The Paradoxical Paradigm

An implicit theme of this study has been the inseparability, for the North Indian audience, of the Manas text from its realization in performance—a relationship anticipated in the structure of the text and endlessly celebrated in the dialectic of its performance traditions. The focus in preceding chapters has been on the stage of epic performance, but we must now turn to the surrounding arena—what was earlier termed the outermost frame of the performance system. Having observed how the text instructs, entertains, and inspires its audiences, we must now grapple with the more difficult question of what it means to them and how its meanings are reflected in their lives and institutions.

Two levels of meaning come to mind: one that pertains to society and may be termed "moral" or "ethical," and one that pertains to the individual and is best termed "spiritual." These can be related to the two dimensions of performance, termed "formal" and "affective," discussed in Chapter 1. In its self-presentation to an audience, a text, like a living performer, may be said to "assume accountability" for an act of communication, and this assumption necessarily situates it within a social context. At the same time, it offers its audience the possibility of enhanced experience—a gratification that, especially in the context of religious performance, points beyond this world to that other, transcendent realm wherein ultimate meaning is felt to reside.

I suggest that the relationship between the social world and the tran-

scendent other is the fundamental theme of the Manas but that the Hindi epic's formulation of this relationship contains a significant element of paradox. This paradox is not experienced as confusing but rather as productive of peace (santi ), understood as a state of equilibrium within the framework of a dilemma that is ultimately irresolvable, at least in this world. Tulsidas's treatment of this dilemma, I argue, has been vital to his poem's enduring appeal.

The problematic relationship between social ethics and spiritual transcendence is explored in a variety of contexts. The remainder of this section considers some implications of the poet's choice of the Ramayan story, and of his idealization of familial and social relationships. The second and third sections focus on the historical context of the epic's rise to prominence, with an emphasis on the use of the story in recent times by religiopolitical movements. The fourth section examines a continuing controversy over the social and religious teachings of the epic, and the last two sections reconsider the current vitality and speculate on the future viability of the performance genres treated in this study.

This chapter does not, however, attempt an ethical study of the epic's contents or seek to identify what Tulsidas may have believed or intended to teach on such now-controversial subjects as the hierarchical ordering of society, the position of women, and the role of the state. Studies exist that undertake such an agenda, and the assumption of their authors usually seems to be that Tulsidas held a consistent position on every such topic—a position that, once identified, they proceed to attack or defend.^[1] In fact, the words of the Manas can be used to support diverse and indeed contradictory positions, and even were it possible for us to question its author as to what he meant by certain passages, we might still reserve the right to favor other readings, since texts have a way of growing beyond the limitations of their authors.^[2] The contradictions and inconsistencies in the Manas are not simply a reflection of our faulty perception of its message, but rather signifiers of a dimension of paradox that is as close to the heart of the epic as it was to the heart of the society for which Tulsi so artfully and successfully crafted it. Some questions, as Levi-Strauss pointed out, are too important, culturally speak-

ing, to have definitive answers. They must get themselves enacted as myths, which are performances of paradox.^[3]

In India the authoritative, systematizing sastra literature has never enjoyed mass appeal; it largely appears as a sterile imposition from above on the disordered activity of the world. The mythical narrative of itihasa and purana^[*] , on the other hand, reflects that activity and remains immensely popular, for its stories harbor paradoxes that point (as all paradoxes do) to the possibility of transcendence. Sastra was characteristically the product of Brahman authors, whereas the epics arose within a Kshatriya milieu. Priestly culture had as its early patron deity Brahma, also known as the "orderer" (vidhatr^[*] ), who sat at the head of the cosmos, gazing down and putting things in their places. The epics became identified with the Kshatriya preserver of the cosmos, Vishnu, a once-minor deity who, in both myth and history, was to dramatically expand in importance; a god who might be termed "upwardly mobile."

It is often held that the Ramayan story, apart from being shorter and more cohesive than the Mahabharata , is less morally ambiguous in tone: a Treta Yuga fairy tale of black and white as against the longer epic's Kali Yuga gray. Although I would not dismiss this generalization entirely, I find that contradiction and paradox remain powerfully present within the Ramayan tradition. Valmiki's story contains a number of inconsistencies, some so glaring that their survival in any single recension is quite remarkable.^[4] These may reflect the unwillingness of compilers to delete variant but popular accounts of key episodes or may even suggest the kind of narrative liberties we have seen taken by contemporary Manas expounders, who sometimes present conflicting versions of stories and invite listeners to savor the "feeling" of each. But there are also fundamental problems inherent in the story, such as Ram's betrayal by his foster mother, his slaying of Bali from a place of concealment, and his ultimate mistreatment of the virtuous Sita. Variant recensions and later commentaries make clear that such incidents did indeed present dilemmas to the audience, which elicited numerous solutions over the course of centuries. Yet these were never definitive, for in an oral culture no single text could encompass the whole of the tradition—the story was too well known to everyone. A millennium and a half after Valmiki, Tulsidas was still dealing with many of the same problems. He

