On Poetry and Performance

In everyday usage the most common associations evoked by the word "performance" are the ones relating to conventional Western entertainment forms such as the theater and concert hall, the cinema and electronic media. In recent years, however, scholars in a number of disciplines—notably anthropology, folklore, and sociolinguistics—have begun to apply the term to a wider range of human activities. Although ethnographers have long been interested in such "cultural performances" as folk dances and dramas and the recitation of folktales by professional bards, recent studies have found the notion of performance equally useful in examining such activities as the telling of parables and jokes in everyday situations, the formulation and delivery of religious sermons, and even the construction of "street speech"—such as the humorous boasts and insults exchanged by urban American black youths.^[76]

The direction of such studies has been toward viewing performance as "a mode of language use, a way of speaking"; this in turn has led to efforts to develop a comprehensive theory of performance as "a species of situated human communication."^[77] Both the above phrases are taken from an essay by Richard Bauman that makes an important contribution to the development of such a theory. Bauman first points to the increasingly encompassing use of the term "performance," to convey a dual sense of artistic action —the doing of folklore—and artistic event —the performance situation, involving performer, art form, audience, and setting.^[78] He emphasizes the need to identify the features that distinguish performance from other "interpretive frames" for communication, and then offers a "very preliminary attempt" to specify the interpretive guidelines set up by the "performance frame":

Fundamentally, performance as a mode of spoken verbal communication consists in the assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of

[76] See, for examples, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "A Parable in Context"; Rosenberg, The Art of the American Folk Preacher (for further discussion of Rosenberg's work, see below Chapter 4, The Nature of Katha ); Labov, Language in the Inner City.

[77] Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, 11.

[78] Ibid., 4.

communicative competence. This competence rests on the knowledge and ability to speak in socially appropriate ways. . . . From the point of view of the audience, the act of expression on the part of the performer is thus marked as subject to evaluation for the way it is done, for the relative skill and effectiveness of the performer's display of competence. Additionally, it is marked as available for the enhancement of experience, through the present enjoyment of the intrinsic qualities of the act of expression itself. Performance thus calls forth special attention to and heightened awareness of the act of expression and gives license to the audience to regard the act of expression and the performer with special intensity.^[79]

Bauman's analysis suggests two criteria for identifying an act of expression as a performance. The first relates to the performer's "assumption of responsibility" and so might be termed a "formal" criterion; it accords well with one of the dictionary definitions of performance as "execution in a set or formal manner or with technical or artistic skill."^[80] The second criterion relates to the potential effect of a performance on participants—its ability to enhance or intensify experience—and so might be termed "affective." Performance events, then, are demarcated by both formal and affective boundaries from ordinary events and communications.^[81] They "break through" into the mundane context, signaling their presence by formal cues but justifying their existence by their ability to transform and enhance life, often by reference to impersonal values and experiences.^[82]

One of the underlying concerns of Bauman's essay is to free scholars of verbal art from a text-centered orientation. He urges that "it is no longer necessary to begin with artful texts, identified on independent formal grounds and then reinjected into situations of use, in order to conceptualize verbal art in communicative terms. Rather, in terms of the approach being developed here, performance becomes constitutive of the domain of verbal art as spoken communication."^[83] This insight reflects a sea change in folklore studies from the period of the nineteenth-century folktale collectors who regarded oral performances as just another category of texts and the performers (if they noted them at all) as mere channels—often annoyingly imperfect ones—through which such

[79] Ibid., 11.

[80] Webster's New International Dictionary, unabridged, 2d ed. (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam Webster, 1960), p. 1818.

[81] Bauman is careful to point out, however, the difficulties inherent in any attempt to define "ordinary" speech (Verbal Art as Performance, 10). It may be more useful to speak of a continuum of communicative frames, some of which have a higher "performance density" than others.

[82] Cf. Hymes, "Breakthrough into Performance."

