The Cult
Her worship began, fittingly, in a field. Late-Vedic house ritual already prescribes an offering to the plough's furrow — the halasīta-bali of the Gṛhyasūtra ritual literature — treating the cut in the soil as a goddess in her own right, and that furrow-goddess is Sītā's oldest layer. In the epics she is Rāma's wife and the daughter of the Earth; in living practice she is almost always worshipped beside him, as a single deity, Sītā-Rāma, whose image stands in home shrines and temple sanctuaries from Ayodhya to Janakpur. Her high days are the family festivals: Sītā Navamī in the spring month of Vaiśākha, and Vivāha Pañcamī at Mithilā and Janakpur, when the wedding is re-enacted before crowds that cross the Nepal–India border. The Ramlila cycles of the Gangetic towns stage her abduction, her fire, and her return each autumn. Her votive tradition is domestic: the kohbar wedding murals of her Mithilā homeland keep her on the walls of every bride's chamber — a cult painted rather than carved.