What happens after Ayodhya? The Renunciation reclaims Sita's voice

In her debut novel The Renunciation, architect-turned-author Pragya Agrawal does not retell the Ramayana, she inhabits its aftermath. In a conversation with indiatoday.tech, she speaks about agency, silence, and why Sita's final act is not a defeat but a declaration.

There is a particular kind of courage involved in picking up a story that belongs to an entire civilisation and saying: but what about her? Pragya Agrawal does exactly this in The Renunciation. The book opens not with the swayamvar, the golden deer, or the war. It begins in the silence after; in the ashram of Sage Valmiki, where a woman named Vandevi is raising twin sons who do not yet know they are princes.

Beginning in the aftermath

The most striking thing about The Renunciation is what it skips. The exile, the abduction, the war — these are not the story. By the time the novel opens, they are already memory.

Agrawal has made a structural choice that is almost counter-intuitive: she begins where most retelling end.

"I wanted to illuminate Sita's inner transformation, her quiet awakening, resilience, and evolving clarity as she moves beyond the roles of wife, mother, and queen," she explains. "I was curious how someone so anchored in these identities could arrive at the decision to renounce everything she once held dear."

The Uttara Kand, she notes, has always unsettled her with its velocity, Sita's return to Ayodhya, her banishment, her disappearance into the earth, all compressed into a few passages, as though the epic itself flinched from looking too closely. "That suddenness always felt less like a conclusion and more like an unanswered question: what inner clarity allowed her to make such a choice?"

The novel is her attempt at that answer, not through declaration, but through the slow accumulation of private memory, "much like memory itself, gradually building toward self-realisation."

It is most convincing when it trusts that slowness. Readers who come expecting the momentum of a plot-driven retelling may need to adjust their pace as the novel asks for a different kind of attention, more inward than eventful. That is a deliberate choice on Agrawal's part, though it does mean the middle sections ask for some patience before the story finds its emotional stride.

The strength that goes unnamed

One of the novel's earliest and most quietly charged moments comes before Sita is even a wife: as a girl, she lifts Pinaka, the divine bow of Shiva, almost in passing, with none of the ceremonial tension that surrounds Ram's later feat in the same space. The contrast is deliberate.

"The lifting of the Pinaka is rarely attributed to Sita's strength in the same way it is to Ram's," Agrawal says. "Hers is often reduced to a part of the larger narrative that ultimately centres him. This subtle sidelining reflects a broader pattern, where women's power is present but not always named or celebrated with equal weight." By leaving Sita's moment quiet and almost unnoticed, she invites the reader to do the noticing instead.

This is the novel at its most elegant: making its argument through form rather than statement. It is a mode Agrawal handles with a sure hand, though there are occasional moments elsewhere where the prose steps in to underline what the scene has already communicated. For a writer so clearly attuned to the power of the unspoken, those instances stand out simply because the restraint elsewhere sets such a high bar.

A title that turns on itself

The title is doing work that most readers will not immediately perceive. Renunciation, in collective memory, this word attaches to what was done to Sita: Ram's renunciation of her. Agrawal's novel insists on a reversal.

"We often remember Sita with sympathy, as the one who was renounced by Ram. But in the final act, it is in fact Sita who renounces Ram," she says. "Yet this is rarely how the moment is held in collective memory, perhaps because it unsettles the image of Ram, or complicates the way we have chosen to revere him."

In the novel, Sita is offered what she once wanted: Ram acknowledges his mistake, and she may return to Ayodhya, provided she submits, once more, to public proof of her chastity. The external conditions are met. The inner voice says otherwise.

"Her renunciation is much more glorious than defeat nor defiance," Agrawal says. "The circumstances narrow her choices, but within that narrowing, she claims complete ownership of her final act. It is an assertion, a decision to listen to herself above all else. It becomes her movement towards an inner completeness."

This reframing is the novel's most original contribution, and the final chapters are where the writing finds its surest footing, which makes one wish the journey to that point moved with a little more urgency in places.

Not a villain. A God bound by his own code

The most surprising, and, on reflection, most principled, decision in the novel is its refusal to condemn Ram. He is not absent, and he is not exonerated. He is rendered with the same care Agrawal brings to Sita: as someone capable of love and capable of failure, unable to fully separate the two.

"If I did not do justice to the grace, depth, and complexity of Ram's character, I would risk weakening Sita herself," she says. "Otherwise, the reader would never understand why she loves him as deeply as she does. Her emotional truth is inseparable from the credibility of Ram's character."

It is a defensible and often moving choice. Occasionally, the even-handedness tips into a careful balancing act that leaves some of the moral tension slightly diffused, as though the novel is so invested in fairness to both its central figures that it holds back from letting the full weight of Sita's situation settle. But Agrawal is clear-eyed about the risk, and one senses it is a conscious negotiation rather than an oversight.

"This is not a moral endorsement," she is careful to say. "It is an exploration of complexity."

The quiet anger and the architecture of memory

There are two moments in the novel where Sita's displeasure flickers, when Ram goads Surpanakha in jest, and when, after the war, he asks her to prove her chastity before taking her back. Neither becomes a confrontation. Both settle into Sita's body like slow sediment, building the substrate of what is to come.

"Sita's quiet anger reflects her essence: restrained, graceful, deliberate," Agrawal says. "An overt confrontation would have suggested agitation, and in some ways diminished her agency. Her power lies not in confrontation, but in the calm, deliberate, and principled way she navigates injustice."

She is alert to what that restraint costs: "When feelings remain unspoken and unresolved, they gather over time into fractures that can alter the course of a life."

Agrawal's background in landscape architecture is not incidental to how the book is built. "In design, you guide movement through space using walls, paths, light, enclosure, and framed views," she says. "Writing works in much the same way — except the space is interior."

In the Renunciation, chapters begin in Sita's present before slipping into the past through a threshold, a smell, a sound, a passing thought, "as though one emotional chamber opened into another." When this works, it produces the novel's most affecting passages. The transitions are occasionally uneven, but the structural instinct behind them is sound, and it grows more assured as the novel approaches its close.

The Renunciation may not answer every question it raises, but its ambition lies precisely in asking them. By restoring Sita’s interior life, recasting her final act as assertion, and insisting on her humanity beyond myth, Pragya Agrawal reshapes a story we thought we knew. It is a debut marked by thoughtfulness and restraint, and a voice that feels both assured and quietly distinctive.