Katha in Context: The Contemporary Performance Milieu

Because audience and setting are crucial ingredients in the art of Katha , I would like to offer, as an introduction to the discussion of performance styles that follows, a brief description of some of the settings within which contemporary performances unfold. This section also supplements and updates the legendary and historical material presented in the preceding chapter.

Daily Katha an Afiternoon at Sankat Mochan

Despite the growing importance of festivals and private performances, nitya (continuous or daily) Katha remains an important oratorical tradition in North India. It is encountered especially in religious centers and ashrams, where there is a steady audience of sadhus and pilgrims intent on experiencing satsang^[*] and gaining insight into the sacred story. In Ayodhya, for example, most of the larger temples and monasteries have resident kathavacaks who perform daily in late afternoon. The audience of ashram residents may be supplemented by neighborhood people with a fondness for a particular speaker's exposition and by sadhus who are temporarily lodged in the establishment, for the daily Katha constitutes one of the important religious activities of the day.

The timing of daily Katha is obviously not based on the modern commercial day, but on an older pattern. Agricultural work as well as religious activity begins before dawn, and a midafternoon meal often marks the end of the workday. In the late afternoon, when the sun's heat is less intense, people gather in the shade of a tree or under a temple portico to pass an hour or two enjoying Katha . This pattern has been only partially replaced by the modern workday of factories and offices, and it continues to coexist with it in cities, especially the smaller ones, which retain a strong sense of traditional culture. Fashionable shops in New Delhi may open and close (more or less) by the clock, but the tiny establishments that line the lanes of Banaras adhere to a more erratic and individualized pattern, which is considered a part of the special ethos of the city, the sense of "Banarsiness" (Banarsipan ) of which residents speak with pride. One man, reflecting on the increasing pace of life in the city, compared the modern commercial atmosphere with what he recalled from his childhood: "In those days, brother, if a shopkeeper didn't feel like working in the afternoon, he'd just hang up some straw mats in front—not these steel shutters with locks like they have now, just mats (can you imagine, people were so honest!)—and then he'd go off and have a swim, or listen to some music, or attend a Katha , whatever was his pleasure. Nowadays the city is full of outsiders who don't understand the Banarsi way of life, and so it's just rush, rush, all the time."^[43] Despite the nostalgic tone of these comments, the life-style they describe is not altogether a thing of the past. The same person reported that he himself left work at the Banaras railway yard daily by 2:00 or 3:00 P.M. in order to join a group of friends for boating and swimming excursions

to the other side of the Ganga; during the month of Ramlila , he left work even earlier in order to carry out his practice of daily attendance at the Ramnagar production. Similarly, although it is said that daily Katha is not as widespread or as well patronized as in the past, such programs are still relatively common.^[44]

In some cases patronage is provided by a charitable endowment that pays a monthly stipend to the performer; this is supplemented by daily offerings. Such an arrangement is in effect at Chini Kshetra, a religious trust housed in an old-fashioned townhouse (haveli ) in a small lane close to Dashashvamedh Ghat, the main bathing place in the congested central city. The trust was endowed in 1874 by a prosperous merchant whose family later shifted to Calcutta, whence his descendants still administer it. The endowment provides for the upkeep of the building, the salary of a manager, daily meals for some thirty Brahman boys pursuing religious studies in the neighborhood, and a daily Katha program from 7:00 to 8:00 P.M. In 1983 the kathavacak was Vidyabhaskar Tripathi, a twenty-four-year-old law student at B.H.U. and grandson of Nara-yankant Tripathi of the Sankat Mochan Temple. Vidyabhaskar had been in the employ of the trust for six years, receiving, in addition to the daily offering, a stipend of Rs 150 per month, and was nearing the end of his second complete exposition of the Manas . The program attracted a steady audience of forty to sixty people, mostly older residents of the Dashashvamedh area.

