People of the Book

I would like to begin this section with a series of vignettes that reflect the present-day popularity of the Manas and the cult of Ram in Hindi-speaking northern India.

Rush-Hour Revival

In the spring of 1983, during Pandit Ramkinkar's annual Katha program at New Delhi's Birla Temple, I made the acquaintance of a man from a village in Haryana State who commuted daily to a teaching job in the capital. As we discussed Ramkinkar's program, it became clear that my acquaintance was both enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the Manas . When I asked him how he had come to know the epic so well, he replied that he studied it on the train during his daily one-and-a-half-hour commute to work. Thereby, as it turned out, hung a tale—one that brought to my attention the most unusual Katha "program" of which I was to hear.

In 1944, the story went, four Brahman office workers were playing cards in a third-class coach of one of the morning commuter trains that converge on Delhi from smaller cities in adjacent areas of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. Someone jokingly asked them why they were wasting their time playing cards; "You are Brahmans; you should be expounding the scriptures!" The four took the suggestion seriously, and a "Railway Ramayan Mandali" (Ramayan "group" or "circle") was formed. The men carried copies of the Manas and read them systematically, discussing each verse. Other riders became interested and asked to join in. The group soon became too large to be accommodated in a single compartment and expanded to other compartments and coaches and, in time, to other trains.

Forty years later, the initial study group had grown into a loosely organized network of moving Katha programs, converging on Delhi each morning from four directions: from Sonepat to the north, Rohtak to the west, Palwal to the south, and Ghaziabad to the east. On each of these lines, according to my acquaintance, one could find commuter trains with special coaches (marked by an ocher-colored flag displayed from one window) in which Manas exposition was being conducted.

Portable megaphones were used so that everyone in the designated coach could hear; the actual reading and exposition was handled by a core group of enthusiasts who took turns preparing passages for exposition; my acquaintance belonged to one such group and had to be prepared to speak on an assigned passage once each week or so. He said that he devoted much time to these preparations in order to do as creditable a job as possible and often came to professional Katha programs in search of new ideas. He proceeded to give me the then-current schedule of groups and topics for trains to and from his own local station of Sonepat:

This literally "running" commentary may well be unique; certainly I never heard of anything like it. But its scale and organization is impressive, as is the fact that it is largely an activity of white-collar workers in India's capital. It is a reminder of the continued appeal of traditional religious exposition in one of the nation's most cosmopolitan and rapidly modernizing regions.

You've Read the Book . . . Now Buy the Cassette

The hottest-selling recording in the thriving cassette stalls of Banaras in 1984 was not, as I would have supposed, the soundtrack to any of the then-current crop of Hindi film musicals or a local hit by any of the city's popular biraha or qawwali groups. Instead, according to Scott Marcus, an ethnomusicologist conducting research on popular music in the city,^[172] it was a boxed set of eight cassettes comprising an abridged version of the Manas sung by the popular film singer "Mukesh," accompanied by other soloists, chorus, and orchestra. These recordings were

made between 1972 and 1976 in celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the composition of Tulsi's epic (1974) and were initially released as records by the Gramophone Company of India. They represented, it was said, a nostalgic labor of love by the aging Punjabi singer, who had made a fortune as the offscreen "playback" voice of numerous Bombay film stars and had set out late in life to rediscover the styles and melodies of Manas recitation he had heard in his childhood. The resulting recordings, although presented in modernized "filmi" idiom, faithfully preserved a number of traditional melodies of Manas chanting and offered a sequential (though heavily abridged) musical version of the epic.

The records enjoyed modest success but were too expensive to reach a mass audience. However, the advent of inexpensive cassette recorders during the late 1970s revolutionized the music industry in India, creating for the first time a mass market for recordings. The Mukesh series was rereleased on cassette by the original distributor and then quickly pirated by smaller companies working outside the limits of the poorly enforced copyright laws. Given the shadowy nature of major pirate distributors such as "T Series,"^[173] it is impossible to say how many of the sets were sold, but by 1984 their impact was both visible and audible. One could scarcely attend a public or private religious function in Banaras that year without hearing, over the obligatory loudspeaker system, the familiar strains of Murli Manohar Svarup's orchestration and Mukesh's mellifluous chanting. And when a consortium of artists and recording companies decided to take out a series of full-page newspaper advertisements to protest the unlawful duplication and sale of recordings, their choice of a symbolic and readily recognizable release was obvious: beneath the banner heading, "Save Music—Kill Piracy," was a large photograph of the ubiquitous "T-Series" Tulsi-Ramayan.^[174]