smoothed out some of them in his own fashion (often by ignoring or merely alluding to them)^[5] and created a few new ones of his own.^[6] We have observed that the Katha audience's verbalized "doubts" about the story become occasions for the performer's artful explanations, but even though such procedures may be satisfying, they do not really offer definitive solutions to the narrative's vexing but fertile problems.

The relationship between the tradition's problems and its vitality was brought home to me by one man's reminiscence of his childhood in Banaras. In the evenings, he recalled, the male members of the family would sit on their rooftop and sing the Manas to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals ("Even today," he added, "if I hear a single line of Tulsidas, that same mood comes over me"). Then they would go downstairs for the evening meal, during which a favorite pastime was to debate some incident from the story. "My elder brother might say that Ram was wrong to slay Bali; it was against dharma and he shouldn't have done it. I would take the other position and defend Ram's action as best I could."^[7] The debate was clearly enjoyable; it was just as clearly never definitively resolved.

Paradoxically, the Ramayan has often been eulogized as a "treatise on dharma" (dharmasastra ), presenting ideal models of social relationships. In the words of one modern enthusiast, the Manas "teaches us how to conduct ourselves in the world with fellow human beings. It tells us how a brother should behave towards brother, son to a father, wife to husband, and friend to a friend. . .. Through the ages men have turned to the Ramcaritmanas when they wished to know how they should conduct themselves in life."^[8] Tulsi's idealization of the relationship of Brahmans to Kshatriyas, men to women, and twice-born Hindus to the lower orders of society is taken up later in this chapter; primacy in any discussion of the text's paradigms, however, must be given to the relationship that is first not only in the listing above but undoubtedly also in the hearts of many of the epic's devotees.

Brothers and Others

Although the Ramayan has shown itself to be fairly exportable as entertainment, Western readers who approach the story expecting a romantic fairy tale of a handsome prince and beautiful princess are likely to be disappointed. The prince and the princess are present, of course, as is the wicked demon who kidnaps the heroine, setting the hero on a perilous quest to rescue her, aided by supernatural beings and talking animals. Yet within this archetypic scenario, the Western reader senses elements that are psychologically alien, most notably in the treatment of the hero and the heroine who, even in the relatively rare moments when they are enjoying each other's company, seldom seem to be alone at center stage. Like much else in Indian culture, the Ramayan is (as one of my teachers in Delhi used to say) a "group experience"—the group in this case being that microcosm of Indo-Aryan society, the patrilineal extended family.

Dharma, to paraphrase the old adage, begins at home, and Ram is the most gregariously familial of deities. Enter any of his temples in northern India and you encounter not an image but a tableau. The precise number of dramatis personae varies from shrine to shrine: Bharat and Shatrughna, Hanuman and Vibhishan are common extras; other attendants, sages, and suppliant deities may be added if space and budget allow. But the minimal and essential element in the tableau is not a representation of a heiros gamos, as in temples to Lakshmi-Narayan and Radha-Krishna, but rather of a divine triad: Sita-Ram-Lakshman— God and his wife and his junior brother. What message is encoded in this particular trinity?

Let us begin with the figure usually placed to Ram's left. Despite her legendary beauty, virtue, and accomplishments, Sita is already idealized in Valmiki's version of the epic to the point of appearing "regular and flat, with almost emblematic features."^[9] By the sixteenth century, as a result of a variety of factors—sociopolitical, theological, and (in Tulsi's case) possibly personal as well—her characterization has moved so far from flesh and blood that during much of the narrative she becomes quite literally a "shadow" (pratibimb ) of her former self, created for the purpose of being abducted by Ravan, while the real, inviolable Sita remains concealed in the element of fire. Of course, this is essentially a theological sleight-of-hand, deftly executed and instantly forgotten in

[Full Size]

Figure 32.
A tableau of Ram, Sita, and Lakshman, with attendant deities,
enshrined in a Banaras temple

the tumultuous press of events, throughout which the shadow behaves just as the real Sita would. But even in Book One, in the romantic scene where we first meet her, Sita's personality and physical attributes are treated with exaggerated understatement; the long nakh-sikh passages devoted to Ram have no parallel in descriptions of Sita, whose idealized beauty is sketched in a line or two. The problem may not be so much Tulsi's puritanism as his metaphysical position; he can never forget that Sita is "the primal energy, ocean of splendor, source of the universe" (1.148.2)—she is less Ram's consort than his almost undifferentiated feminine half, although this theological imperative finds an antidote in the popular performance tradition, in which Sita acquires a more vivid personality. In any case, she is indispensable to the triad, as a point of reference to throw into focus the crucial relationship between the other two figures.