[83] Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, 11.

texts were transmitted.^[84] The realization of the unique, emergent qualities of oral performances came as something of a revelation and perhaps inevitably led to a reaction against the text-centered approach. Albert Lord's study of Yugoslav bardic poets, The Singer of Tales (1960)—a work of such originality and vigor that it still tends to be invoked, Ganesh-like, at the beginning of any major study of oral performance—conveyed an infectious enthusiasm for bardic recitation and gave recognition to the previously unknown art of "oral-formulaic composition." It also gave rise to an "oral-formulaic school" of literary critics who, in a sort of retroactive revenge on textualists, set out to dissect various literary classics in order to demonstrate that they were, in effect, imperfect records of "lost" oral performances.^[85] Ironically, although The Singer of Tales grew out of Millman Parry and Albert Lord's research on the Homeric epics, its author came to take a negative view of the relationship between oral and written literature, suggesting that the latter was parasitic on the former and that its dissemination would inevitably result in the decline and disappearance of oral traditions.^[86]

Perhaps influenced by this view, much recent folklore research has focused on nonliterate cultures with vigorous oral traditions—often small communities located in remote areas of the globe. Such studies appear to transport us to a "pure" realm of oral communication, untainted by the written word. Bauman writes confidently of the possibility of creating an "ethnography of verbal art" for such cultures as the Plateau Malagasy of Africa, the Ilongot of the Philippines, or the Quechua speakers of Bolivia—a project that would involve the cataloging of all the "major speech styles" in the community.^[87]

Scholars interested in the verbal art of North India, however, face a more complex situation: a society possessing a literary heritage dating back three millennia, but much of which has always been orally transmitted and performed; a mixed literate and illiterate culture that supports an extraordinarily broad range of performance genres and an intricate text/performance relationship that should rarely be excluded from any comprehensive study of either text or performance. Thus, for example, it has recently been observed with regard to certain oral tradi-

[84] Thus, for example, the British scholars who recorded the Alha cycle in North India patronizingly regarded their bards as the imperfect preservers of what they mistakenly assumed to be a "lost" twelfth-century epic; see Grierson's introduction to Waterfield, The Lay of Alha .

[85] For an appraisal of the school's contribution, see Finnegan, Oral Poetry, esp. 69-73.

[86] Lord, The Singer of Tales, 137.

[87] Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, 12, 13, 20.

tions that the modern proliferation of printed texts has not put an end to performances (as Lord's prognosis would suggest) but has in some cases encouraged them or has led to the development of new performance styles.^[88] On the other hand, scholars of classical Indian literature are finding increasingly that they must come to terms with reflections of "performance" in their texts.^[89] For the study of performance in the Indian setting, then, it may sometimes be necessary "to begin with artful texts," because many oral performances in this culture do precisely that. As we shall see, a religious epic like the Manas has for its audience an inherently "emergent" quality: it is a means rather than an end, a blueprint rather than an artifact.

The strength of Bauman's contribution lies in its emphasis on a broad and inclusive vision of performance as "a unifying thread tying together the marked, segregated esthetic genres and other spheres of verbal behavior."^[90] This vision of performance as a mode of communication with both formal and affective dimensions serves here to relate such seemingly disparate activities as the solitary chanting of the Manas by an individual in his own home and the presentation of a drama based on the text by a large ensemble of costumed actors before an audience of fifty thousand people.

The identification of performance as a distinctive communicative frame sets it in contrast to other such frames, and despite the difficulty in defining what is "normal" or "ordinary" speech in a given society, most speakers would identify some such category as their "standard" form of communication.^[91] In the realm of literature there is an equivalent dichotomy between prose and poetry; the former, albeit bound by its own formal conventions, represents the written equivalent of "ordinary speech" and hence is the medium of choice for the description of the "prosaic" world of everyday life. Yet what separates poetry from prose is not merely the formal conventions (such as meter and rhyme) by which a poet "assumes responsibility for a display of communicative competence" but also poetry's potential to provide "enhancement of experience" and "heightened awareness."

The intimate relationship between poetry and oral performance is

[88] See, for example, Karine Schomer's work on the Alha tradition; "The Audience as Patron." A close parallel with the Indic situation is the oral-textual interaction in Malay, richly explored in Sweeney's A Full Hearing.

[89] E.g., the growing interest among Sanskritists in the oral-performance context of the Puranas; see Rocher, The Puranas^[*] , esp. 53-59; also Bonazzoli, "Composition, Transmission, and Recitation of the Puranas^[*] ."

[90] Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, 5.