. . . And Watch the Video

On January 25, 1987, a new program premiered on India's government-run television network, Doordarshan. Broadcast on Sunday mornings at 9:30 A.M. , it represented an experiment for the national network, for it was the first time that television (popular in India only since the early

1980s) was used to present a serialized adaption of a religious epic. The chosen work was the Ramayan and the major source for the screenplay was the Manas . Produced and directed by Bombay filmmaker Ram-anand Sagar, the serial itself was an epic undertaking: featuring some three hundred actors, it was originally slated to run for fifty-two episodes of forty-five minutes each but had to be extended three times due to popular demand and eventually grew into a main story in seventy-eight episodes, followed after an interval of several months by a sequel incorporating the events detailed in the seventh book (the Uttarakanda^[*] , or epilogue) of the Valmiki epic. Long before the airing of the main story concluded on July 31, 1988, the Ramayan had become the most popular program ever shown on Indian television, drawing an estimated one hundred million viewers and generating unprecedented advertising revenues. Throughout much of the country, activities came to a halt on Sunday mornings and streets and bazaars took on a deserted look, as people gathered before their own and neighbors' TV sets. The epidemic of "Ramayan fever" (as the magazine India Today termed it) generated lively debate in the press, with urban intellectuals and policymakers struggling to understand why a production dismissed by critics as a second-rate and technically flawed melodrama had elicited such a staggering response. Did its success point once again to the enduring power of sacred narrative to galvanize the masses, or was it rather a cue to the advent of a new force in Indian culture: the mesmerizing power of the television screen? Yet few critics noted the show's continuities with older genres of Manas performance: the serialized format, the presence of a storyteller/commentator (usually Ramanand Sagar himself, who, like Tulsidas, inserted himself into his "text"), the alternation between actors' dialogues and sung narration (chiefly Manas verses set to music), and the imaginative and extended elaboration on individual incidents and characters—all these elements suggested the conventions and interpretive styles of Katha and lila performances. The audience too responded appropriately: purifying and garlanding the TV set (as a seat for the video vyas ), performing the arti of beloved characters, and distributing prasad at the close of broadcasts. The phenomenal impact of the Ramayan serial merits closer examination than it can be given here, but it is clear that the production and the response it engendered once again dramatized the role of the epic as a principal medium not only for individual and collective religious experience but also for public discourse and social and cultural reflection.^[175]

Banking on the Name

The use of the name "Ram" as the most common nonsectarian designation for the supreme being was already widespread in northern India before Tulsidas's time and was reflected in the use of the name by nathpanth yogis and sant poets such as Kabir.^[176] But Tulsi's great emphasis on the power of the name—his insistence in Balkand^[*] that "the name is greater than Ram himself" (1.23), and his endorsement in Uttar kand^[*] of the name as a panacea for all the ills of the Dark Age—gave further impetus to the cult of the name. Whether or not one accepts Rajnikant Shastri's irate charge that Tulsi's advocacy of the name "has rendered millions of householders and thousands of ascetics apathetic and weak . . . firmly convinced that in the Kali Yuga, apart from the repetition of Ram's name, no other discipline or activity can be fruitful,"^[177] one cannot deny the pervasive presence of Ram's name in North India today, reflected in its invocation in moments of distress, as the most common rural greeting (Ram-Ram ), and in the pallbearers' chant (Ramnamsatya hai —"Ram's name is truth"). But if Tulsi urged the ceaseless verbal repetition of the name, millions of literates and marginal-literates armed with pens and paper have taken up a new discipline based on the name, which has given rise to a new kind of popular religious institution.

