The Life of a Text

The Life of a Text offers a vivid portrait of one community's interaction with its favorite text--the epic Ramcaritmanas--and the way in which performances of the epic function as a flexible and evolving medium for cultural expression. Anthropologists, historians of religion, and readers interested in the culture of North India and the performance arts will find breadth of subject, careful scholarship, and engaging presentation in this unique and beautifully illustrated examination of Hindi culture. The most popular and influential text of Hindi-speaking North India, the epic Ramcaritmanas is a sixteenth century retelling of the Ramayana story by the poet Tulsidas. This masterpiece of pre-modern Hindi literature has always reached its largely illiterate audiences primarily through oral performance including ceremonial recitation, folksinging, oral exegesis, and theatrical representation. Drawing on fieldwork in Banaras, Lutgendorf breaks new ground by capturing the range of performance techniques in vivid detail and tracing the impact of the epic in its contemporary cultural context.

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
A Note on Transliteration	p. xv
The Text and the Research Context	p. 1
Introduction	p. 1
Tulsidas and the Ramayan Tradition	p. 3
Metrical and Narrative Structure	p. 13
The Fathomless Lake: Tulsi's Narrative Framing	p. 18
The Manas and the Western Audience	p. 29
On Poetry and Performance	p. 33
Banaras: City of Tulsidas	p. 41
The Text in Recitation and Song	p. 53
The Varieties of Recitation	p. 53
Spreading the Word: The Puranic Recitation Model	p. 56
The Rites of Recitation	p. 68
The "Great Sacrifice" of Manas Recitation	p. 80
The Pleasures of Manas Singing	p. 97
The Text Expounded: The Development of Manas-Katha	p. 113
The Telling and Its Milieu	p. 113
Epic and Puranic Exegetical Traditions	p. 119
The Manas-Katha Tradition	p. 128
Changing Styles of Katha	p. 157
The Art of Manas-Katha	p. 165
The Economics of Katha	p. 165
Qualifications of a Performer	p. 170
Performance Structure and Techniques	p. 182
Katha in Context: The Contemporary Performance Milieu	p. 192
The Performer and the Text	p. 209
The Nature of Katha: A Cross-Cultural Perspective	p. 231
The Palace of Mirrors	p. 243
Words Made Flesh: The Text Enacted	p. 248
The Ramlila Tradition	p. 248
The "Sport" of Kings: Evolution of the Banaras Ramlila	p. 254
Three Contemporary Productions	p. 267
Ramlila and Devotional Practice	p. 308
The Ultimate Commentary	p. 329
The Text in a Changing Society	p. 340
The Paradoxical Paradigm	p. 340
The Rise of the Eternal Religion	p. 360
The Politics of Ramraj	p. 371
Cracks in the Mirror	p. 392
People of the Book	p. 409
The Future of Manas Performance	p. 426
Glossary of Names with Transliteration	p. 441
Bibliography	p. 449
Index	p. 461
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

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