself banished, like Sita, when her husband decided to end their marriage (which he informed her via email), whilst she was on a working trip to New York! “Why Sita of all the heroines in Indian mythology? Sita chose me, instead of the other way around. I realised that the Ramayana is a primal story of human relationship, very old, very archetypical, and very true. There is no equivalent story in the West. The characters of Rama and Sita are descriptions of what we all are like, especially when it comes to love. I too was the walk-through-fire-for-love kinds, yet I lost my man and it all but shattered me. Through their story, Valmiki explains the principles of human life. The soulful jazz numbers like ‘Mean to me’ that I’ve included in the film too complement this. I found that two seemingly unrelated things, separated by thousands of years, speak the very same primal story of human experience,” says Nina.
The artiste, who rose to fame with her syndicated cartoon strip ‘Nina’s Adventures’, is an advocate for the free culture movement [‘a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of free content’], becoming one after she got into copyright legalities for using Annette Hanshaw’s original songs in Sita… In fact, Nina is here in the city to speak at the ongoing annual conference of the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software, an autonomous organisation set up by the Government of Kerala. “Songs, words, art, films… they are all part of our cultural heritage and I believe that it should be accessible for all. When corporations buy the rights of a work of art, they are essentially buying our history,” she says. She adds that the best way to spread the cause of free culture is to lead by example. “That’s why I decided to put Sita… and my other works out there for people to copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix to their heart’s content,” she explains. Her tryst with Kerala, it seems, also paved the way for her belief in free culture. “In the West you are kind of trained to follow copyright laws and breaking it is taboo. When I came to Kerala, I saw Spidermans and Supermans painted on trucks and other so-called blatant ‘infringement on copyrights’ just about everywhere I looked. It was only then that I realised just how much I was censoring myself,” she adds.
Nina hopes to follow the same path with her next film Seder Masochism, her interpretation of the Exodus. “It’s a part of mine and my parent’s personal heritage but there is more to the story than Jews fleeing the ills in Egypt…It’s a work in progress. Much like The Ramayana, it leaves you with a whole lot of unanswered questions,” she says, as she signs off.
SITA’S STORY
In Nina’s quirky take on Valmiki’s epic, Sita, in all her sultry finery, sings the blues of 1920s musician Annette Hanshaw, through a wildly fantastical tale of love, despair, betrayal and desertion. Cleverly interwoven in the narrative is a hilarious and unscripted commentary on the historic background of the epic by a trio of South East Asian shadow puppets, and also the director’s own startlingly similar story of abandonment by her husband. It all leads to a stunningly unorthodox, ever so feminist conclusion, where Sita decides to “empower herself by joining a farmer’s collective” rather than returning to the comforting furrows of Mother Earth, from whence she was born. Watch the film on YouTube/ Sita Sings the Blues.