I first became aware of this phenomenon in an encounter with a woman who worked as a servant in a Banaras guesthouse. During her afternoon rest periods I would see her sitting on the steps, diligently writing in a notebook. My curiosity was aroused. Was she studying something? Keeping a journal? Doing accounts? On inquiry, I was shown pages and pages filled with minute renderings of a single name, in an immaculate hand and bright red ink. This activity was not spontaneous; the notebook, she cheerfully explained, was provided by "the priest at the Hanuman temple" and was to be filled and returned to him, whereupon she would be issued another. My curiosity as to what would become of the filled notebook—it could hardly be thrown away, since it contained the name of the Lord—was answered on a pilgrimage to Ayodhya, where I discovered that the latest trend was the construction of special "banks" (so labeled with a transliteration of the English word) for the deposit of these uniform workbooks, neatly ordered in bales of fifty or a hundred, wrapped in red cloth, and stacked floor-to-ceiling in

small, Plexiglas-fronted temples. A sign on the facade of one such establishment showed that someone was keeping track of the accumulated merit; it invited the pilgrim to "enjoy the auspicious sight of 125 karor^[*] (1,250,000,000) names of Ram!" In the foreground, several larger notebooks were on display, on whose opened pages artists had created striking images of Manas scenes in what at first appeared to be a hazy, pointillist style but on closer inspection proved to consist entirely of minute, ingenious permutations of the name in various shades of ink.

The spiritual exercise of repeatedly writing out a divine formula is not new; Tibetan Buddhism long ago developed it with comparable technological ingenuity, and it has also long been customary, I was told, to present Hanuman at the Sankat Mochan Temple in Banaras with paper garlands, the links of which contain 100,000 renderings of the name. Yet the "banking" scheme seems, for India, a peculiarly late twentieth-century development—a reflection of an only recently popularized system of savings banks and a modern variant on an enduring need for tangible signs of religious activity. The mere name on one's tongue may seem an ephemeral thing in these materialist times, but a filled Ram-nam notebook is, as we say, "like money in the bank"—congealed merit (punya^[*] ) slowly accumulating interest in the concrete and Plexiglas vaults of a vast but (one hopes) uncommonly efficient spiritual bureaucracy. More than once in Katha programs, I heard Ram's court described not as a darbar or kacahari (the royal or magisterial court of the nineteenth century) but as a daftar —a modern bureaucratic office—complete with desk and file cabinet and with Hanuman at the door to screen petitioners.^[178] Though intentionally humorous, the metaphor plays on the real anxiety that many Indians feel about their dealings with bureaucracy; any expedient to circumvent the system, any magical "chit" or passbook to get the Great Man's attention, is not to be overlooked.

To these brief vignettes might be added many others that likewise suggest the continuing vitality of the Ram tradition and its principal text,^[179] but the reader may not require further evidence on this point. Yet what of the future of Manas performance genres? Urbanization,

industrialization, and increasing literacy are among the factors that are unquestionably changing many aspects of life in India. What effect will such changes have on the popularity of Tulsi's epic? Before I address this question, let me raise a pertinent and related one: Do Manas devotees understand what they are reciting?

Avadhi, Khari Boli, and "Hindi-Ization"

In the course of my research I sometimes encountered educated people who told me that they could not understand the Manas . "It's in Avadhi," one man said, "not in Hindi, and so it's just like a foreign language to me." Although the performance genres that I have described undoubtedly help spread knowledge of the text, they also presuppose a considerable familiarity with it; the most effective Katha performances require an audience knowledgeable enough to interact with the performer and even to complete his quotations from the text. Yet Tulsi's epic is more than four centuries old; unlike its Sanskrit ancestor, it was not composed in a frozen literary language but in a fluid spoken dialect. Thus, it seems inevitable that the archaism of the text will obscure its meaning and erode its popularity. Hein observed that an important function of the Vaishnava dramas he witnessed in Mathura in 1949-50 was to mediate texts that were no longer readily comprehensible to their audiences. He warned that "the thought and language of Surdas and Tulsidas . . . present all the difficulties Shakespeare would have for us if in addition he had been a Scotsman. The gap which the players are called upon to bridge is widening, and the time will come when the best dramatic skills will not be able to make the old poetry live."^[180] The growing use of standardized Khari Boli—the dialect of the Delhi re-gion—to mediate the Manas in oral performance is undeniable, as is the fact that much recitation is conducted in a mechanical fashion that gives little importance to comprehension; shall we assume then, that most contemporary devotees, like the man cited earlier, no longer understand their epic?

