From Natya to Lila: Rasa, Ritual and Royal Patronage in the Ramlila of Ramnagar, Varanasi

Abstract

Each autumn, the town of Ramnagar, on the far bank of the Ganga from Varanasi, becomes the stage for a month-long performance of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas. Sponsored by the Maharaja of Kashi, the Ramnagar Ramlila moves from site to site across the town, and its audience moves with it. This paper reads the performance in three ways. It is environmental theatre, since fixed places in Ramnagar are made to stand for Ayodhya, Janakpur, Chitrakut, Panchavati and Lanka. It is royal ritual, since the Kashi Naresh still frames and legitimises it long after princely rule ended. And it is living heritage, recognised by UNESCO in 2008 and now facing urban growth, mobile phones and the two-year break forced by COVID-19. The paper also reads the Ramlila against the rasa theory of Bharata’s Natyashastra. It shows that Ramnagar keeps the classical machinery of vibhava, anubhava and sthayibhava, but turns the detached relish of the sahridaya into the devotional absorption of the bhakta, a shift that later theorists named bhakti-rasa. The study is a qualitative synthesis of ethnographic, theatrical and historical scholarship, chiefly the work of Richard Schechner, Linda Hess, Anuradha Kapur and Philip Lutgendorf, read alongside heritage records and recent press reports. I argue that the Ramlila has lasted because it draws together three kinds of authority that are usually found apart: the sacred authority of the text and the boy actors who embody the gods, the symbolic authority of the Maharaja, and the lived authority of devotees who walk the story night after night. If this is right, protecting the Ramlila means protecting the physical, acoustic and social setting in which these three meet, and not only its script and costumes.