In the introduction to his translation of Valmiki's Ayodhyakanda^[*] , Sheldon Pollock views the Sanskrit epic in the perspective of social and political conditions in northern India in the latter half of the first millennium B.C.E. , the period that saw the coalescence of a hereditary system of hierarchical social organization, and powerful monarchies governed, in theory, by the law of primogeniture. Pollock finds the central conflict in the early epic texts to be the struggle among "brothers" (often, in our kinship terms, cousins or half-brothers; the patrilineal extended family allows for the same intimacy among all of these) and suggests that the violent and ultimately catastrophic succession dispute of the Mahabharata found its ideological antithesis in Valmiki's narrative. For in every situation in which the ancient audience would have expected tension, opposition, or open rebellion, it instead found itself presented with a new ethical imperative: "For civilized society the poet inculcates, by positive precept and negative example, and with a sometimes numbing insistence, a powerful new code of conduct: hierarchically ordered, unqualified submission."^[10] However, the story's enduring popularity is not simply a remnant of the historical context of its composition, for problems of authority and power, dominance and submission, were not confined to dynastic lineages of the distant past. Tulsidas did not write for royal patrons or even in a milieu of dynastic Hindu rule, and many of the ideological tensions highlighted in the older text—the potential problems posed by the institution of heir-apparent (yuvaraja ), for example, and by the custom of sovereignty-as-brideprice (rajyasulka )—were

of little interest to him;^[11] they are of even less concern to the modern-day, but no less fervent, worshiper of the Ramayan triad. I take up the subject of the tradition's impact on political ideology later in this chapter; for the moment I wish to consider the family dynamics with which the Hindi epic is implicitly concerned.

In Lanka^[*]kand^[*] , during Ram's lamentation over the mortally wounded Lakshman, Tulsi allows his hero to speak "as an ordinary man" (6.61.1). Here, apparently, is what an ordinary man would feel in such circumstances:

Sons, wealth, wife, home, and family,
constantly come and go in the world.
Arise, dear one, reflecting on this:
Irreplaceable, on earth, is a blood brother!^[12]

How will I face them in Ayodhya,
having lost, for a woman's sake, a dear brother?
Better to suffer public disgrace,
for the loss of a wife is no great thing!
6.61.7,8; 11,12

That this is an outburst in a moment of intense emotion makes it all the more significant. I have already noted in my discussion of Ramlila cycles that Bharat Milap—the reunion of the separated brothers—is an emotional high point far surpassing the intensity of the rather subdued episode of Ram's reunion with Sita. Significantly too, we note that in Ramchandra Shukla's identification of the "five most touching incidents" in the Manas , not a single one concerns Sita, whereas three (Ram's meeting with Bharat in Chitrakut; his lament over the wounded Lakshman; and Bharat's anguished wait for Ram's return) underscore the all-powerful fraternal bonds.^[13] Such evaluations remind us that the cornerstone of the Hindu extended family is the relationship not between husband and wife but between adult brothers, who represent the focus of authority in the family. The epic's self-regulating family hierarchy, based on the willing submission of junior siblings, is the idealized reverse-image of a real world in which brothers often quarrel and their

animosities split large families into hostile camps. The psychological as well as the material costs of such microcosmic Mahabharatas are best understood only by insiders, for in the often-constricted physical environment of the joint household, which necessitates constant interaction and sharing of resources, fraternal disputes can become sources of intense pain, guilt, and tension.

I once observed such a battlefield in the home of a wealthy family in Banaras, some thirty members of which shared a large duplex bungalow. A dispute between the two senior brothers (each of whom had several married sons) over the control of family businesses had been simmering for years, and relations between the two branches, housed in opposite halves of the duplex but sharing common front and rear courtyards, became increasingly strained. One day the quiet warfare took a new turn when a party of masons appeared in the front yard and, in a matter of hours, erected a brick and concrete wall down its center, creating a house quite literally divided. The elderly paterfamilias of one side, now retired from active combat, was a devoted daily reader of the Manas ; he could only shake his head and sigh, "That's how this world is—no love between brothers. Would Ram and Bharat have done such a thing?" The escalation of hostility occasioned much gossip in the neighborhood, for the sophisticated defenses of this nouveau-riche Kurukshetra added a new twist to an old, familiar story. The less privileged, who could not afford duplexes and masons, made do with conventional weapons.

