Watch novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explain Sita's story.
Videos: Afsar Dayatar/Rediff.com
When Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni wrote The Palace Of Illusions: A Novel, in 2008, she knew it was just the beginning.
After writing the Mahabharata from Draupadi's point of view, she could feel another queen's story that needed to be told.
But Sita's story took her longer to find, and in Sita's story were the voices of the other women in the Ramayana -- Urmila, Sita's sister who married Lakshman; Kaikeyi, the mother who chooses her son, Bharat, over her step-son, Ram; and Mandodari, Ravan's virtuous but silently suffering consort.
In a conversation with novelist Ashwin Sanghi, that introduced Divakaruni's The Forest Of Enchantments, she explains why.
Before she did that, Divakaruni read an excerpt from her book.
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