Khojwan: Ramnagar Remade
The Ramlila of Khojwan Bazaar, a neighborhood on the southwestern outskirts of Banaras, makes claim neither to antiquity nor to originality.[64] When the current production was organized, around the beginning of the twentieth century, Khojwan was a little kasba (market town) well beyond the southern boundary of the city. Today spreading urbanization has engulfed it, but Khojwan's narrow, meandering main street, fronted by high stone buildings, strikes a contrast to the grid-patterned colonies that have sprung up around it. Every muhalla of Banaras nurtures its own sense of identity, but Khojwan's seems particularly strong. The tidy streets, flourishing bazaar, and new secondary school all bespeak municipal pride, and this is equally in evidence in the local Ramlila arrangements.
The printed announcement of this lila is the most elaborate that I have encountered. Its heading reads "Historic Ramlila of Khojwan Bazaar, Kashi," and this is followed by a paragraph summarizing the pageant's short history:
It is well known that the acts of Ram composed by Goswami Tulsidas are performed in Khojwan Bazaar for the benefit of devotees. In olden times, revered Mahatma Apadas-ji sponsored it for some days at Manasarovar, Sonarpura, Kedareshvar, and so forth; after that the late Gokul Sahu-ji, on the Mahatma's departing for heaven, with the assistance of the late Kashinath Sahu and Jagganath Sahu (the grain dealer), sponsored it in Khojwan Bazaar and for his whole life dedicated himself to it, body, mind, and fortune. Now that he has departed the world, this great work has been accomplished for sixty-six years with the will of the community and the assistance of devotees.,[65]
In her discussion of the patronage of neighborhood Ramlila productions, Kumar notes that organizers tend to fall into two categories:
(1) middle-level merchants and traders in grain, wood, metal, or cloth as well as small shopkeepers, including those of milk and pan , and (2) religious figures, whether "official" (mahant or panda[*] ) or "nonofficial" (vyas , sadhu , baba ). The former would control money through his institution; the latter would attract it through his personality. As a rule, the people of categories (1) and (2) work in association.[66]
In its origin and organization, the Khojwan lila conforms to this model. The inspiration originally came from a Vaishnava sadhu who started a series of performances at sites in surrounding communities; the locations mentioned—the great tank called Manasarovar (after the Himalayan lake of Tulsi's allegory) and the bazaar at Sonarpura, about two kilometers northeast of Khojwan—are still used for certain performances. The sadhu's efforts were carried on by a group of traders in the bazaar; "Sahu" is the name of a mercantile caste, and there are still a number of Sahus among the forty-one officers of the Ramlila committee prominently listed on the schedule. The reference to the pageant's being conducted "with the will" of the community (pancayatajnanusar ) indicates that the source of its funding is a general solicitation. It was thus, I was told by committee members, that the 1983 production costs of approximately Rs 35,000 were met: "Some people give four or eight rupees, some give fifty-one, some give three hundred or more, according to their means." The announcement states that the lila has been organized in this fashion for sixty-six years—that is, since 1917, although it also indicates that Mahatma Apadas started his performances somewhat earlier.[67]
Today the Khojwan Ramlila enjoys the status of a venerable community institution and major investments in the pageant have recently been made. In the heart of the bazaar, just behind the popular Puran Das Temple, stands a handsome two-story structure with an open-air stage at ground level and a suite of rooms above. This tidy, brightly painted Sri Ramlila Srngar[*] Bhavan ("Ramlila Production Center," as an inscription on the facade announces) serves as committee headquarters; its upper rooms contain trunks of costumes and props, and their walls are hung with masks. Also kept there are the oversize copies of the Manas from which the Ramayanis chant and the script-books used by actors. These were composed by a local resident when the pageant first began
and have recently been recopied and painstakingly illuminated by an amateur artist, a cloth merchant who, like the sari dealers at Chitrakut, also serves as makeup master. The beauty and exuberance of this man's work—some of his paintings also decorate the inner walls of the building—epitomize the enthusiasm and flair with which the burghers of Khojwan mount their lila ; appropriately enough, the artist's name is Shobhanath (Lord of beauty).
The stage on the lower level fronts on a large field that serves as the schoolyard for the local secondary school, in which the pageant's director is a teacher. In the lila , the stage and the field represent Ayodhya, which thus, as at Ramnagar, is situated in the heart of the community. Other sites—gardens, enclosures, tanks, and small stages—are scattered throughout the area, and participants sometimes trek several kilometers in the course of an evening. Many sites feature permanent structures built especially for Ramlila . One of the most impressive is located at the end of Khojwan's main street: a lofty pavilion with polished columns, resembling a permanent reviewing stand. This edifice represents Ram's abode in Panchvati, from which Sita is abducted by Ravan; it is used for the performance known as Nakkatayya (nakkataiya[*] ), which is described below. Apart from such specially built settings, existing sites in the area have also been incorporated into the drama; thus the large tank known as Manasarovar is used to stage the "Crossing of the Ganga" episode. When Ram alights on its further shore, he is received by the inmates of an adjacent Ramanandi ashram, who become (in the play) the denizens of the sage Bharadvaj's hermitage at Prayag.
