Nina Paley's Duet with Sita

After bad breakups, women have all kinds of coping strategies. There’s the tub of ice cream, the chocolate binge, shopping sprees, the rebound guy and there’s…reading the Ramayana?! That’s exactly how animator Nina Paley found solace after she and husband Dave split while he was working in South India. Her identification with the tragedy of Rama and Sita led to one of 2008’s most talked about animated films: Sita Sings the Blues.

“Sita Sings the Blues is a mash-up. It’s Indian and American,” notes Paley, who describes the film as “My Ramayana.” “To say that I’m following the Ramayana would be as though I’m trying to make a canonical Ramayana that serves the needs of everyone. A: That’s impossible, and B: That wasn’t anywhere near my goal. My goal was really to heal myself through making some art,” she explains.

Paley’s healing process resulted in a project that’s both whimsical and painful. Using the songs of 1920s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw to move the story along, Paley parallels Sita and Rama’s breakup with that of a fictionalized Dave and Nina. She also employs three irreverent narrators. Voiced by Aseem Chhabra, Bhavana Nagulapally and Manish Acharya, the trio of shadow puppets offers a fractured and often hilarious recounting of the Ramayana—like passing the epic through a child’s game of Telephone but still getting the basic story correct.

The animation, too, is all over the place, using several different styles—from traditional Indian art to more cartoonish renderings. “One reason I did that was to keep myself from getting bored,” recalls Paley, who began working on the film on her laptop computer in 2002. “Another goal was to give a tiny sampling of the breadth of Ramayana art that exists. After I finished it, I realized that it reflects my experience of the Ramayana. I read many versions, read about even more versions and talked to many people about it. And, of course, everybody has a different take on it.”

Nina Paley

Everybody also has a different take on Paley’s film. Sita Sings the Blues aired on PBS in the spring of 2008, did the film festival circuit and debuted at New York City’s IFC Center in December, but it is also available as a free Internet download. For a film primarily marketed through the Web, it has garnered a lot of critical acclaim. “It’s surreal,” says Paley. “I think if the reaction were negative, it wouldn’t be getting as much press.” But there has also been controversy, stemming from Paley’s appropriation of popular Hindu mythology and religious doctrine. “The critics don’t like the depiction of Sita, and they don’t like that there’s any humor in it at all. And they don’t like that she’s singing the blues,” she says.

Perhaps they also don’t like that Paley condenses the age-old epic into the tale of a marriage gone awry? “That’s another reason that it’s not the Ramayana, because the Ramayana has all these other characters and focuses mostly on the war. I dealt with the war as this river of blood behind a wall while Sita is singing. I was focusing on Sita’s relationship with Rama, which is all I really cared about,” insists Paley. “[That] is why the title is Sita Sings the Blues, and not Rama’s Life.”

But in telling solely Sita’s story, Paley takes a lot of liberties—like leaving Rama’s brother Lakshman out of the characters’ exile into the forest. “Because my story was about Sita and Rama, to put Lakshman in would’ve distracted from the main point. I certainly can’t say that it was better, but it was certainly more economical,” admits Paley.

She also defends her decision to have the villainous Ravana kidnap Sita in a grab job, rather than disguising himself as a beggar asking her for water. “Reading the story, it’s such a set-up,” Paley says. “[People say], ‘Oh, Sita shouldn’t have crossed the [threshold of the hut],’ but she had her duty; there was a beggar at the door and she had to be hospitable. Of course she was going to be kidnapped. It didn’t matter if there was a line to cross!”

Paley doesn’t think the change takes any power away from the character. “In Lanka, in Sita Sings the Blues, Ravana’s pushing himself on her all the time and she is resisting,” points out Paley. “She says, ‘The only reason I do not burn you to ashes is because Rama has not ordered me to do so.’ She asserts herself throughout it. I don’t feel like the Sita in my film is a passive Sita at all.”

The question of Paley’s responsibility as an artist to tell the story “correctly” has definitely cropped up. “I’m an artist, man. I’m not making this film for you,” she says to such critics. “I’m making it for my muse, because I need to. The artist’s responsibility is to their vision. It’s not to be politically correct, and it’s not to please academics or pundits.”

At the end of the day, “This is a story about me,” says Paley. “I couldn’t help but take a great deal of comfort from reading the Ramayana because the kind of suffering that I was going through was clearly not unique to me. It’s been around for a really long time. Sita is pure, and even she has that moment where she says, ‘I must have committed a terrible sin in a previous life to deserve such suffering.’ I love that moment, because I’m not a goddess and I’m not pure and I doubt myself frequently. And Sita, she has no stain whatsoever, but when things get tough for her, even she doubts herself.”

There is no doubt that Sita Sings the Blues is its own unique song—one person’s noise and another person’s harmony.

To watch the film and learn more about Paley‘s creative process, visit www.sitasingstheblues.com.

Mala Bhattacharjee is currently news editor, columnist and blogger for Soap Opera Weekly magazine. When not interviewing daytime's bold and beautiful, she's perfecting her chana masala recipe and Netflixing Hindi films.