The nineteenth-century Bengali saint Ramakrishna Paramhamsa's disparaging formula describing the affairs of this world—"women and gold"—has a special resonance in the Indian domestic context, for the disputes that erode fraternal love most often concern the division of inherited property and relations with sisters-in-law. The two forms of submission ideally required of a junior sibling are, in the Ramayan, neatly parceled out between two characters: Bharat, who renounces "gold"—the patrimony of the kingdom, temptingly offered to him— and Lakshman, who renounces "women" by rejecting his own wife to live as a celibate servant of Ram and Sita and maintaining a careful distance from his sister-in-law and reverence for her as his "mother."

The latter half of Tulsi's weighty Ayodhyakand^[*] is dominated by Bharat's tormented personality: his self-flagellation for being Kaikeyi's son and his tearful and reiterated denials of involvement in the events that led to Ram's exile. The portrayal is apt to strike the Western reader as excessive, yet this section has traditionally been among the most

admired in the poem. The conventional explanation is that Bharat is a model for the devotee, yet his aptness in filling this role hinges on his being, first of all, a model brother. He also resembles Ram both in physical appearance and in character, and the harshness of his voluntary exile at Nandigram parallels or even surpasses Ram's own travails.

Among the stereotypes of the extended family are those of fraternal personality types.^[14] Although male children in North India are typically pampered, the socialization of the elder brother is liable to begin earlier and be more rigidly enforced than that of his younger siblings. The result, ideally, is a personality of dignity and reserve, a patriarch-in-the-making, aware from an early age of the responsibilities that will fall on him as future head of the family; his archetypes are Ram and Yudhishthira. Younger brothers typically have more emotional leeway, and the youngest often enjoys a prolonged and idyllic childhood. He is permitted or even expected to be impulsive and restless, often artistic, and he may "take a long time to find himself"—a luxury denied his elder sibling, whose adult personality is more a foregone conclusion. His archetype is Krishna—Devaki's eighth and last son, whose adventurous adolescence generated an entire theology.

Within the Ramayan two cohesive fraternal dyads (Ram/Lakshman and Bharat/Shatrughna) conform to the stereotype. Ram and Bharat both play the role of dignified elder (although Bharat is ultimately subsumed to Ram), whereas their junior partners display impulsiveness and quick temper.^[15] I suggest that this fraternal pattern has wider social resonances: the elder brother is, so to speak, the Brahman in the relationship—the austere, dispassionate exemplar of sattva ; the younger brother is the temperamental, rajasik Kshatriya. Together they epitomize an elemental polarity in Indo-Aryan society: that of authority (which is ultimately spiritual and based on a transcendent principle) and power (which manifests itself in the conflict-based order of this world).^[16]

Within the joint family there tends to be a natural affinity between younger brother and elder sister-in-law. Since marriages of brothers are usually arranged in order of age and brides are typically younger than their husbands, the new wife may be closer in age to her brother-in-law; in addition, both are in relatively weak positions within the family hierarchy—hers of course is initially far more vulnerable than his. In traditional and especially in rural joint households, family life-style and household environment often restrict the development of emotional intimacy between newly married partners. The new wife of an elder brother often finds herself caught between the demanding, testing, and generally unsympathetic women of the household and a husband whom social etiquette as well as his position as elder requires to be remote and unresponsive. As already noted, the younger brother is stereotypically less emotionally restrained than his elder; he is also, if still unmarried, at an age when his contact with women (apart from mother, sisters, and aunts) is restricted and his curiosity about them intense. The culture recognizes the empathy that may develop between younger brother and elder sister-in-law as potentially both beneficial and threatening. Ideally they form what is sometimes termed a "joking relationship"—it being understood that family "jokes" are often sexually suggestive galiyam^[*] that provide an escape valve for the release of tensions—in which the elder sister-in-law (bhabhi ) becomes a friend and confidante to her younger brother-in-law (devar ); each thus gains a natural ally within the family as well as a relationship that can provide emotional relaxation.^[17] On the other hand, it is an uncomfortable fact of social life that "joking" relationships occasionally turn serious. Although actual liaisons are undoubtedly rare, the potential for even a "correct" bhabhi-devar relationship to generate emotional upheaval and jealousy among the principal protagonists can represent an ongoing source of tension in the household.