Probably the best-known daily Katha program in the southern part of the city is the one at Sankat Mochan Temple. Here the program in the early 1980s featured two performers—Narayankant Tripathi and Ramnarayan Shukla—and the small audience of regulars was periodically expanded by crowds of darsan seekers who visited the temple, especially on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Narayankant, affectionately known as Baba-ji, was said to be the oldest expounder in Banaras and had long served as the temple's resident vyas ; he had now become, so to speak, its emeritus vyas , the official position having been passed on, about a dozen years earlier, to Ramnarayan.^[45]

One approaches Sankat Mochan through a lofty sandstone gateway, conveniently fronted by a parking area for bicycles, rickshas, and motor vehicles; the parking lot is a reflection of the growing fame of this temple and its astute promotion by a succession of influential mabants for,

as Narayankant recalled to me, fifty years ago Sankat Mochan was no more than a tiny shrine in the forest, flanked by a few dilapidated mud-brick structures. Today a brick-paved path lined with trees leads the worshiper from the gateway through a shady park filled with chattering monkeys to the shrine itself, where two lofty temples lie within a complex of columned courtyards and whitewashed outbuildings.

Like all Hindu temples, Sankat Mochan has its busy and its quiet times, a reflection of the daily puja schedule, which in turn reflects the "day" of its patron deity. Hanuman, like most gods, rises early and has a busy morning. At 6:00 A.M. , for example, having already been bathed, dressed, and refreshed with an early breakfast, he is ready to enjoy an hour's recitation of the Valmiki Ramayana^[*] , presented to him by Ramnarayan Shukla as part of his own daily duties at the temple. Then from 8:00 to 11:00 A.M. he is entertained with kirtan of the name of Ram, sung by five Brahmans in the employ of the temple. In the meantime, as background to this official litany, numerous supplicants seated on the marble well platform that fronts his shrine or walking the circumambu-latory colonnade that surrounds it, are filling his ears with their own renditions of the Hanumancalisa and the Manas . At midday Hanuman enjoys another meal and retires to rest behind a red silken curtain embroidered in silver spangles with the message "Jay Sita-Ram." During the midafternoon when Hanuman is unavailable, the public side of temple life comes to a halt; vendors of sweets doze behind their leaf-covered wares and a loincloth-clad priest draws a bucket of water from the well and takes a leisurely bath in a corner of the courtyard. By 3:00 P.M. , however, things begin to pick up. The curtain will be reopened soon, and worshipers will again begin to arrive, first in a trickle but turning into crowds by evening.

It is at this juncture that Katha occurs, during the transition from drowsy afternoon to bustling evening when (especially on Tuesday and Saturday) people will wait in jostling queues for Hanuman's darsan and ringing bells and fervent cries of "Bajrangbali ki jay!" will echo through the complex.^[46] The expounders perform, as usual, in order of precedence, beginning with a "warm-up" pandit who performs occasionally at about 2:30, when there is practically no one in the compound, and discourses on the Bhagavatapurana^[*] . Katha on this text is still held in high regard in Vaishnava circles, although in practice it is comparatively rarely heard; in any case, this man is an uninspired performer. I remem-

ber him droning on in a soft monotone from an early section of the text, presenting, with almost no exposition, a catalog of names of sacred cities and rivers to an audience of two or three elderly men, one of whom appeared to be asleep. This too is Katha of a sort: textual exposition as spiritual Muzak—an auspicious background noise to which one may not give much attention but from which one absorbs merit (punya^[*] ) all the same.

The vyas seat at Sankat Mochan is a gaddi , or "couch," made of worn planks set on creaky, lathe-turned wooden legs—an object displaying no particular artistry and cracked and faded with age. Yet this seat is an object of veneration, for legend associates it with the time of Tulsidas. By the time Baba Narayankant approaches the gaddi at 3:30, the temple compound has begun to stir. An attendant appears with an ocher cloth to drape over the gaddi and a wooden bookstand to set at one end of it, and then carefully unwraps a large, ancient-looking copy of the Manas , its cover and pages stained from years of flower offerings. Baba Narayankant is an aged but wiry man in a stained caubandi (a tunic tied in four places and traditionally associated with Brahman teachers) who walks with a bamboo staff and gives his age as ninety-six. He has been giving Katha at Sankat Mochan, he says, for fifty years and has trained dozens of expounders. He needs help in climbing onto the high seat, and his voice is no longer as strong as it once was; moreover, he is quite toothless and his speech is sometimes difficult to understand. Yet despite these handicaps of old age, he has a warm presence and draws a small but devoted group of listeners.

