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Nina Paley bills herself as America’s Best Loved Unknown Cartoonist . Give her till 2008 and she’ll be India’s Best Debated Unknown Cartoonist.

To rewind a little, Paley is the creator of Sitayana, a series of animations based on the story of Sita from the Ramayana. Paley, an American artist who lives in New York, has already attracted a lot of attention from Indian netizens for her colorful work set to little known jazz music from the 1930s.

While the original inspiration came during a visit to Kerala where her American husband was then working, Paley began working on Sitayana after her husband dumped her by email.

[A]s time went on, my life began increasingly to resemble
Sita’s. I desperately tried to move on emotionally, but I couldn’t get over
my husband. Why was my heart devoted to him, when he’d treated me so badly?
My husband’s peculiar behavior resembled Rama’s: no violent explosions, just
mysterious emotional implosions. Why had he frozen up? Why had he rejected
me, when I loved him so much? Why, why, why?

Obviously, those are fighting words.

Any number of people (count me amongst them) find her attempts both cool and artistically innovative. She’s obviously put in a lot of work and this is a project that means a lot to her. But more importantly, she’s succeeded in creating a work of art that focuses on the immortal aspects of an ancient story – the story of our mothers and sisters and ourselves.

Ramayana, the story of Ram the perfect man, whose perfection demanded he repudiate the perfect woman retold as Sitayana, the story of the perfect woman who can’t hold on to the perfect man. It’s not just a religious story, it’s a human story.

A number of people have of course taken issue with this. Not only is the Ramayana the big honcho of all religious texts in India, surpassing the Bhagwad in popular reference, its central character, Lord Rama, has unwittingly been at the eye of a socio political storm for the past 20 years in India.

Some amongst us are also the last of the Victorians so more than a few people have written in to complain about Sita’s buxom body, fetchingly draped in the kind of clothes you’d see in temples across India. Apparently, these whiners have no clue. A fact that she underlined when she wrote that she got her inspiration from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Then of course, Paley is a white American woman. Cue the drum beats baying for her blood. This complex we have when it comes to white people is so ingrained in our psyche that we don’t know whether to celebrate that they’re paying us attention or get angry at the direction taken by their interest.

If Saraswati doesn’t bestow her favors by first looking at their religion, then why would Ganesh be offended by the color of an author’s skin? It is one thing to remember the colonial era and how it shaped/shapes our world today, it’s completely another to thrust the onus of more than 200 years of institutional racism on a single artist merely because she is white and she has dared to tackle one of our holy cows.

That is racist on our part.

Fireworks are due to begin in 2008 if she proceeds along to plan. Click here for her FAQ. First five chapters of her work available at Youtube.