Sita's trial and exile is the passage Hindu women's own retellings have worked on hardest. In the Yuddha Kanda, Rama recovers her and then says publicly that he fought for his honour and not for her, and that she cannot return to a house she has lived in as another man's captive; she enters fire and Agni returns her unburnt. That should end it, and does not — in the Uttara Kanda a launderer beating clothes says he is not Rama, to take back a woman who lived in another man's house, and Rama has the pregnant Sita abandoned in the forest without telling her why. She raises the twins at Valmiki's hermitage, and when Rama finally sends for her to swear her purity once more in public, she asks her mother the earth to take her instead, and the ground opens. Village women's Ramayanas in Telugu, Bengali, Maithili and Tamil have for centuries sung this from her side, sometimes making Rama small and petty, sometimes ending the story before the exile. It is the most sustained internal criticism in the tradition, and it is sung rather than argued.