Most of them are regulars and know one another; there are smiles and gestures of greeting as each arrives and much urging of the newcomer to sit near the front. Although this is apt to be a daily ritual, it never palls. The little gestures of modesty and civility are part of the charmed circle of satsang^[*] , an affirmation of both social decorum and devotional fellowship: "No, no, Maharaj, kindly deign to come forward, you must sit here, near Baba-ji." One old man always sits at Baba-ji's feet and listens intently, his face radiant with delight. The vyas turns to him after each well-made point, and the old man nods delightedly, as if to say, "Quite right, just what I feel myself! But how well you've put it!" This favorite listener hails from Bihar but now lives close to Sankat Mochan because, as he tells me one day, "What else is there to do but listen to the Lord's story?" Another, younger devotee is a technician in charge of the electron microscope in the physics department at the university. He praises Baba-ji's style as "the old style, using the Manas only."

Baba Narayankant's Katha is straightforward and charming. He proceeds line by line through the text, sometimes paraphrasing rather than reciting a verse and drawing most of his citations from the Manas itself. If his speech is sometimes slurred, his expressive face helps to make up for this: alternately tender, compassionate, firm, it eloquently conveys the emotion of each line. Rendering poignant passages such as Laksh-man's petition to his mother for permission to accompany Ram to the forest, his voice breaks with emotion, and the elderly Bihari at his feet, ever in tune with the expounder's mood, fishes for a handkerchief to wipe away a tear.

Narayankant says that he will expound Ayodhyakand^[*] for at least one year and the complete epic in not less than three. Then he will start over again, as he has numerous times during the past half-century. His Katha is seamless, woven through the years. He begins each session where he left off the day before and ends abruptly at 4:25, sometimes breaking off in midsentence when a priest appears with arti tray and the small congregation rises to sing the praises of the story. Behind the priest is Ramnarayan Shukla, freshly bathed and dressed in an immaculate shirt and dhoti; people in the crowd greet him reverently, but he himself comes forward to touch his aged predecessor's feet and receive a tulsi leaf from him. Then, as Narayankant hobbles away on his staff, Ramnarayan bows to the gaddi and takes his place.

Narayankant's little group of regulars grows rapidly when the younger vyas takes over. The old man can no longer project his voice effectively, and the temple is not a quiet place; only those who sit directly in front of him can pick up what he says. Ramnarayan on the other hand has a strong, clear voice—the kind of voice that, in North India, attracts listeners like a magnet. People making the darsan round in the temple pass the little portico, just opposite the main shrine, where the Katha is being given and are drawn irresistibly to the periphery of the group. Some listen only briefly, just to see what the excitement is about, but many others, after listening for a moment, sit down and join the satsang^[*] . Village pilgrims from the Banaras hinterland come to Sankat Mochan in great numbers; they are readily identifiable, the men in their rough homespun tunics and mud-covered plastic shoes and the women in garishly patterned saris. Such rustic visitors often linger on the fringes of the group, listening intently with rapt expressions, their minds torn between fretting children clamoring for city treats and the magical web of the story into which they feel themselves drawn.

Such is the power of Katha , Vaishnavas believe, that even a chance hearing may transform one's life. Among the regular listeners at Ram-

narayan's feet is a well-dressed young householder from the Bhadaini neighborhood who has taken initiation from the vyas and, like him, wears a double strand of tulsi beads around his throat. He is often seen around the expounder's quarters at the temple, assisting him in various ways, and from this I assume that he may himself be an aspiring vyas . When I question him one day, he laughs: "No, 1 am not like that! I serve him out of love and to gain devotion for the Lord. What's the good of rendering service if your motive is, 'Oh, I'll become a vyas and earn a hundred rupees an hour!'?" Then he tells me the story of his "conversion," itself a Katha about Katha . He first came to Sankat Mochan on the suggestion of a friend, just for darsan , but a Katha was going on, so he listened to it. Ramnarayan was telling a story:

A certain Marwari merchant and his wife, on a pilgrimage to Chitrakut, were en route to Atri's ashram when they lost their way.^[47] There were dacoits in the area, and as the couple had money and gold jewelry, they were terrified. Suddenly a dark-skinned tribal appeared, carrying a load of firewood on his head. Seeing their plight, he offered to guide them safely back to their lodgings. The Marwari gratefully promised him a reward of five hundred rupees. On arrival, the merchant went upstairs to get the money, but when he came down after a moment the tribal was nowhere to be seen. It seemed impossible that he could have walked away so quickly, and in fact, the road was quite deserted. The Marwari questioned the shopkeepers sitting nearby, but no one had even seen such a person.