[91] E.g., the "everyday talk" of the Malagasy; the "stylistically unmarked 'straight speech'" of the Ilongot; Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, 12-13.

underscored by the fact that the spread of literacy and print technology does not necessarily increase the appreciation of poetry. In the modern West, near-universal literacy has been accompanied by the gradual eclipse of poetry by other written entertainment forms to the point that literature instructors have become accustomed to hearing students complain that they "like to read but hate poetry." Of course, students in literature classes continue to dutifully read the writings of poets; some may even have the chance to hear these writings recited by an inspired teacher—which is much better. But few today have the kind of repeated exposure to poetry that causes it to be, as our idiom so appropriately puts it, "learned by heart"—internalized to the degree that it can become self-performing within us. This is an essential part of the experience of poetry, and without this experiential/performative dimension it is hardly surprising that the popularity of the art has suffered.

Poetry has suffered too in its association with the act of "reading," which has become largely a private and silent experience.^[92] But although it is relatively easy to "read" a prose narrative or nonfiction work, it is (as has often been observed) more difficult to "read" a poem. Subjected to the kind of silent scanning normally given to prose literature, poetry tends to remain opaque and unrewarding, to seem either too obvious or too obscure. Of course, poetry of a sort retains mass popularity through one specific genre: the popular song. Here technology on a mass scale—but in an oral rather than a print medium—has tremendously enhanced the popularity of poetry, whatever one may think of its quality or predominant themes.

The Ramcaritmanas was the product of a culture that lacked a strong prose tradition, widespread literacy, and the technology for mass dissemination of texts. All of these factors have, in the modern West, given rise to a style of appreciation of literature known as "reading," which despite its undoubted merits, does not appear to be well suited to the appreciation of poetry. That the Manas was not meant to be "read" in this sense—that it was always intended to be performed—is repeatedly emphasized in the text itself. Although a verb meaning "to read" (bancna ) occasionally occurs at appropriate moments when written communications are "read,"^[93] this verb is used nowhere in reference to the "reading" of religious truths or of the Manas itself. Instead, the

[92] For an excellent summary of recent research on the technological and cultural transformations associated with this development and their impact on the experience of sacred texts, see Graham, Beyond the Written Word.

[93] E.g., King Dashrath reads (to himself) the letter from King Janak telling of Ram and Sita's marriage (1.290.4); Ravan receives a letter from Lakshman and "has it read" to him (bancvana , a causative form of bancna ) by one of his ministers (5.56.10).

verbs commonly used are "to recite" (kathna ), "to tell" (kahna ), "to sing or chant" (gana ), and "to listen" (sunna ). These verbs occur especially in the concluding verses of each book, which are known as "hearing the fruits" (phalsruti ) because they describe the benefits that the text offers to devotees. Sundar kand^[*] concludes:

Singing the virtues of Raghunayak yields all blessings.
Reverently listening, one crosses the ocean of existence without a boat.
5.60

The closing chand of Kiskindha^[*]kand^[*] declares:

Whoever hears, sings, recites, or meditates on this story,
attains the highest state.
4.30.15

Such verses are found in many Hindu texts. They are not simply a convention, but a reflection of an ancient belief in the efficacy of hearing, reciting, and memorizing the sacred word—a belief reflected in the traditional categories of literature, which are conceptualized not as read but rather as "heard" (sruti ) and "remembered" (smrti^[*] ).^[94] The Manas grows out of a religious milieu in which oral performance is both the basic medium for the transmission of religious truths and a ritual act and discipline possessing inherent virtue and power.

If the Manas was not intended to be read, we may add that it is not "read" in the modern sense—except perhaps by Westerners who labor through it out of cultural or historical curiosity or by a somewhat larger number of Indian students who dutifully digest excerpts from it in college literature courses, much as their Western counterparts "read" Milton and Shelley.^[95] Such readers make up one audience for the text, but they are hardly its prime constituency. The latter is composed of the many millions of Hindi-speaking Hindus for whom the Manas is both

[94] Tulsidas also advocates the memorization of his epic. The phalsruti of the final book (7.130.15) urges one to memorize (literally, "place in the heart") a specific number of verses; the numerical terms (sat panccaupai ) can be interpreted in several ways. Hill translates "five or six' (The Holy Lake of the Acts of Rama , 498) but most traditional commentators favor "105" or even "500." Some have attempted to identify which verses the poet had in mind, and published anthologies exist for the convenience of devotees who wish to memorize the "essence" of the epic.