The scale and permanence of the lila structures at Khojwan are striking—many community productions manage with makeshift platforms that are hauled about and rearranged to suggest the various sites—and their obvious model is Ramnagar, which lies across the river to the east. Yet the manner in which the prestigious royal pageant is recreated in Khojwan indicates the shift from princely to mercantile patronage that occurred at the close of the nineteenth century, which I noted in my discussion of Katha . The Ramnagar pageant, like the older style of privately endowed Katha , begins in late afternoon, and all but a few of its performances conclude by 9:00 or 10:00 at night. The timing serves the convenience of the royal patron, who schedules a long intermission after less than a hour of performance, during which he retires for his evening prayers—a procedure that, as Schechner has noted, daily advertises the maharaja's punctilious piety.[68] The Khojwan lila , on the other hand,
like modern Katha festivals, never gets under way before 9:00 P.M., when the bazaar closes for the night. This has the result, given the leisurely pace at which most performances unfold, of setting many important scenes at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. —a fact that organizers and players seem to take, for a month at least, in bleary-eyed stride.
At Khojwan a group of enthusiastic devotees backed by a prosperous business community have taken Maharaja Udit Narayan's inspiration one step further. Unable to go to Ramnagar regularly, they have brought Ramnagar home by reshaping their community to conform to the epic's geography, thereby also making a successful bid for wider recognition within the city. Khojwan was one of the handful of names commonly cited when I asked Banarsis to identify the most notable productions in the metropolitan area, and its biggest event, the Nakkatayya, ranks among the half-dozen or so top crowd-drawing lilas in the city. Such prominence suggests that Ramlila can serve as an effective vehicle for community identity and pride.
Although the Khojwan lila has drawn inspiration from Ramnagar, the imitation has not been slavish. While attempting to match the royal pageant's layout and scale, the local people have made innovations in specific details, which mark the lila as their own. At thirty-one days, it is fully as long as the maharaja's production, but it begins and ends about a week later and its choice of episodes for enactment is notably different. In his description of Ramlila in the Braj area, Hein noted a tendency among contemporary productions to stage and recite less of the Manas , which he ascribed to the increasing obscurity of Tulsi's sixteenth-century dialect.[69] The relatively new Khojwan production, however, displays an impressive degree of fidelity to its text and in fact dramatizes even more of the Manas than the Ramnagar pageant does. The Khojwan lila does not confine its staging to Tulsi's central narrative but begins early in Book One with the story of Sati's delusion, the courtship and marriage of Shiva and Parvati, Narad's infatuation (a crowd-pleasing comedy that is included in many neighborhood productions), and other episodes prefixed by Tulsi to his main story. It devotes six nights to these preliminaries, which precede even the birth of Ravan and the gods' plea to Vishnu to incarnate himself—the episodes with which the Ramnagar cycle begins.
In its staging conventions too, the Khojwan lila closely follows the epic text. At Ramnagar when dialogue occurs in the poem, the Ramayanis chant a character's speech in its entirety and then stop while the
actor gives a prose paraphrase of the passage. At Khojwan long speeches are broken up into shorter units roughly corresponding to sentences; the resulting frequent alternation between chanting Ramayanis and declaiming actors creates the effect of a line-by-line prose commentary. In addition, the couplets that regularly occur within speeches (which at Ramnagar are rendered into prose) are often left untranslated at Khojwan; the actors interrupt their prose declamations to sing these couplets with great emotion, repeating what the Ramayanis have just chanted.
Another Khojwan innovation is a buffoon character reminiscent of the vidusaka[*] of classical Sanskrit drama. He is played by a gifted local actor and is brought into virtually every scene: as a courtier of Ayodhya or Janakpur, the boatman Kevat, and even Ravan when the latter comes disguised as an ascetic to abduct Sita. His special function is to supplement the written script with droll ad-libs delivered with a perfect deadpan expression. Other entertainment also finds its way into the production: there are interludes of lascivious disco-style dancing by female impersonators (hijra[*] ) on the occasion of Ram's birth and marriage. Here the producers are not simply pandering to popular taste but are following the time-honored practice of envisioning the events of the epic in their own familiar vocabulary—for hijras[*] do indeed gather, as they have for centuries, to dance and to sing obscene songs outside homes in which a son has been born or a marriage is about to occur.