Here my teller pauses to look at me probingly, "You understand, don't you, who it was?" Hearing this story, he continues, he was struck "right here" (pointing to his heart), and he has been coming to the daily Katha ever since.^[48]

Although Ramnarayan occasionally accepts invitations to perform outside Banaras, he does not like to be away from Sankat Mochan for long. He has a house in the Nagwa neighborhood and a son, Prahlad Narayan, who is an aspiring vyas , but for many years he has virtually lived in a small room in the temple compound and his devotion to its resident deity is an all-consuming passion. His health is poor and his discipline arduous; it is said that he is under treatment for bone tuberculosis and is in much pain. When he fell critically ill in the early 1980s, the doctors gave him up for lost; many of his listeners today vouch for that and for the miraculous nature of his recovery. Ramnarayan says simply,

"My life was finished, but Sankat Mochan kept me in this body for the sake of all of you who come to hear the Katha ." Ramnarayan is unsparing of himself as a performer, and in addition to his daily afternoon program and his morning recital of the Valmiki text to Hanuman, he gives Katha each evening at 8:00 P.M. on Tulsi Ghat, about a kilometer away, and also a late-night program on Thursdays at the temple; moreover, he frequently performs at other functions in the city. Beyond this, he devotes several hours each afternoon to reciting Ram's name in front of Hanuman; indeed, it is to this practice that he attributes all his knowledge.

Ramnarayan's performances are intense and physically taxing. He is best known, understandably, for Hanuman Katha and for a certain extraordinary phenomenon that occurs sometimes in the course of it. Even though many expounders suggest that in performance they become "mouthpieces" for the Lord, Ramnarayan is the only performer I have observed to display physical signs suggestive of actual possession. On occasion—usually a Tuesday or Saturday—while he is discoursing on the wonderful carit of Hanuman, he enters a state of intense excitement and begins twisting his head from side to side with a whiplash motion, his long hair flying about him. His face turns bright red and the veins and tendons in his neck bulge from the strain. The blurred image of his oscillating features suggests a religious calendar vision of a multiheaded deity, and like the deity, he seems to be speaking out of many mouths at once: a fountain of sound pours from his lips, flashing with strings of couplets and highly alliterative verses abounding in staccato retroflex sounds, describing the monkey's exploits in battle. The atmosphere becomes electric and listeners gaze openmouthed with wonder. Then suddenly it is over; the motion of the head stops, and Ramnarayan, looking flushed but exhilarated, resumes his normal pace as if nothing had happened.

Although Ramnarayan's performances are always animated and intense, occurrences such as I have just described are rare and are not touted as special attractions of his Katha . His regular listeners simply know that this happens to him sometimes and understand it in their own fashion. "He has seen Hanuman; that's why it happens," one man told me and added, quite correctly, "You and I wouldn't even be able to speak if we were turning our heads like that!" Ramnarayan would say only that he does not consciously induce these phenomena and has, in fact, "no idea" what happens to him at such times.

While Ramnarayan discourses, the evening crowds pour into the tem-

ple and his congregation grows, often numbering one hundred or more by arti time. The noise level also rises, and although the vyas has a powerful voice, sometimes the din in the temple becomes too much even for him and he must momentarily close his eyes and compose himself, muttering "Shri Ram!" Like Narayankant he does systematic exposition; this is part of his vow to Sankat Mochan, "to remain here and expound the whole Ramayan as long as he keeps me in this body." But he ranges further from the story than the older vyas does, quotes from an impressive corpus of texts, and introduces thematic topics appropriate to special occasions in the ritual calendar; thus, on Vasant Panchami, a day sacred to the goddess Sarasvati, he discourses on the power of speech, of which she is patroness. He frequently expounds lines word by word, and a single pregnant term, such as the name Kashi (in 1.6.8; "Kashi and Magadh, the river of the gods and the river of ruin"—part of a series of opposites listed by the poet in his opening invocation), may send him off on a thirty-minute paean to the glories of Shiva's city and its lord.