It is only against the background of joint family dynamics that the exemplary value of Lakshman's total sublimation of his sexual identity becomes fully comprehensible: his abandonment of his own wife, Urmila (a figure barely mentioned in the Manas but of importance in folk tradition), who, like Sita, desires to follow her husband to the forest; his obsessive, self-imposed wakefulness (it is said that he never sleeps during the fourteen years of exile) and reverential service to the couple. The

modern pilgrim to Chitrakut is shown, adjacent to the hill on which Lakshman constructed a house for the pair, a smaller summit a respectful distance away, atop which he maintained his lonely vigil of guarding their idyllic romance.^[18] Especially poignant is the well-known tradition that Lakshman was unable to identify any of Sita's ornaments—thrown off during her abduction and recovered by the monkeys—apart from her anklets, which he had seen during his daily prostrations at his sister-in-law's feet.^[19]

Epic models become memorable by being extreme, and the behavior of Ram's younger brothers conveys definite lessons in hierarchical subordination. But it is also true, as Pollock notes, that "you do not legislate against things nobody does,"^[20] and so the epic, in its encompassing breadth, also dramatizes the consequences of breaches of the rule. Thus, it implicitly contrasts the human fraternal pairs with two others in which the paradigmatic senior-junior relationship is violated. Both Ravan and Bali are violent and lustful "Kshatriya" elder brothers, whereas their juniors are more judicious and religious-minded—the "Brahmans" of these adharmic duos. The wages of their social sin, of course, is death.

The Limited Ideal

A recent study by Edmour Babineau views the Manas as a response both to the narrow social outlook and obsessive ritualism of Brahmanical orthodoxy and to the excesses of antinomian theism exemplified by Kabir and other poets of the sant tradition. It identifies the epic's underlying message as the ultimate compatibility of "social duty" and "love of God." I agree that the tension between worldly order and transcendent ideal is an implicit theme of the Manas and that the epic offers—or more precisely, enacts—a kind of resolution, but it is not the tidy ethical compromise ("loving submission to the will of Ram") that Babineau's study proposes.^[21]

The theme is already implicit in the Sanskrit Ramayana^[*] , and Valmiki's handling of it highlights a basic contrast between the two early Indian epics; for whereas the Mahabharata's realpolitik presents a world in which brothers quarrel and reconciliation is finally possible only in heaven, the Ramayana 's^[*] depiction of fraternal harmony proposes instead to bring heaven to earth, demonstrating perfection within this world rather than beyond it. The Sanskrit epic opens with Valmiki questioning Narad as to whether a perfect man can be found in this world. The response is a name, and a story told first in brief and then in · expanded form. But seven books and fifty thousand lines later, each listener must still decide whether the question has really been answered.

The relationship between this-worldly order and transcendent ideal has been explored in the context of South Indian Hinduism in an essay by David Shulman. Viewing the tradition as "a religion radically divided against itself," Shulman compares the paradigms of orthodox ritualism and devotional ecstasy and, within the social order, the roles of Brahman and Kshatriya; he detects, "an enduring dialectical tension between an intensely idealistic vision and a consciously pragmatic urge to come to terms with the created world. . .. The order which seeks to encompass these forces rests on the principle of limitation."^[22] The vitality that Shulman sees in the radical poetry of the Tamil cittars , which is epitomized in North Indian bhakti in the iconoclastic vision of Kabir, is an eruption of "divine chaos" into an orthodox order of forms that "in all their purity can become dead, empty, shells, while life rages outside their petrified boundaries."^[23]

At the intersection of worldly order and divine chaos stands the notion of dharma—"that most elusive of ideal orders."^[24] Dharma is also, for translators of South Asian texts, among the more elusive of terms— it is both what Babineau renders as "social duty" and Pollock as, among other things, "righteousness." The range of meanings that the term encompasses suggests an abiding cultural tension; as O'Flaherty observes, "dharma is a problem rather than a concept."^[25] For dharma is both earthly and transcendent: the justification for what we do in this world, it has its roots in that other realm to which we aspire. A principle to which even the gods must bow, dharma points toward ultimate things

and, by imposing order on chaos, permits the creation of a meaningful world. Yet paradoxically, within that world dharma becomes another kind of limiting order, which legislates against the eruption of the other kind of chaos that Shulman describes: the unmediated vision of transcendence. Like samsara^[*] , dharma has often been visualized as a wheel: complete and harmonious but also closed and potentially stifling, a system against which the heterodox liberation theologies rebel—although not by denying dharma but by positing a transcendent dharma outside it. The attempt to express ideal order in this world is necessarily imperfect; in due course the paradigm of cosmic organization—"that which upholds"—becomes the legitimation of social oppression—that which "holds down." Within the Hindu social system, the tension between real and ideal is expressed at many levels, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the relationship between the reigning elites of Brahmans and Kshatriyas.