To answer this question, we must consider the linguistic complexity of northern India and the continued existence, even within the Hindi belt, of variant dialects, particularly in the rural areas where 70 percent of the population still lives. The region has long been characterized by the coexistence of more or less standardized dialects used for intra-

regional communication, with localized ones used for the expression of a village- or district-level cultural identity. Despite Tulsi's assertion that he wrote in "village speech," linguists have come to recognize that he, along with other bhakti poets, evolved new, composite dialects "aimed at a larger audience much beyond their own dialectical region."^[181] What Tulsi's literary language had in common with much village speech—and this is as true today as it was in the sixteenth century—was its oral playfulness, its readiness to twist and transform words while still leaving them recognizable in their context. As Edwin Greaves noted in his 1895 study of the grammar of the epic, "Any attempt to indicate all the modifications and changes to which a word is liable in the hands of Tulsi Das would be quite vain. He does not go in search of a word to fit into a certain corner, as a meaner poet would do, but takes the word most suitable in meaning and makes it fit, and it is wonderful how snug and comfortable these words look and sound, after the eye and ear have had a little practice."^[182] Thus, when we read that the Manas is composed in "Avadhi," we should bear in mind that this was not, in Tulsi's hands, a precisely standardized language; rather it was a synthetic dialect built on a base of Eastern Hindi grammatical forms but incorporating elements from other dialects and utilizing an enormous vocabulary of Sanskrit, Perso-Arabic, and local words,^[183] all of which were subject to the poet's characteristic transformations. "A little practice" was probably as necessary in the sixteenth century as it is today, although comprehension of the variant forms comes more readily to the ear than to the eye.

Greaves wrote nearly a century ago, when Khari Boli prose was already becoming the standard literary dialect of the educated and doubts were being raised concerning the "archaism" of the Manas . Yet Greaves argued that "[the epic's] very difficulties constitute its peculiar value to the student who wishes to learn the language of the people" and went on to observe, "There are some, I know, who look upon the Ramayan as written in, perhaps, interesting, but still, obsolete, language, and who say, 'But the villagers don't talk in the language of the Ramayan'; it can only meekly be replied, 'But they do.' Not, of course, entirely, but village boli is very much nearer to the language of the Ramayan than probably any other book that could be named."^[184] Many of the epic

forms that Greaves cited as current in his day—such as kakahabata (what shall I say?), toke and mose (to you, and by me) and dui (two)—remain in everyday use in eastern Uttar Pradesh, where they coexist with the Khari Boli forms that people learn in school. Concluded Greaves, "This is the language of the Ramayan and this is the language of the people."^[185]

Gandhi, who promoted the use of Khari Boli Hindi as a national language, was inclined to agree and to praise Tulsi's colloquialisms: "He just picked up words spoken in the streets and used them, because Tulsi Das was writing for you and me. . .. The language of Tulsi Das therefore is our language."^[186] Lower-class devotees usually confirmed this assertion; when I asked the Manas singers at Khari Kuan if they understood the words they were singing, one replied, "Brother, this is our own local speech. How could we not know it?" On the other hand, educated people sometimes indicated varying degrees of difficulty with the idiom; one daily reciter estimated that she understood "about half" of the text as she chanted it; to understand it fully, she said, she would have to read it more slowly and with the aid of a prose commentary. Such difficulty, however, may stem as much from poetic style as from dialect; some lines are simply convoluted and obscure, and probably always were. The straightforward narrative of Books Two to Six is, in my experience, more readily comprehensible than the philosophical digressions of the first and last books. Poetically difficult language invites interpretation and commentary, and the obscurities of the Manas have always been germane to its performance traditions. When one expounder told me that the Manas was "difficult," I asked him whether he meant that its language was difficult. "No," he replied, "its language is simple—its inner meaning is difficult," and added, smiling broadly, "that's why we expounders are necessary."^[187]

Indians are often bi- or trilingual and relatively comfortable with variant dialect patterns. The fact that Braj Bhasha and Avadhi, in their pure forms, were spoken by relatively few people at any given time did not prevent poetry in these languages from being widely enjoyed. Indeed, until this century, these dialects, together with Urdu, were the preferred media of poetry; a person who wished to express poetic sentiments switched into one or another of them, just as Banarsis shift back and forth between Bhojpuri, Khari Boli, and Urdu, according to the

context and the person being addressed. We may compare this multivocality to that in the American musical idiom, where, for the expression of certain conventional sentiments, white northern singers assume a southern or African American dialect and accent.