The end of Ramnarayan's daily Katha is signaled by a formulaic closing that incorporates one of his favorite couplets from the Manas :

The essential object of all Katha , all discourse, is this: to develop love for the Lord's feet and, adhering to one's own proper dharma, to constantly repeat the Lord's name.

Whose name is the antidote to illusion,
remover of the three kinds of anguish—
may that Merciful One, to me and to you
ever be well disposed!
7.124a

The Sammelan: an Evening at Gyan Vapi

When the Manas recitation at Gyan Vapi ends each day at about 1:00 P.M. , workmen clear away the platforms used by the reciters and spread cotton carpets over the floor to create a huge seating area. The crowd begins to collect at about 6:00 P.M. , although the program does not formally begin till 7:00. Early arrivals are entertained by a local devotional singing party (bhajan mandali^[*] ). What follows is a brief account of the sequence of performers at Gyan Vapi on a typical evening during the 1982 festival.

The first speaker, introduced shortly after 7:00 P.M. , is a young Banarsi expounder whose name does not appear on the posted schedule

but is being given an opportunity to display his skills as a "warm-up" to the featured speakers. Naturally, he is given the least desirable time slot, for at this early hour the rug-strewn enclosure is only about a third full and the crowd is restless and inattentive. Nevertheless, this is Gyan Vapi—the Carnegie Hall of Banaras Katha —and no doubt the young vyas considers himself lucky simply to be here. He speaks for only half an hour and is followed by the first invited speaker, also a young and relatively unknown performer, Hari Mishraji of Barhaj, who likewise performs for only half the usual time. The strategy of the organizers appears to be sound, however, for although Hari Mishraji's Katha is unsophisticated—it consists almost entirely of a string of quotations from the Manas , each followed by a brief prose translation delivered in a strident, haranguing style—he has a fine voice and sings all the verses to an appealing melody of his own, vigorously snapping his fingers in time with the rhythm. This kind of Katha is not highly regarded by connoisseurs (one listener remarks pointedly to me about "those who merely shout and wave their arms"), but it is melodious and easy to follow and so seems a good choice for this part of the evening, when the mandap^[*] is slowly filling with a more serious crowd. Moreover, Hari Mishraji's clear, ringing tones and innumerable quotations sound especially good over the loudspeaker network and carry the unmistakable message of Manas-katha to anyone within its far-flung range.

A more senior expounder, Gokarna Nath of Mirzapur, ascends the dais at 8:00 P.M. and performs for an hour. His exposition is straightforward and narrative-based, and on each of the three nights that he performs he chooses an episode from that morning's recitation and works his way slowly through it, one line at a time.^[49] In addition to having a melodious voice, he is an expressive actor, and his performance has more subtlety than that of his predecessor. On the first evening of the festival, he expounds the episode of Sati's delusion (Satimoh ): the failure of even Lord Shiva's wife, in her incarnation as Sati, to understand how the unmanifest, eternal Lord could become incarnate as Ram, prince of Ayodhya, and her disastrous effort—against Shiva's warnings—to test Ram's divinity. The verses describing this episode are interspersed with Gokarna's translations and explanations. He is especially good at enacting dialogue, rendering it in colloquial household dialect while expressively miming Sati's willfulness and later embar-

rassed regret, Shiva's dismayed resignation, Ram's polite irony, and so forth. His Shiva and Sati sound (as they often do in folk performances) like a middle-aged village couple, and the humor of his retelling provokes laughter from listeners. His underlying theme, like that of the text episode itself, is the unfathomable nature of Ram's incarnate divinity, which confuses even gods.