At the spiritual apex of the system, the Brahman stands in two worlds as both seer and ritualist; the problematic quality of this dual role is reflected in an ongoing debate over his essential nature. Is he the "knower of the Absolute" and the exemplar of a transcendent order based on wisdom and inner experience, or the knower of the mechanics of ritual and the minutiae of systematizing stricture, a hereditary specialist in worldly order? Ideally, he is both, but the Upanishads already recognize that in practice this may not be the case. The rigid theoretical division between spiritual authority and worldly power is implicitly questioned in these texts, where priests sometimes go to kings in order to gain esoteric knowledge. We know from history that the Kshatriya order, though in theory no less a function of birth than that of the Brahman, was in fact always more permeable—witness the numerous royal lineages that rose from humble or "obscure" (gupta ) beginnings. This permeability offered aspiring individuals and communities the possibility of worldly dominion—but not, in theory, of spiritual transcendence, which was reserved for the Brahman alone. Within the system the Brahman, by serving the king as minister or purohit, bestowed legitimation on the regime but sacrificed his own purity. The king, accepting the Brahman's legitimation, acquired worldly merit (and otherworldly dividends) but acknowledged his spiritual subservience.^[26] A delicate balance was maintained, yet mythology preserves murmurs of discontent,

notably in the saga of king-become-seer, Vishvamitra, which—interestingly enough—was elaborately highlighted in the Sanskrit Ramayana^[*] .^[27]

Pollock has noted the tendency of early Indian monarchs to aspire to what he terms "self-legitimation." Thus, a spiritualized king like Ashoka inevitably begins to usurp the Brahman's exclusive status.^[28] However, he does so by transcending the system: adopting a heterodox creed and positing a new universal dharma that negates the old order of tension and compromise.^[29] The Valmiki epic, which seems to have historical roots in roughly the same epoch, counters with a vision of a universal monarch who remains within the system; hence his usurpation of transcendent authority is more subtle. In analyzing the character of Valmiki's hero, Pollock suggests the paradox that while Ram, as exemplary Kshatriya, embraces and upholds the worldly hierarchy, he also, by his obstinate refusal to accept the pattern of killing and conflict that had come to be recognized as Kshatriya-dharma, appropriates some of the perquisites of the Brahman renunciant, thus offering "a comprehensive model of behavior, enacting . . . two roles that encompass communal life in its totality."^[30] This dual characterization of the epic's hero has profound implications: "If, in his course of action, Rama explicitly affirms hierarchical subordination, the spiritual commitment that allows for his utopian rule seems explicitly to oppose it. . .. Hierarchical life and the separation of 'powers' that underpins it, which the poem elsewhere unambiguously attempts to validate, appears at the highest and critical level to be questioned, and a reformulation is offered in its place."^[31] This reformulation has as its symbol the concept of Ramraj: transcendence brought to earth through the medium of a spiritualized king, whose role has expanded to fill both earth and heaven. This understanding of Ram suggests the inevitability of his association with Vishnu, the "expanding" deity whose self-limitation in incarnate forms is the touchstone of his transcendence, the "Kshatriya" guardian of this world who ultimately usurps the status of the Upanishadic Absolute. The "upward mobility" implicit in the Ramayan story also helps to explain the historical fact of the epic's having been enjoyed and patronized by those who are oppressed by the social system it explicitly promotes. Yet the epic's resolution of the paradox of dharma—in Heesterman's terms, its attempt to heal the "axial rift" between "un-

compromising transcendence and mundane reality"^[32] —could not be explicitly formulated on the level of the didactic (for that would have challenged the system), but only, as Pollock suggests, implicitly enacted as narrative.

To Pollock's formulation of the essential question framed by the Valmiki epic—"What is it that makes life possible?"^[33] —I would add an equivalent question posed by Tulsidas: "Is transcendence possible in human life?" In the very act of choosing as his embodiment of the Absolute a figure who had acquired the title "ideal man of propriety" (maryadapurusottam^[*] ), Tulsi began his confrontation with this problem. Although maryada connotes rule, order, and propriety, it also carries the more archaic meanings of frontier, limit, and boundary. The "ideal man" of maryada is thus a man who, as we would say, "knows his limits." But does this not make him, then, necessarily limited? This indeed is the problem that generates the Manas narrative, and it is raised again and again by each of the principal hearers of the tale: Yajnavalkya, Sati, Parvati, and Garuda.