Frequency of exposure and knowledge of context are critical to the comprehension of a literary dialect. Elizabethan English varies sufficiently from contemporary speech that we cannot understand many of its terms and idioms without a glossary. Yet we may grasp a good deal of this language when we hear it performed, particularly if we are familiar with the general context of a passage or (in the case of Shakespeare's works) with the plot of a play. Returning to Hein's observation, I suggest that the King James Bible might be a more apt choice for comparison with the Manas than the works of a Shakespeare, Scots or otherwise. A person raised in a household where passages from this Bible were recited daily would become imprinted with its patterns (even though he would not necessarily use them in ordinary speech) and might even feel, as many Christians did until recently, that its archaisms were essential to religious diction, so that in addressing God in prayers or hymns, he would automatically shift into these special forms, which were sanctified by long use. In the same way, many contemporary speakers of Khari Boli use Braj or Avadhi forms when singing devotional hymns to Krishna and Ram.

Both Greaves and Growse, writing a century ago, stressed the ready comprehensibility of the epic to even uneducated people; Growse observed that "a Hindu child generally grasps at once the familiar idiom, and finds no great difficulty in even the most crabbed passage."^[188] A century of linguistic change and increasing standardization of urban speech necessitates modifying these observations somewhat. It is notable, for example, that in the nineteenth century the most popular section of the Manas was said to have been Ayodhyakand^[*] , even though it was admitted to be long and slow-moving and to contain (especially in its latter half) some of the most convoluted and obscure language in the epic.^[189] When I asked contemporary devotees which section they liked best, the answer was usually Sundar kand^[*] —which is short, action-packed, and one of the easiest books linguistically; only one old woman told me that she liked Ayodhya best—"Because of the way they talk to each other."

Clearly not everyone grasps the idiom so readily now, especially if he or she was not raised in an environment permeated by the text. An upper-class resident of Delhi, reared on a combination of Punjabi-flavored Khari Boli and public school English and never exposed to the epic at home, encountering it for the first time in a college course on medieval Hindi literature, would assuredly find its language highly irregular. It was one such person whom I cited earlier, who informed me that he could not understand the epic. But it is important to recognize, as was clear in the context, that this man wished to convey to me not only that he did not "understand" the Manas but that he did not particularly like it or believe in it; he wanted to distance himself from its folk ethos and "backward" values. If large numbers of Indians felt this way, then of course the text would quickly lapse into the status of a literary relic. But as long as people continue to value the epic and to perform it—which a great many still do—its language, even though significantly different from their everyday speech, will remain accessible to them.

One more linguistic factor in the popularity of the text should not be overlooked: the ever-growing influence of Hindi as a (usually unacknowledged and often explicitly denied) lingua franca for much of India. Little credit for this development can be given to heavy-handed governmental efforts to impose a highly Sanskritized form of Khari Boli as a national language, yet despite the resistance that such efforts have provoked and the continued vitality of other regional languages, Hindi of one sort or another has continued to make inroads in many regions. The popularity of Hindi films and, more recently, of Hindi-language television (most notably the Ramayan and Mahabharat serials) has obviously contributed to this process, but other, more subtle factors have long been at work. Bharati noted that, despite the explicit emphasis of Hindu Renaissance leaders on Sanskrit texts and education, the actual effect of their activities has been what he terms "Hindi-ization" and the spread of a more homogeneous, bhakti -oriented popular faith, permeated by texts in the "bhakti lingua franca"—one or another dialect of Hindi.^[190] Like Hindi itself, the Manas has tended to "win by default" in popular religious practice, as an accessible and relatively nonsectarian scripture equally suitable for a Hanuman puja or a Devi vrat . This has been true not merely in the epic's homeland but also in neighboring regions that do not have a comparably authoritative text in their mother tongue. I was told by a Kannada friend, for example, that he knows of

middle-class ladies in Mysore who have become convinced of the benefits of reciting the Manas and have taken up the study of Hindi solely for that purpose.^[191]

