Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments ed. by Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments ed. by Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha
• Amanda Culp

PERFORMING THE RAMAYANA TRADITION: ENACTMENTS, INTERPRETATIONS, AND ARGUMENTS. Edited by Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 376 pp. Paper, $48.99.

Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments is a volume that positions itself at the intersection of impossibilities. To start, the Ramayana is not a single text but a rich tradition of iterations of a story—a collection so vast that it defies summary, synthesis, or simplification. As Richman notes in her introductory essay, the body of work that we call the Ramayana does not even have a clearly defined beginning or end. To further complicate things, this volume focuses on the Ramayana as it is reimagined—over and over and over—in India’s impossibly extensive catalog of performance styles. After this we must confront one final layer of impossibility. It is one that seems to be inherent in our field, namely, that the study of performance challenges us to engage in scholarship with an evanescent primary event that never translates fully into writing. In spite of these innate challenges, Performing the Ramayana Tradition is a remarkable volume, successful in large part because of the way it frames these impossibilities as strengths. Here they become immensely productive sites for discourse.

Richman and Bharucha have divided the volume into six parts, each containing two to three essays. In “Part I, Orientations and Beginnings,” Bharucha and Richman each contribute an opening essay that situates the project’s goals as they pertain to the fields of both Ramayana and Theatre and Performance Studies. In these opening chapters, Richman and Bharucha complicate the relationships between narrative, text, and performance by approaching them from different vantage points. In Richman’s chapter, “The Ramayana Narrative Tradition as Resource for Performance,” she looks to the “textual lineages” of the story’s many iterations to illuminate how “playwrights and performers interpret, enact, and innovate within the Ramayana [End Page 228] tradition” (pp. 9–10). Bharucha’s chapter follows but takes the reverse perspective. It considers the process of performance as a site of invention and creation wherein the process of making Ramayana narratives emerges from enactment itself. The section culminates with Rizio Yohannan’s essay “Where Narrative and Performance Meet: Nepathya’s Rāmāyaṇa Sa kṣepam.” This essay does double duty: it demonstrates how the categories of text and performance collapse into one another in the case study of the South Indian performance tradition of kutiyattam; at the same time, it introduces the framework of the epic’s narrative to an unfamiliar reader.

“Part II: The Politics of Caste” explores interpretations of Shambuka, a Shudra who is executed by Rama for practicing austerities forbidden to his caste. (The story is first recorded in the Sanskrit Ramayana.) The section begins, however, with a poem by twentieth-century writer Omprakash Valmiki, who succinctly transposes the ancient story into the world of contemporary caste politics. This poem is followed by Aaron Sherraden’s essay “Recasting Shambuk in Three Hindi Anti-Caste Dramas,” which traces the use of Shambuk’s character in anti-caste activism during the last century, and Sudhanva Deshpande’s essay “The Killingof Shambuk: ARetellingfroma Director’s Perspective,” whichdocuments Delhi-based Jana Natya Manch’s 2004 adaptationofthe story into the open-air production Shambuk-Vadh.

“Part III: Interrogating the Anti-Hero” takes on the character of Ravana. In “Ravana Center Stage: Origins of Ravana and King of Lanka,” Richman juxtaposes a Kathakali performance from the eighteenth century with a Tamil mythological play from the mid-twentieth to argue for a complex history of interest in and innovation with the purported anti-hero of the epic narrative. Bharucha’s essay, titled “Ravana as Dissident Artist: The Tenth Head and Ravanama,” compares works by contemporary artists Vinay Kumar and Maya Krishna Rao that deconstruct Ravana’s mythology through avant-garde performance techniques. These are mirrored by Bharucha’s avant-garde approach to scripting both the performance texts and his experience of them as a spectator within the essay’s analysis.

“Part IV: Performing Gender” pairs case studies from South India in...