The Absolute that is all-encompassing, undefiled, unborn,
undivided, impassive, undifferentiated,
which even the Veda does not know—
Can it take form and become man?^[34] 1.50

Since the archetypal hearers, situated on the ghats of the encompassing frame story, are surrogates for every potential listener, we must suppose that their oft-repeated question was one that Tulsi expected his own audience to pose concerning his Ram-katha . Its hero might be exemplary and his adventures instructive, but could the man who wept with grief for his lost wife in the Dandak forest be accepted as the ultimate expression of divinity?

Ram's "limitations" were well known to Tulsi's contemporaries. The verses that Kabir had sung perhaps half a century earlier,

The creator didn't marry Sita,
didn't tie up the sea with stones.
Those who pray to Raghunath as the one
are praying in the dark.^[35]

were undoubtedly still heard in the religious assemblies of Banaras. In proclaiming his devotion to the name Ram, the unorthodox poet had been careful to dissociate it from the limited hero of the Ramayan narrative. An even more serious challenge (since it came from within the orthodox Vaishnava fold) was the assertion by the leading theologians of Krishna bhakti —Vallabhacharya and the Bengali goswamis of Vrindavan—of the limited nature of the Ram incarnation. Despite the reverence that these pious Vaishnavas paid to the son of Dashrath as a "descent" (avatar ) of the Lord, it was inconceivable to them that the role of maryadapurusottarn^[*] could represent the fullest expression of divinity. Ram, they said, was a partial incarnation (ams^[*]avatar ), who manifested only twelve "degrees" of godhood (kala ; units of a circle), whereas the sixteen degrees necessary for a total manifestation were present only in the life of Krishna, the lilapurusottam^[*] whose playful pastimes overstepped the bounds of propriety.^[36] Ram's acquiescence in the established order of the world seems to have taken precedence in the minds of Tulsi's contemporaries over the liberating possibilities implicit in the myth of the spiritualized king. The sant poets could adore him only by denying his earthly acts, other Vaishnavas only by demoting him to the second rank of godhead. Yet Tulsi's istadev^[*] , through the medium of the poet's irresistible narrative, would in true Vaishnava fashion expand beyond these limitations to become the most pervasive symbol of divinity in northern India.

An important factor in Tulsi's success was his rearticulation of the tension between order and transcendence, now set in an explicitly Vaishnava theological context in which the Lord's acceptance of limitation became not only the key to his accessibility but also, paradoxically, the proof of his divinity. The sants ' solution—the rejection of order in favor of transcendence—was both heroic and extreme; its idealism was widely admired, but in practice it became formalized (as antistructure movements in India usually do) as a counter-structure, pressing its own claims to ritual purity and power.^[37] The risks of chaos—divine or other-

wise—and the attractions of order-based status proved more compelling to some than the vision of uncompromising freedom. The solution offered by the poets and theologians of the Krishna tradition had as its quintessential expression the raslila , in which the human urge for transcendence was fulfilled by the Lord's multiplying himself to satisfy every devotee. This theophany was visualized, however, as a divine drama enacted on a circular platform deep in a nocturnal forest—an arena (as Hawley points out) decisively separated from the mundane world.^[38] Earthly order was not rejected but was left behind at the time of entering Krishna's realm; as in the Mahabharata , transcendence was possible only beyond the boundaries of worldly life.

In contrast, Tulsi's play came to be enacted in the most public of arenas—city streets and squares—and its visual parable of simultaneous limitation and transcendence was destined to spill over formal theatrical boundaries. The paradoxical manner in which it "resolves" the tension between order and transcendence may be glimpsed in an individual episode, considered as both text and performance. The problematic relationship between Brahman (the paradigmatic elder brother and representative of transcendent order) and Kshatriya (the junior brother and the surrogate in this dyadic schema for all the lower orders) is dramatized in the encounter between Ram and his elder Brahman "double," Parashuram. The fact that this episode is one of the few passages in which Tulsi departs from Valmiki's narrative sequence suggests that it occupied an important place in the poet's personal agenda.