The next speaker is Piyush Goswami of Vrindavan, grandson of the famous vyas Binduji Maharaj, whose name was particularly associated with the development of large-scale festivals. Piyush-ji begins by asking the audience's indulgence for his youth (he looks to be in his late twenties), calling himself a "mere child"; in fact, he is a polished performer with a melodious voice and an emotional style' of presentation that evokes a warm response from the crowd. His presentation is less narrative-oriented than that of Gokarna; he prefers to examine a small section of text from a variety of angles, quoting it repeatedly and holding it up for scrutiny, though always with the eye of faith. The mandap^[*] is full when he comes on, and several prominent members of the organizing committee arrive just before he begins and seat themselves directly in front of the dais, pushing back those of less prominence who arrived earlier but seem to accept this treatment without complaint.^[50] Piyush Goswami is clearly a respected performer, and his pauses are usually punctuated with a flurry of appreciative exclamations. His subject is the Book Two passage in which Lakshman responds to the forest-dweller Guha's grief at seeing Ram and Sita reduced to sleeping on the bare earth. This is a favorite passage with commentators, both because of the poignancy of the situation (and Piyush-ji's emotional comparison of the splendor of the divine couple's life in Ayodhya with their circumstances in exile evokes tears from some listeners) and because of the philosophical content of Lakshman's reply, which readily lends itself to interpretation from a variety of perspectives. Piyush-ji's approach (which is hardly original) is to hail it as the "Gita of the Treta Age," comparing the eighteen lines of Lakshman's discourse to the eighteen chapters of the Bhagavadgita .

The last featured speaker of the evening, who takes his seat on the dais about 10:00 P.M. , is Shrinivas Pathak of Mathura, a middle-aged

vyas with a solemn demeanor and a cool, detached style, in marked contrast to Gokarna Nath's histrionics and Piyush Goswami's emotional interpretations. His pravacan has an unusually admonitory flavor, and he reminds listeners several times that it is not enough merely to recite or listen to the Manas but they must try to apply its teachings to their lives. At the close of his talk he leads the crowd in an extended kirtan , explaining, "Whether or not they liked the Katha , if you talk to most people a day or two later you will find that they remember, at best, maybe two percent of what the vyas said. But if one forms the habit of remembering God's Name, it will remain with one all one's life and give liberation at the moment of death."

The festival program concludes each night with a brief sermon by Shiva Narayan, the elderly local vyas who has been associated with this festival since its beginnings and leads the morning recitation. Citing the lateness of the hour and his own poor health, he discourses only briefly and then leads the audience in the usual Ramayan^[*] arti , at the end of which there is a great rush to take the blessings of the arti lamp and touch Shiva Narayan's feet. Then the crowd disperses rapidly, passing the booth of a lone tea seller who offers fortitude to face the chilly and deserted streets.

One-man Show: Ramkinkar at Birla Temple

Given the choice, any vyas would probably prefer a private engagement to an appearance as one of many performers in a sammelan . To be invited to speak alone is more prestigious and usually more lucrative, and it frees the expounder from the anxiety and sense of competition that is common in a festival situation. Individual engagements are usually sponsored by private patrons and may be presented in the patron's home to an invited audience; however, they may also be opened to the public as a form of religious philanthropy, which is obviously intended to reflect favorably on the sponsor.

There is virtual unanimity among my interviewees that the most renowned contemporary vyas is Pandit Ramkinkar Upadhyay, and his fame surely owes much to his longstanding relationship with the Birlas, a family of industrialists that controls one of the largest conglomerates in the private sector of the Indian economy. "Birla" is a household word in India, for the family has placed its imprint on everything from fabrics to heavy machinery. It has also been anxious to place its name on reli-

[Full Size]

Figure 19.
Ramkinkar Upadhyay being greeted on his arrival at New Delhi's
Lakshmi-Narayan Temple by Basant Kumar Birla and his wife, Sarla

gious institutions and has constructed and endowed imposing temples, dharmashalas, and ghats in major pilgrimage places. The family sponsors cultural institutions as well, and these too have a strongly religious character; for example, it is the Calcutta-based Birla Academy of Art and Culture that publishes the many volumes of Ramkinkar's pravacan and sponsors the public programs, held annually in Delhi and Calcutta, that generate these collections.

