Devotional Drama in Hindi

Two folk traditions of religious drama, the Ram Lila and Ras Lila, developed in North India some time before the secular Svang. Dedicated to the sectarian deities Ram and Krishna, the Lila theatres likely originated with impersonations of the gods at annual festivals. Their current forms date from the bhakti period of Hindi literature, when vernacular devotional poetry found a home in the hearts of the Hindu population. The Lila dramas wed episodic enactment of the lives of Ram and Krishna with the singing, dancing, and recitation of poems from this newly flowered literature.

The Ram Lila is based upon Tulsidas's narrative of Ram's adventures, the Ramcharitmanas , a long poem composed in the Awadhi dialect.^[4] Chanted passages from Tulsidas's text intersperse with song, drama, and pageantry to explicate the story. This form of the Ram Lila began soon after Tulsidas's death in 1624 and, according to legend, was first enacted by his disciple Megha Bhagat. In the nineteenth century the royal house of Banaras undertook sponsorship of the Ram Lila at Ramnagar on a massive scale, employing large numbers of actors and specific locations in the city to represent the story's geographical settings. This grand Lila is performed over a period of days, culminating in the festival of Dashahara, when Ram finally defeats the forces of evil. It is attended by hundreds of thousands of spectators who follow the procession as an itinerant audience of worshipers.

Whereas the most famous Ram Lila is linked with the geography and people of Banaras, the Ras Lila's homeland is Vrindavan and the Braj area, where pilgrims come to worship Krishna, born among its simple village people.^[5] Temple courtyards and pavilions form stages for dozens of Ras Lila shows held every year at Krishna's birthday. The performances are bipartite, comprising circle dances (ras ) by boys playing female devotees (gopis ) and dramatic episodes (lilas ) from Krishna's life. As foci of religious emotion and musical embellishment, the verses of poets like Surdas and Nanddas, written in the Braj dialect, punctuate these incidents. The Ras Lila may have achieved this form as early as the sixteenth century.

Alongside these celebrated Lilas, scores of less elaborate representations of the Ram and Krishna stories are performed by wandering drama companies and residents of city neighborhoods. The artists who play in these rustic shows are not dogmatic about the difference between devotion and entertainment, and the deity's story is intermixed with much

singing, dancing, and comic improvisation.^[6] These folk Lilas provide an important avenue of access to devotional Hinduism for people all over northern India.

The Lila theatres, particularly in their village and neighborhood forms, established a practice of popular drama that in a general sense created a foundation for the later Svang and Nautanki Common conventions such as open-air performance, use of music and dance, and mythological story material link these theatres, but a more explicit genetic relationship at the regional level is difficult to verify.^[7] Indeed, a set of contrasts distinguishes the theatre of devotion from its secular counterpart. On the one hand, the Lila plays are meant to inspire reverence and love for God, and they often produce audience emotion approaching rapture; the actors, prepubescent Brahmin boys, are worshiped as divine incarnations (svarup ). On the other hand, Svang and Nautanki shows evoke merriment, lust, wonder, even fear; their performers are considered outcastes and prostitutes. The Lilas function within a religious matrix presided over by priests, patrons, and high-status interpreters. Nautanki relies on its commercial appeal, offering diversion in exchange for a price. The language of the Lilas is elevated and literary, whereas Nautanki is composed in the spoken tongue, accessible to all.^[8]

The Lila traditions may therefore be considered precursors of Svang to the extent that they created a receptive climate for dramatic performance, accustoming viewers to theatrical representation. Since theatre was well established in India in ancient times but appeared to lapse when the use of Sanskrit for literary composition declined, we may more aptly state that the Lila theatres perpetuated the folk stage in an era of transition. Under the guise of devotional religion, the Lilas kept the traditions of folk theatre performance alive, until altered circumstances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave rise to a new secular drama.