If Ram is a Kshatriya acting as a Brahman—a warrior in hermit's guise, who upholds his father's word by self-imposed suffering—his adversary is just the opposite: a Brahman acting as a Kshatriya, who upholds his father's word by matricide and universal "sacrificial" destruction.^[39] The referee of this reverse-image confrontation is Vishvamitra—mythology's one example of a Kshatriya literally become a Brahman, and Ram's own initiatory preceptor. The senior "Ram" storms into Janak's assembly (note that Tulsi prefers the public arena of the bow sacrifice, with all the kings and citizens of Videha present, to Valmiki's forest setting) to punish the breaker of Shiva's bow—the sym-

bol of the god who, for Tulsi, was the special patron of Brahmans—an upstart Kshatriya who threatens to have it all: marry the princess, rule the world, and even encompass the Absolute.

The pungent satire of this scene is best appreciated by witnessing its performance at Ramnagar, where it ranks among the most popular episodes in the Ramlila . For this occasion the maharaja dismounts from his elephant and sits enthroned on a columned verandah, for once in close proximity to both Ramayanis and actors—clearly he doesn't want to miss a word. Himself of ambiguous status—king and Kshatriya by role, Bhumihar Brahman by claim^[40] —he listens with evident amusement as his Brahman chanters and actors recreate the saucy insults hurled by Ram's alter ego, the fiery Lakshman, at the overweening Parashuram, a Brahman who does not "know his limits."^[41] Ram, like the maharaja, listens with apparent relish, intervening only when actual violence threatens to erupt, and then only to utter ironically deferential homilies. Characteristically, however, the denouement is effected by a gesture that both affirms and supersedes the conventional social hierarchy. When Ram parts his robe to reveal on his chest the footprint of the sage Bhrigu (another angry and overweening Brahman), it is, of course, a deferential gesture—the meek, Brahman-loving Vishnu displaying the scars of his devotion to dharma. Yet paradoxically, it is also the ultimate theophany: the self-revelation of a cosmic Clark Kent who tears open his shirt to display the symbol of unchallengeable transcendence. Parashuram is instantly subdued and, turned once more into a docile Brahman, intones a hymn of praise before departing for the forest to practice austerities, leaving godhood to the upstart generation.

How is the viewer to interpret this scene? Brahmans are to be respected, evidently, although some Brahmans—even powerful ones—are clearly fools whose arrogance blinds them to greater realities. The display of deference to such people may itself indicate a kind of superiority to them. By scrupulously keeping within his limits, Ram puts Parashuram back within his. On a didactic level, the text affirms varna^[*] structure and the conventional rule that deference must be shown to Brahmans regardless of their character or behavior, as Tulsi has Ram himself affirm unambiguously elsewhere:

Though he curses, beats and berates you,
a Brahman should be adored—thus sing the holy.^[42] 3.34.1

Yet on a narrative level, the Manas enacts an ironic commentary on this doctrine. The result is a paradoxical "resolution."

I shall soon have occasion to note some of the tortuous efforts of Tulsi's modern apologists to explain away verses such as the above and to attribute to the poet a logical and consistent—or more incongruous yet, a twentieth-century liberal-democratic—view of the relationship between wordly order and transcendent ideal. In fact, the statement just quoted is followed, a mere fifteen lines later, by Ram's solemn declaration,

I recognize only one relationship: devotion.
Caste and lineage, virtue and status,
wealth, power, family, merit, and intellect—
a man possessing these, yet without devotion,
resembles a cloud without water.
3.35.4-6

The occurrence of such jarring juxtapositions is an indication that the poet, unlike his apologists, posited no definitive solution to the dilemma of order and transcendence.

Babineau labels Tulsi's approach "orthodox theism" and cites the poet's "special aptitude for acclaiming renovation without destroying tradition, for promoting change without sacrificing continuity."^[43] Many modern Hindu writers similarly describe the poet's path as "devotion based on the sastras " (sastriyabhakti ).^[44] Yet we may recall that, for Hindus, "orthodoxy" is generally less important than "orthopraxy" and the sastras are often mutually contradictory and subject to diverse interpretations. Shulman's analysis of the negotiated nature of Hindu orthodoxy more effectively expresses the Hindi poet's position as well as the paradoxical role of his hero: "To the complete freedom of disorder gained by the rejection of compromise, orthodoxy prefers the tension of living within borders while always looking beyond them."^[45]

Although the utopian vision of Ramraj is elaborately developed in the final book of the Manas (and its implications are considered further

below), Tulsi's preferred symbol of transcendence is the divine name and his vehicle of order is a new "Veda"—the epic itself—which is accessible to all. Yet the very recognition of a Veda reiterates the need for authority, structure, and limitation. The borders remain; instead of the fundamental problem being resolved, it is endlessly reenacted. The poet's inspired irresolution allowed for this performative elaboration, and in time for the use of his epic by political groups to the right and the left, as well as—like the text itself—at the paradox-ridden center.