A wife should be like goddess Sita: Bombay HC

A remark attributed to a Bombay High Court judge — that a wife should be like the goddess Sita, devoted, patient, and self-sacrificing — ignited a sharp debate about the place of religious and mythological ideals in judicial reasoning, and about what such language signals to women seeking justice from the institutions meant to protect them.

The invocation of Sita as a model for contemporary Indian wives is not uncommon in popular culture or political rhetoric, but its appearance in a legal context carries a different weight. Courts are not temples; judges are not priests. When a judicial officer suggests that a woman's marital difficulties might be resolved by cultivating the patience of a goddess who endured exile and fire-walking rather than seeking relief through law, the implication — however unintentionally framed — is that endurance is the appropriate response to marital mistreatment.

Women's rights advocates reacted strongly. Their argument was direct: the legal system exists precisely to protect people from circumstances they should not have to endure through patient suffering. A wife who is mistreated has access to law — to provisions against domestic violence, to divorce proceedings, to criminal remedies. Telling her to be more Sita-like is not guidance; it is an instruction to look away from those remedies.

There is also the question of whose Sita. The Ramayana has been interpreted in hundreds of ways across thousands of years and across the length and breadth of South and Southeast Asia. The submissive, uncomplaining Sita of popular piety is one reading — one that many feminist scholars of the text have challenged by emphasizing her strength, her agency, and ultimately her refusal, in Valmiki's version, to return to Rama at all.

What courts project in their language matters. It shapes how petitioners understand their standing and their options. Mythology is rich territory for literature, philosophy, and personal faith. It is uncertain ground for jurisprudence.