Along with the above factors, we may note the effects of increased mobility and especially of pilgrim traffic to important religious centers in Hindi-speaking areas, such as Banaras, Allahabad, Hardwar, Ayodhya, and the Himalayan shrines of Uttar Pradesh, where pilgrims encounter a milieu permeated by the epic's influence as well as bazaar bookstalls filled with inexpensive editions that they carry back to their home regions. This process of dissemination has also been influenced by the diaspora of a people who themselves originated outside the linguistic homeland of Tulsi's epic, but whom historical circumstances have now made among its most active propagators.

The New Patrons

I have referred several times to historical changes in the patronage of Manas performance; these changes may be summarized as follows:

Of these developments, the most significant for contemporary performance genres was the shift from aristocratic to mercantile patronage during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and it will now be worthwhile to take a closer look at some of the causes and consequences of this shift.

The historian C. A. Bayly has argued that until the nineteenth century the influence of merchant groups, even in cities such as Banaras, Faizabad, and Lucknow, was subordinated to that of the land-based gentry, which represented the dominant local power and exercised considerable control over trade. This pattern began to change as the economic impact of the colonial presence became more pronounced. The British attempt

to standardize the revenue system and promote a cash economy began to threaten systems of local taxation, local mints, and the pattern of (what the British termed) "idle consumption" by aristocratic society, "acted out in forms of relationship between orders of people, and gift-giving, feasting and display."^[192] These changes were augmented by a widespread economic depression in northern India between roughly 1830 and 1850, probably worsened by a series of poor harvests, which altered the economic standing of key segments of the population.^[193] The gradual recovery that followed, helped along by the construction of the railways, was characterized by a steady reduction in courtly consumption and by the growing importance of trading and adminstrative centers and (by the end of the century) of manufacturing cities—notably Kanpur, strategically located on the new railway line. One consequence of these developments was a change in the role of the merchant, who had always functioned as both trader and moneylender (baniya ).

In the Indian states the usurious role of the merchant had often been offset in part by lavish royal expenditure and investment which the merchant community also helped to finance. Merchant, peasant, artisan and ruler had been part of a system in which it was not in the interest of one element to reduce any of the others to complete dependence. Many of the negative features attributed to the Indian Baniya in more recent times do not seem to be a product of inherent viciousness but of particular historical circumstances. In particular, his role changed in the absence of the lavish local elite expenditure and intrusive political authority which had once put limits to the consequences of his commercial ruthlessness.^[194]

The stereotype of the "commercially ruthless" Baniya is most often applied in contemporary North India to the Marwaris, a group of mercantile castes that migrated from the princely states of Jodhpur (Marwar), Jaipur, Bikaner, and Jaisalmer in a diaspora to the rising commercial towns of northern and central India. These castes had formerly served as bankers and brokers to the Rajput houses of their home regions and had also participated in overland trade with western Asia, which declined with the coming of the British and the rise of maritime commerce. They represented what some economists have termed a "resource group," a far-flung network of closely knit family firms joined by ties of marriage and religious affiliation, which seems to have put them in a uniquely advantageous position to exploit commercial opportunities.^[195] Their di-

aspora had begun in the eighteenth century, when Marwaris served as bankers and contractors to some of the Maratha kingdoms; during the early nineteenth century, large numbers of Shekhavati Aggarwals (a trading community from the Jaipur region) became prominent in the opium trade out of Malwa, while other groups of Marwaris established themselves in the grain markets of the Doab and the Ganges Valley. By 1832 James Tod could write (perhaps with some exaggeration) that "nine-tenths of the bankers and commercial men of India are natives of Maroodes [Marwar]."^[196]

The cohesiveness of the Marwaris contributed to their success. During the period 1840-60, when Marwari merchants began to establish themselves in Calcutta in competition with indigenous Bengali and Khatri trading communities, prosperous Marwaris set up subsidized boarding houses to attract other members of their community, whom they employed in their growing firms. By 1864 roughly half the bankers in Calcutta were Marwaris, and by the 1880s they had begun to beat out Khatris and Bengalis in the battle for coveted appointments as chief brokers to the leading British import-export firms. By 1921 the diaspora had grown to an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 persons spread throughout India (in addition to some 600,000 community members in Rajasthan), who controlled an increasingly disproportionate percentage of the nation's commerce.^[197]

