Ramnamis and the Manas

The Ramnami Samaj is a sect of harijan (Untouchable) Ram bhaktas from the Chhattisgarh region of Madhya Pradesh. Formed in the 1890s, the sect has become a dominant force in the religious life of the harijans of the area. While the "official" text of the sect is Tulsidas's Ramcaritmanas , an examination of the movement's history and practices reveals the presence and growing importance of oral variants of the Manas , based on Tulsidas's telling of the Ram story yet distinct from it. In actuality it is these oral variants that circumscribe the Ram story for the Ramnamis.

The founder of the Ramnami sect was an illiterate Chhattisgarhi Camar (member of an Untouchable leather-worker caste) named Parasuram. His father, like many North Indian Ram devotees, had been an avid Manas devotee who would listen to recitations of the text whenever possible and commit verses to memory. Parasuram followed his father's example and from early childhood began memorizing verses from the text. According to the sect's oral hagiography, when Parasuram was in his mid twenties he contracted leprosy but was miraculously cured by a Ramanandi ascetic.^[13] The

ascetic then exhorted Parasuram, m to devote himself entirely to the Manas , viewing the text as his chosen deity, and to ceaselessly practice ramnam , repetition of the name of Ram. As word of the miracle spread, countless villagers came to see Parasuram, who would tell them of the ascetic's teachings, recite stories from the Manas , and speak of the greatness of ramnam . Parasuram's popularity grew, and in less than a year the Ramnami Samaj was born. Those most attracted to Parasuram and his teachings were illiterate harijan villagers like himself.

The Manas became the central symbol of the sect on three different levels. On the material level, the physical text was revered as the sect's chosen deity, as is evident in the Ramnami practice of positioning a copy of the text in the center of the group during bhajan , treating it as an image of a deity to which they are offering hymns. On the level of sound, the Manas was celebrated as a repository of ramnam , and its verses viewed as mantras possessing transformative power. On the level of meaning, the Manas was cherished by the Ramnamis as their primary source of the Ram story—though actual recitation of the narrative has never been stressed—and a repository of great spiritual wisdom.

In the early years of the movement the Ramnamis focused primarily on the first two levels, paying relatively less attention to the text's meaning, possibly because nearly all of the members of the sect were illiterate.^[14] Parasuram could not actually read the Manas well but had memorized large portions of the text, which he would recite in the presence of the other sect members. At this stage in the sect's development the Manas enjoyed a quasi-sruti status in that it was revered primarily as a recited text containing potent mantras that did not need to be understood in order to be spiritually efficacious. The text had already attained this status among many North Indian Ram devotees, so the Ramnamis were not assigning a new distinction to it. They merely adopted a prevalent sentiment.

Since most of the group could neither recite from memory nor understand the text of the Manas , group bhajans originally centered almost exclusively on the chanting of ramnam rather than on recitation of the Manas itself.^[15] As a result, the Name gradually came to supersede the Manas as the central symbol of the sect. Not only did ramnam become the quintessential mantra on which Ramnami devotional chanting focused but its written form was used as a ritual diagram, or yantra , and inscribed on their homes, their clothing, and their bodies.^[16]

In time, however, members of the sect other than Parasuram began to memorize verses from the Manas and integrate them into their ramnam chanting. Group members would occasionally learn the meaning of the verses they had memorized, although in the early days of the sect the verses were still viewed above all as mantras, the power of which was automatically activated through recitation.

The desire to memorize verses nonetheless led eventually to an increase both in literacy and in understanding of the chanted portions of the text. Because the Ramnamis initially were unfamiliar with the full contents of the Manas , they believed that its teachings were based solely on gyan ("religious knowledge"), bhakti ("devotion"), and ramnam . However, as understanding of the memorized verses increased, sect members began to realize that the text also contained many verses that support orthodox Hindu beliefs regarding Brahmin social and religious superiority and the inferior status of low castes and women. The Ramnamis were thus confronted with a difficult situation. The text they had been taught to revere as scripture turned out to contain certain teachings that were diametrically opposed to their own beliefs and apparently supportive of the existing social and religious hierarchy that had placed them at its bottom, declaring them unworthy to possess a developed religious life.

This situation inspired a move by many of the younger Ramnamis to learn to read so that they could understand the meaning of the growing number of verses that had been integrated into group bhajans . The purpose of this effort was twofold. First, it would allow them to sift through the existing collection of verses and eliminate those that were contrary to the sect's developing belief system. Second, it would aid in the establishment of selection criteria to be employed in the building of a corpus of verses to be chanted, which would in turn help give definition to the sect's philosophy and values. In tiffs way the corpus of memorized verses and the sect's beliefs came to exist in a dynamic interchange, each affecting the development of the other.

As the focus shifted from rote recitation of Manas verses to an understanding of the recited text, from an emphasis on sound to an emphasis on meaning, the status of the Manas began to shift from sruti to smrti . No longer viewed as a bounded, inviolable scripture, the text came to be seen as open-ended, capable of being interpreted, elaborated, and when necessary modified. The Ramnamis began both to reinterpret and to expand on the text, emphasizing verses that were in accordance with their values while ignoring others that violated their belief system. The Manas thus became the basis for the sect's own tellings of the Ramayan , which draw not only on the Manas but on a variety of additional texts.