Wordsmith Samhita Arni (Ramayana in life)

Author Samhita Arni :  A magical  novelist

When Samhita was eight years old, her family shifted to India from Pakistan, where her father had been posted as an Indian Government officer. "I used t read a lot - especially The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. this was one of the way to stay connected to the culture that I had left behind," she recalls."But when I came back, I felt that my identity as an Indian has been questioned. It was 1992, and there was a lot of tension in the country," says the author of Sita's Ramayana and The Missing Queen.





In school in India, she was ostracised by her peers because she had come from Karachi. The epics were her respite: "it was therapy. The Mahabharata felt so familiar, because it reflects the situation between India and Pakistan," says Samhita.
The character which she identified with the most was Karna- "who was the brother of the Pandavas, yet on the side of Kauravas. There is sometimes a sense of familarities in these myths which enables one to understand the world better," she says. The earlier version of Mahabharata Samghita had read was C. Rajagopalachari's, floowed by many authores: R.K. Narayanan, Kamala Subramaniam and more. Visually what she remembered vividly, is Peter Brook's film, which she watched when she was six or seven.




Samhita also knew The Ramayana, but was not particularly fond of it - "What adventure do the women of the Ramayana have? Sita was too submissive and passive for my taste. But when I returned to The Ramayana at 22, what started me was how prevalent the epic is, everywhere we go. From the Lakshman Rekha cockroach repellent to the 2G judgement where the court statement used the phrase, Lakshman Rekha. These metaphores that are used so often - it shows how deeply these stories have penetrated us."
Samhita's last work, The Prince, is based on the iconic Tamil epic, Salappatikaram. "I was tiredd of these epics where the men go to war and the men stay at home, and are left behind and banish even. From time immemorial, we have had a pattern of gendering our emotions. Silappatikaram talked about the power of rage. How it is to be necessory to be angry to protest, ask questions and challenge," say Samhita.


Along the same line with the characters of Manimakalai, godess Meenakshi of Madurai, philosopher Neelakesi and Alli Rani. "I am currently experimenting with a 16th century version of Madurai Meenakshi and her romance with Siva-they meet in battle and begin to experience real love, valnerability and coyness. It disimpowers her." As much as epics interest her romance does too. "I am fascinating by the way we write about relationships. I would love to explore that."