Even more significant for India's subsequent economic development was the entry of Marwaris into manufacturing following World War I. The Birla family, which had quadrupled its assets in the profitable trade of the war years, opened a jute mill in Calcutta in 1919 and textile mills at Delhi and Gwalior in 1920-21; during the 1930s the family added sugar refineries and cement plants. Such family conglomerates continued to grow during the post-Independence period, buying up many of the British firms they had previously served as commercial agents; by 1964 the "Birla Group" had become the largest private conglomerate in India, controlling 151 companies, the majority of which were headed by brothers, cousins, and nephews of the pater familias, Ghanshyamdas Birla.^[198] The family's success was signal but not unique; the Marwari community as a whole is estimated to control 60 percent of the assets of Indian industry.

Great success often arouses jealousy; such folk sayings as "If you meet a snake and a Marwari, kill the Marwari" reflect the popular stereotype of the community as unscrupulously self-aggrandizing. The merchants' rise to prominence was paralleled by the decline of the landed gentry and the traditional economy in which the Marwaris themselves, back in Rajasthan, had once participated. The colonial government's increasing demand for cash revenue, coupled with cycles of bad harvests, the repeated subdivision of inherited estates, and the enforcement of uniform and inflexible commercial laws, resulted in the old rich getting poorer throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The merchant was the beneficiary, and for commercial castes the period might be characterized as one of semiinvoluntary upward mobility. Put into varna^[*] terms, Vaishyas were being turned, by historical circumstances and their own commercial ambitions, into Kshatriyas. One Gokuldas, for example, of the banking firm of Sevaram Khushalchand of Jabalpur, acquired numerous estates in forced sales for tax defaults and ended up owning 158 villages and having the title "raja" prefixed to his name.^[199] Such success was financially desirable, but it was also threatening, since it challenged the traditional order to which the Marwaris, like other pious mercantile communities, implicitly subscribed:

The area of the greatest and most pervasive social risk, however, was for Hindus, like Jains, the boundary between the inward, frugal life of the merchant and the kingly manner which involved constant giving and receiving. Merchant families might find themselves trapped in the limbo between these two styles of life, unable to command the power and respect of the ruler yet "expensive" enough to forfeit credit in the mercantile sphere.^[200]

Power in the rising cities was increasingly concentrated among "bodies of entrepreneurs and property-owners who were not well accommodated within the older relations of ranking and precedence."^[201] In other words, the merchants faced a crisis of identity that reflected the classic tension in Hindu society between upward social aspiration and downwardly imposed order. In the special circumstances of the period, the interaction of these forces in the assertion of new identities helped fuel both nationalism and religious revival.

Despite their legendary wealth, the great Marwari families of Calcutta avoided the kingly pattern of luxury consumption and instead

concentrated on patronage of religious and cultural institutions. Among the most lavish activities of these pious Vaishnava familes were funerary observances, entailing the feeding of huge numbers of Brahmans and guests.^[202] Enormous sums were also given to charity, and such largesse benefited both religious and nationalist causes. The Marwaris were reckoned to be one of the most conservative and "backward" mercantile communities; the census of 1921 reported that whereas their male Hindi literacy rate was high (this being essential to the conduct of business), their rate of English literacy and involvement in higher education was low and their female literacy rate was almost nil—evidence of continued adherence to rigid rules of female seclusion (parda ).^[203] Marwaris were active in Sanatani organizations and in the cow slaughter agitation of 1917.^[204] The prominent Marwari families of Allahabad at the turn of the century "dotted the town with temples and rest houses, patronized the Ramlila Committees, and became presidents of orthodox religious bodies in the neighborhood."^[205] Yet at the same time Marwaris were active in the Nationalist movement and became committed Gandhians, devoted to such causes as women's rights and Harijan uplift; indeed the community—and especially Ghanshyamdas Birla, a close personal friend of Gandhi's—was the major financial power behind the Indian National Congress, donating an estimated Rs 100,000,000 to the movement by 1947.