[95] I was fortunate in that the teacher with whom I first read the Manas , Kali C, Bahl, encouraged me from the beginning to chant it aloud and taught me melodies to which each of its meters could be sung. I found my comprehension and appreciation of the text greatly enhanced by this practice. I also began memorizing verses that pleased me especially; this too proved helpful, as each newly acquired line became an internalized paradigm that helped me to understand other passages. I am convinced that both recitation and memorization (however unpopular the latter may be with Western students and educators) are vital to the appreciation of poetry.

an epic song to be savored aesthetically and a liturgy that plays an important role in everyday life—with the added observation that these two forms of "appreciation" generally cannot be separated.

It has often been noted that the popularity of the Tulsidas epic crosses the boundary between educated and illiterate. In discussing the appeal of folk dramas based on the epic, Kapila Vatsyayan observed, "There is no question of making demarcation between the literate and the illiterate in this sphere, for many times a seeming illiterate will know the story and the words better and with a greater understanding of its value than one who reads it only as an intellectual exercise."^[96] If people who cannot read know not only the story but also "the words" of a text, then the question arises as to how they have learned them—obviously by hearing them performed. But when, how, and by whom is the text performed? A researcher interested in these questions will find only a few intriguing clues in scholarly sources. Thus Allchin, in the introduction to his translation of Vinay patrika , cites the popularity of the Manas and mentions "generally accepted schemes of division so that the whole work may be completed in either nine or thirty parts. Such public recitations are one of the strongest parts of Vaishnavite religious education. They are also supported by a vast body of private readers or reciters who regularly read the story of Ram in their own homes, often completing a whole reading each month."^[97] Vatsyayan mentions another kind of performance—that of a professional reciter and singer "who recites the theme either as pure recitation or as the sung word. This Kathakara is known to all parts of India. Sometimes he is called just a Kathakara , sometimes a Rama-Kathakara or a Hari-Kathakara . He is a professional singer, an artist who is a reciter, singer, musician, mono-actor and instrumentalist, all at once."^[98]

Allchin's and Vatsyayan's observations suggest two performance genres that utilize the epic, neither of which has been systematically studied. A third genre that has received some attention is that of Ramlila dramas, although in this case most of the research has focused on theatrical and staging conventions rather than on the role of the epic text in the performances. These three genres—simple recitation, recitation plus exposition, and full dramatic enactment—may be ordered in a sequence proceeding from simpler to more complex, and so the structure of this study may be visualized as shown in Figure 4.

The recitation of the Manas (Manas-path^[*] ) can be carried on by a

[96] Vatsyayan, Traditional Indian Theatre, 111.

[97] Allchin, The Petition to Ram , 65.

[98] Vatsyayan, Traditional Indian Theatre, 111.

Figure 4.
Schema of Manas performance

single person and there need be no listeners; this is clearly the simplest way to perform the text and is represented by the inner frame of the diagram. Even though one might suppose that in this case there is a performer but no audience, it would be more correct to say that performer and audience are the same; for both the criteria of performance noted earlier are present here, although reflected in a solitary activity. This kind of performance is discussed in Chapter 2. Recitation's more complex variant, in which there is an outside audience and the reciters assume a professional status, is examined in the same chapter, along with a special style of group singing of the epic (Ramayan^[*]gana or dhun ) that is popular in the Banaras region.

The exposition of the text (Katha or pravacan ) necessarily involves both performer and audience. The latter may be of any size, and today the use of electronic media has brought this art to huge audiences. The performers in this tradition are largely professionals; the patronage relationship thus implied contributes to the further complexity of the genre, which is treated in chapters 3 and 4.

The third and, technically speaking, most complex genre is the one in which the text serves as the basis for a full-scale enactment of the Ram legend (Ramlila ), requiring the cooperative efforts of large numbers of people—reciters, prompters, actors, costumers, prop makers, and musicians—and aiming to present the text and its story to the widest audience. This genre is discussed in Chapter 5.

Just as my diagram of the epic's narrative "genealogy" had an implied outer frame—the performance and interpretation of the text by Tulsi's own hearers—so the present diagram has an encompassing matrix: the social and cultural context within which these performances unfold, which influences them and is influenced by them in diverse ways. This context and these influences are considered in the concluding chapter.