Thinking the Ramayana Tradition through Performance
This introductory chapter explores the role of performance in questioning, transforming, and subverting the Ramayana narrative tradition. Calling attention to diverse modes of enactment in which the story of the Ramayana gets interpreted through specific performative circumstances and techniques of psychophysical embodiment, it provides a dense vocabulary of different categories of performance in Indian languages in relation to acting, presenting, feeling, showing, exhibiting, transforming, and doing. Not only do these diverse epistemologies of performance shape the retelling of Ramayana at a structural level, they also contribute to the affective and spiritual dimensions of experiencing Ramayana at the level of the senses. Beyond enactment, the essay also provides a few examples of what happens to the Ramayana narrative when it gets performed outside the limits of the stage in the cultures of everyday life, where the politicization of the Ramayana places new demands on the agency and interpretive skills of actors.