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.