The Ramlila of Ramnagar [India]

Extract

Ramlila is a cycle play lasting ten to thirty-two days performed annually outdoors in the Hindi speaking region of north India. Its season is around the Dasarha holidays in September-October. The performance is based on Tulsidas’ late 16th-century epic poem Ramacaritamanas (RCM), a Hindi version of Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana. Although thousands of Ramlilas are performed, we shall describe only one—the 31-day cycle of Ramnagar across the Ganga River from Varanasi (Benares or Kasi). Due to the patronage of the Maharaja of Benares who resides in Ramnagar this Ramlila is the most extensive, best performed, and draws the largest audiences of any. It developed its present shape during the early and mid 19th-century. The whole subject of Ramlila is vast, touching on themes of pilgrimage, bhakti (devotional worship), Hindu ideas of reincarnation, the nature of a mixed oral-literate culture of immense sophistication, relationship between government, Maharaja, and ordinary people.