Introduction

Anyone interested in the religion and culture of Northern India sooner or later encounters a reference to the epic poem Ramcaritmanas and its remarkable popularity.^[1] This sixteenth-century retelling of the legend of Ram by the poet Tulsidas has been hailed "not merely as the greatest modern Indian epic, but as something like a living sum of Indian culture," singled out as "the tallest tree in the magic garden of medieval Hindu poesy," and acclaimed (by the father of Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi) as "the greatest book of all devotional literature."^[2] Western observers have christened it "the Bible of Northern India" and have called it "the best and most trustworthy guide to the popular living faith of its people."^[3]

[1] All translations from the Ramcaritmanas are mine except where otherwise indicated. Numbers refer to the popular Gita Press version edited by Hanuman Prasad Poddar. For an explanation of the numbering system, see below, p. 15.

[2] The first quotation is from R. C. Prasad, in his introduction to the revised edition of Growse, The Ramayana^[*]of Tulasidasa , v; the second is from Smith, Akbar, The Great Mogul , 417; the third is from Gandhi, An Autobiography , 47.

[3] E.g., Macfie, The Ramayan of Tulsidas ; the second phrase comes from Growse, The Ramayana^[*]of Tulasidasa , xxxviii.

Such remarkable notices may arouse one's curiosity, first of all, to read the text—although here the English-language reader may be daunted by the fact that (for reasons to be discussed below) Tulsidas's great epic fares rather badly in translation. Beyond that, a student interested in the popularity and impact of this remarkable work has had to be content with a literature consisting primarily of textual studies that, despite their undoubted contributions to an understanding of the origin, structure, and meaning of the epic, shed little light on its interaction with its audience—an interaction that has never been primarily through the medium of the written word. Indeed, it seems ironic that a text so often cited as a popular and living tradition has received so little study as such, apart from a handful of treatments of Ramlila folk dramas, the most obviously "theatrical" genre of Ramcaritmanas performance. The present study, which grew out of one reader's encounter with the text and increasing curiosity about its living performers, seeks to fill this lacuna by investigating a wide spectrum of performance genres that utilize the epic, including traditions of public and private recitation, folksinging and formal exposition, as well as the more familiar Ramlila pageants. Approaching the text from the perspective of its performance, it will suggest that, in the audience's experience, the two are essentially inseparable.

Since its underlying approach will be to treat the Ramcaritmanas as, in S. C. R. Weightman's admirable phrase, "a religious event"^[4] and as a living—hence necessarily changing and evolving—presence in North Indian society, this study will also be concerned with the historical development of the performance genres that it treats. This is problematic, since written source materials are meager, and oral history—although richer—cannot be relied on for accuracy. Yet a historical perspective is all the more necessary given the tendency of many within the Hindu tradition to assert the hoary antiquity and static changelessness of their practices, and of some Western scholars to accept such pronouncements uncritically. The living tree of Hinduism may indeed have deep roots, but it is constantly putting out new branches as well as occasionally shedding dead leaves, and although many of the performance genres described here had ancient precursors, their evolution and present popularity reflects, as will be seen, specific social and historical developments of the comparatively recent past.

Even a study of text-in-performance must necessarily begin with the text—itself an essential context for understanding its performance. The

[4] Weightman, "The Ramcaritmanas as a Religious Event," 53-72.

present chapter is intended to provide the general reader with background information necessary for an appreciation of the performance genres to be examined in succeeding chapters. To this end it touches on a number of potentially vast subjects: the history of the Ramayan tradition, the life and works of Tulsidas, and the metrical and narrative structure of the Ramcaritmanas —even though, in some cases, exemplary studies or even whole literatures on these topics already exist. For a study based primarily on field research, other contexts must also be delineated: conceptual, methodological, and geographical; hence this chapter also introduces some of the concepts that underlie the study, places them in reference to other recent research, and outlines the structure of the investigation to follow. It concludes with a brief introduction to the city of Banaras and its importance as a setting for the performance of the Tulsidas epic.