Sita on Screen: A Film, Television, Animation, and Documentary History
Chapter Three · Screen History
Sita on Screen
Film, television, animation, documentary.
The poem is older than the camera. Once the camera arrived, in a theatre, in a drawing room, on a phone, it could not leave her alone. This chapter is that screen history. It is not a ranking of piety, and it is not a review of Sai Pallavi.
Before the Talkies
Indian screens met the Ramayana while cinema was still silent. Dadasaheb Phalke's Lanka Dahan (1917) is among the earliest landmarks.[1] Women were often kept off the set, so Sita could be played by a man. Anna Salunke appeared as both Rama and Sita in Phalke's film.[2] That fact still startles a first-time reader. It tells you how young the industry was, and how old the hunger for this story already was.
Many early prints are lost or fragmentary. This archive will not invent a complete silent list where the film itself has gone. What can be said safely is simpler. Sita was among the first women the Indian camera thought it could show as sacred and as a role at once.
When Women Took the Part
As actresses entered the frame, Sita became a test of presence rather than of disguise. Debaki Bose's Bengali Seeta gave the role to Durga Khote, among the earliest named women in the part.[2] Shobhana Samarth played her in Vijay Bhatt's Hindi Ram Rajya (1943), a film later remembered in popular history as one Mahatma Gandhi consented to watch.[2] In Odia, Prabhavati appeared in Seeta Bibaha (1936).[2] The geography of the role widened before the industries had settled their later borders.
These performances drew on theatre and on the face offered as if to a shrine. That grammar never quite left the mythological film. Later cameras would complicate it. They did not invent it.
Studio Mythologicals: Hindi, Tamil, Telugu
Through the 1950s and 1960s the studio mythological became a popular machine. Tamil cinema's Sampoorna Ramayanam (1958) gave Sita to Padmini, with N. T. Rama Rao as Rama and Sivaji Ganesan as Bharata.[2][7] Telugu cinema made a speciality of wedding and court: Geetanjali as Sita in N. T. Rama Rao's Sita Rama Kalyanam (1961), Rao himself as Ravana.[2][6] Anjali Devi, Jaya Prada, Chandrakala and others carried the part through Telugu and bilingual films for two more decades.[2][5] Jaya Prada played an older Sita opposite Jeetendra in Lav Kush (1997).[1][5] Nayanthara took the role in Sri Rama Rajyam (2011).[5]
Hindi cinema had Anita Guha opposite Mahipal in Babubhai Mistry's Sampoorna Ramayana (1961).[1] Homi Wadia's Sampoorna Ramayana (1960) ended, Outlook later recalled, with a dedication that the Ramayana would not conclude until the miseries of all Sitas of the land were ended.[3] Even inside the studio style, someone was already arguing that the figure exceeded the costume.
Do not flatten these industries into one "Bollywood Sita." Tamil inherits Kamban as well as Valmiki. Telugu inherits a stage grammar of verse and frontality. Hindi, after 1987, inherits a television face so strong that later films have had to walk around it.
The Sunday That Stopped the Street
Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan (1987 to 1988), on Doordarshan, did what no single theatrical Sita had done. It entered the house. Deepika Chikhalia played Sita opposite Arun Govil's Rama.[1][4] Streets thinned on Sunday mornings. Decades later, people still touched her feet in airports. During the 2020 lockdown the serial was broadcast again and found a second nation of viewers who had never seen it first-run.[4]
That is why Arun Govil's presence as Dasharatha in the 2026 film is not only a credit. It is a fact of memory. A new Sita will be watched by eyes that already know another one. Later television tellings, including the 2012 Sagar reboot on Zee, and Siya Ke Ram, with Madirakshi Mundle, belong on the same shelf.[1] They are not footnotes. For millions they were the poem.
Animation, and the Viewer Who Did Not Grow Up With Sagar
Animated Ramayanas are often a first Sita for children, and for viewers outside the Sunday-serial generation. The Hindi animated feature Ramayana: The Epic (2010) gave Sita's voice to Juhi Chawla.[9] Such films set iconography for people who will meet Tiwari's picture without Doordarshan in their childhood. They are not trivial because they are drawn.
Outside India, Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues (2008) retold the abduction and the later wound in American independent animation, set against 1920s jazz and against the filmmaker's own marriage. Paley called it a tale of truth, justice and a woman's cry for equal treatment.[3][8] It is not an Indian studio product. It belongs in this chapter so that "Sita on screen" is not mistaken for a closed national list.
When the Camera Argues
Not every screen Sita is a mythological in the old sense. Madhureeta Anand's documentary Laying Janaki to Rest (2006) went straight at the fire ordeal.[3] Stage and film revisions of the last twenty-five years have asked what happens if the later exile is not softened. Om Raut's Adipurush (2023), with Kriti Sanon as Sita, became a public argument about taste, language and visual effects rather than a new consensus about the character.[1][10] That argument is history too. This archive will not use it only as a foil to praise the next film.
A fair comparison, when one is finally made, should use a fixed grid: which telling is being followed; what the costume does; what the body is allowed to do; what she is given to say; who directed; and in which decade the picture was asked to please. Ranking actresses for piety is not criticism.
The 2026 Film as One More Chapter
Nitesh Tiwari's two-part Ramayana places Sai Pallavi in a line that began when a man played Sita in a silent fire, and that passed through Khote, Samarth, Padmini, Geetanjali, Anjali Devi, Jaya Prada, Chikhalia, Nayanthara, and names this page has not yet earned the right to list in full.
What is already history: the role is hers in public from 3 July 2025; Tiwari said on 18 July 2026 that she was a first choice; the campaign has shown her first as companion, not as captive.[11] What is not yet history: the interpretation as a completed performance. When the film can be seen in full, this chapter gains a last row. It does not delete the rows above it.
What Is Not Known
- A complete title-by-title list. Many regional prints remain unconfirmed in this file.
- How Namit Malhotra's Sita will sit on the comparison grid until Part 1 is seen.
- Whether the production studied any particular screen predecessor. No such brief has been published.
Sources
- Indian Express, "Amid Prabhas-Kriti Sanon's Adipurush release, a look at all the Ramayans told on screen," 17 June 2023.
- Times Now, "Ramayana: Before Sai Pallavi, Who Were The First Women To Play Sita In Films?," 5 April 2026.
- Outlook India, "When Sita Shows Defiance: Against The Grains Of Myths," 23 June 2023.
- The Statesman, "Deepika Chikhalia, OG Sita of Indian television gives her verdict on Ranbir Kapoor and Sai Pallavi's 'Ramayana'," 26 June 2026.
- News18, "Sai Pallavi To Nayanthara: 6 South Indian Actresses Who Played Sita On Screen," 4 April 2026.
- Credits of Sita Rama Kalyanam (1961, Telugu), directed by N. T. Rama Rao; Certificate of Merit, 8th National Film Awards.
- Credits of Sampoorna Ramayanam (1958, Tamil), directed by K. Somu; released 14 April 1958.
- Nina Paley, Sita Sings the Blues (2008); Margy Rochlin, New York Times, 15 February 2009; Indian Express revisit, 14 June 2023.
- Credits of Ramayana: The Epic (2010); Sita voiced by Juhi Chawla.
- Contemporaneous coverage of Adipurush (2023), Om Raut; Kriti Sanon as Sita.
- SaiPallaviCanvas, "Ramayana Context," 16 September 2026: Sai Pallavi, 3 July 2025; Tiwari, 18 July 2026.