Ramkinkar hails from a village near Banaras and maintains a residence in the city, but he seldom performs there nowadays. Although one sometimes hears, in explanation, that the unorthodox nature of his interpretations earned him the ire of the late Swami Karpatri and other Sanatani leaders, an equally valid reason would appear to be economic. The springs of courtly and aristocratic patronage that nurtured the Katha tradition in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Banaras have dried up, and the most successful expounders have carried their art to the greener pastures of Calcutta, Kanpur, and Bombay, which are home to a new class of "princes."^[51] Such is Ramkinkar's popularity that, ac-

cording to an aide, his busy performance schedule—restricted somewhat by health considerations (he was roughly sixty years old in 1983)—is fixed three years in advance and includes a number of annual engagements that have remained constant for two decades or more.

One such stint is his appearance for nine evenings at the time of Ram Navami at New Delhi's Birla Temple, a masonry and marble colossus whose principal shrine honors Vishnu and his spouse (Lakshmi-Narayan) and is located about a kilometer west of Connaught Place, the commercial heart of New Delhi. The program is held in the garden behind the temple, where an open-air proscenium stage of red sandstone faces a vast lawn set among gardens, fountains, and religiohistorical monuments. On this stage, the sponsors erect an elaborate white podium with a velvet-fringed canopy, resembling one of the aerial chariots seen in religious calendar art. Other arrangements include metal balustrades demarcating men's and women's seating areas on the lawn, festive entrance gateways decorated with flowers, and a bookstall that does a brisk business selling Ramkinkar's many publications. Outside on the main street there are electrified signs announcing Manaspravacan . The crowd, which numbers in the thousands, is prosperous-looking and its male contingent seems dominated by white-collar workers, many with attaché cases, who have come from jobs in nearby high-rises and government offices. Quite a few carry "two-in-ones"—the ubiquitous cassette recorders-cum-radios—which they use to record the discourse. Such devices are an increasingly common sight at pravacan programs, and many expounders, no doubt flattered by their presence, allow them to be placed directly in front of them. It is said, however, that Ramkinkar's concentration is disturbed by these machines, and so the organizers have arranged a special area off to one side, complete with electrical outlets, where the owners of tapedecks may record from a nearby loudspeaker.

The daily pravacan is from 6:00 to 7:00 P.M. , the right time in downtown New Delhi to catch office workers on their way home. It is preceded by a professional bhajan singer who entertains the gathering crowd and leads it in Ram-namkirtan as the moment of Ramkinkar's arrival approaches. The atmosphere is electric with excitement as the small, rotund vyas steps through the ornamental gateway at the edge of the lawn and gravely makes his way down the central aisle, moving at a snail's pace to avoid treading on the innumerable heads and arms that poke through the side railings to touch his feet. At the end of the aisle, garland in hand, wait the principal listeners of this Katha , Basant Kumar Birla, chief executive of the Birla corporate empire, and his wife, Sarla.

Mr. Birla, an international figure who spends most of his time in the world of corporate boardrooms and private executive jets, appears here in dhoti and kurta , looking very much the pious householder; he and his wife sit attentively on the lawn directly in front of the dais throughout each program.

While Ramkinkar is being greeted by the Birlas and other dignitaries, two of his students, part of the considerable entourage that accompanies him to Delhi, ready the dais for him, fluffing up pillows and unpacking a large tote-bag of personal items, including a richly robed statue of Hanuman and a small copy of the Manas , wrapped in red silk. There is also a silver tumbler, kept in readiness should the master's throat become dry. While Ramkinkar performs, a student remains crouched behind the vyas seat, ever ready to offer assistance.

From his high perch on the canopied dais, Ramkinkar surveys an audience of some five thousand persons spreading across the great lawn and beyond into the hilly rear of the temple garden. Even though this throng lacks the intimacy of the small group of listeners who gather around Baba Narayankant each afternoon at Sankat Mochan, it is no less devoted to its vyas , and there are many in the crowd who have been coming to these talks for years. Indeed, when Ramkinkar begins to utter his mangalacaran^[*] , there are some who murmur the slokas along with him, and when he concludes his invocation with the opening couplet of Ayodhyakand^[*] , the entire assembly joins in with one voice.