Like other Marwaris (and like Gandhi himself), the Birlas continued to identify themselves as Sanatani Hindus; Ghanshyamdas's elder brother, Jugal Kishor, retired from the family business in 1920 (after cornering the market in opium futures) to devote himself to religious activities, constructing a chain of temples and rest houses at major pilgrimage places. As he grew older, Ghanshyamdas himself manifested similar interests. Patronage of the Manas , as we have seen, was often synonymous with Sanatani activity, and as a community the Marwaris have become so active in this respect that they may rightfully be regarded as heirs to the princely patrons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Swami Karpatri's religiopolitical activities were underwritten by the Marwari community of Banaras, which also organized, with his blessing, the Gyan Vapi Manas Festival. The Poddars (the name means "treasurer," and the clan was originally said to have served the nawabs

of Fatehpur in this capacity) founded the Gita Press of Gorakhpur, which became the preeminent North Indian distributor of the epic. The Birlas, through their Academy of Art and Culture, sponsored mass recitations and Katha performances, published Atkins's two-volume English translation of the epic, and spread the fame of Pandit Ramkinkar, the family's favored expounder. The example set by the most powerful families was emulated by lesser Marwari clans, and the exodus of top-ranking Katha performers to the industrial cities of Kanpur, Bombay, and Calcutta noted earlier is essentially a consequence of Marwari patronage.^[206]

The identity crisis to which I referred above was not unique to the mercantile community, for other groups were also affected by the economic and social reshuffling of the late nineteenth century. Rajas and zamindars themselves, though in overall decline, tried to hold on to their perquisites and continued to patronize their traditional clients as long as they had the means; the conspicuous patronage of religious performances was one of the more visible ways in which to uphold a public image. The Brahman and Kayasth service communities dependent on these patrons likewise promoted orthodox religious causes in order to retain their own prestige. Moreover, it must be remembered that the landholding class, despite a dominant Rajput ethos, was far from monolithic in caste constitution; during the late nineteenth century as several of the "marginally clean" agricultural castes, such as the Ahirs and Kurmis, rose in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, they too manifested a desire to assert an upper-class life-style and identity. The fact that British census takers in 1901, convinced of the relevance of the varna^[*] system to Hindu social organization, classed the Ahirs as "Shudras," produced an immediate reaction in the formation of a caste association to press for recognition of Kshatriya status. Thousands of Ahirs began wearing the sacred thread and appending "Singh" and "Rai" to their names; this effort also propelled them into the forefront of cow slaughter agitation and other Sanatani causes, and hence into an unlikely alliance with Brahmans and Rajputs, who often did not recognize their claims.^[207]

The "new men" of the late nineteenth century faced the need to assert their identity and status by participating in a perceived Great Tradition-in a process as old as the historical record in India. But other

factors specially relevant to this period and to these men help explain the appeal the Ramayan tradition exerted for them. The Birla family has remained in the forefront of the progressive wing of the Marwari community; its sons and nephews today have no qualms about "crossing the black water" to earn M.B.A.s at foreign universities before taking over their assigned portfolios, and they then operate with considerable autonomy within the conglomerate. Yet close-knit family structure is still regarded as essential to the corporate success of the Birla Group. As the family dharmasastra par excellence, the Ramayan presents a paradigm of the loyalty, cohesiveness, and hierarchy that the Birlas and other leading Marwari clans recognize as one of their greatest strengths—hence its obvious appeal to a family-oriented business community. Then too there is the factor of diaspora: the Marwaris achieved their success in areas remote from their homeland. They carried with them a revered text and, in the typical manner of the émigré, sought to promote it in their new regions, bringing renowned pandits from Banaras and Ayodhya to Calcutta and Bombay to publicly expound it.^[208]

The decline of the princes and zamindars in the late nineteenth century was not simply another of the periodic dynastic fluctuations of the past; it had a finality that even the most conservative merchants must have sensed—the world was changing in fundamental ways and there would be no going back to the old order. The men who rose up to replace the princes did so in a new milieu of nationalism; they spoke of something called "India," of concepts of democracy and equality that challenged the traditional structure of society. The interplay of order and transcendence, of real and ideal, within the Manas made this epic, to troubled and uncertain "new men," a source not only of orthodoxy but also of "peace of mind."