Ramkinkar's admirers are fond of pointing out that he possesses no "voice"; whereas expounders like Binduji were famous for their vocal ability, Ramkinkar is famous despite his lack of it. "His voice lacks every good quality," one man observed to me, "yet thousands of people sit spellbound. How else can one explain it except by grace?" In truth, Ramkinkar's delivery is flat almost to the point of being monotone, his pace and rhythm show little change over the course of an hour, and apart from a few restrained hand gestures—hardly visible to the better part of his huge audiences—he makes no effort to enliven his presentation. He is also unusual in that he makes only minimal use of quotations; sometimes he merely reminds listeners of Manas passages without actually reciting them. What he does quote is delivered in the same flat tone in which he speaks.^[52] Ramkinkar's dry, untheatrical delivery seems

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Figure 20.
The crowd at one of Ramkinkar's annual pravacan programs at
Lakshmi-Narayan Temple, New Delhi

to contribute to his image as the "thinking person's vyas ," whose discourse appeals particularly to the university-educated intelligentsia. Such people, perhaps because they themselves have been led to discover or rediscover the Manas by hearing it explained by this vyas (whose specific approach to the text is considered in the next section) often seem to regard him as without precedent in the oral-scholarly tradition. A Calcutta businessman attending the Delhi program told me emphatically that Ramkinkar had no precursors: "Earlier expounders like Binduji just sang the Manas , but they couldn't explain it. Now, thanks to Pandit-ji, people are finally beginning to understand its meaning." Needless to say, this view is hardly defensible; it is likely, however, that some of Ramkinkar's enthusiastic devotees have been exposed to relatively little Katha and may be unaware of their expounder's traditional antecedents.

Not everyone is spellbound, of course. At the festival in Ayodhya at which I first heard Ramkinkar perform, he had some difficulty in quieting the huge crowd, which included many country pilgrims perhaps accustomed to a livelier style of Katha . And since Ramkinkar is the most famous and, by all accounts, most commercially successful vyas , it is inevitable that he should have his detractors, especially among fellow

performers. The most common complaints heard against him are that he has "turned Katha into a business" and that his interpretations of the Manas are "imaginary" (kalpanik ), doctrinally unsound, and contrary to the intention of Tulsidas. Although it is not my concern to enter into this controversy, it may in fairness be pointed out that the first complaint is often heard from other professional (and no less commercial) performers whose earnings happen to be far less than Ramkinkar's, while the second seems to reflect a particularly narrow, "fundamentalist" understanding of the Manas , not necessarily characteristic of the broadest tradition of the epic's interpretation.

It is worth mentioning in this connection that Ramkinkar's allegorical and bhakti -centered interpretations of the text rarely stress the ideal of varnasram^[*]dharm —a term used euphemistically nowadays to refer to caste-based social inequality—which some conservative expounders emphasize as one of the epic's primary themes. At Birla Temple, Ramkinkar devoted his 1983 pravacan series to Kevat-prasang^[*] , a thirteen-line excerpt from Ayodhyakand^[*] that highlights the exemplary devotion of Kevat, an untouchable who ferries Ram's party across the Ganga. Even though the drama of the passage depends to some extent on the audience's awareness of Kevat's base status, Ramkinkar's interpretation exalts Kevat to an unusual degree, emphasizing the timing of his encounter with Ram (just after the prince has left Ayodhya on his journey into exile) to suggest that Tulsidas has made Kevat not merely an exemplary outcaste devotee but in fact "the first citizen of Ramraj ." In subsequent discourses, he suggests that Kevat's love for Ram is beyond the understanding of the gods and even surpasses that of Dashrath for his son. Although none of this amounts to a radical political message—and Ramkinkar's audience, perhaps more than most Katha audiences, is squarely upper-middle class—it has a liberal, democratic tinge that may help to explain this speaker's popularity with the Birlas, who have sought to promote the glories of Hinduism while opposing, in principle at least, "backward" practices such as untouchability.^[53]

As Ramkinkar concludes his remarks, the evening arti ceremony begins in the adjacent temple; broadast by loudspeaker, it features a recording of the popular film hymn "Jay jagdis hare." Hundreds of devotees linger in the garden in the gathering dusk, forming a long queue for

the usual prasad of tulsi leaves; a few place cash gifts at Ramkinkar's feet. Then they too join the dispersing throng of Delhiites, many of them facing long commutes to distant suburbs by scooter or bus.