Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments Illustrated Edition Paula Richman (Editor)

Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9780197552506,0197552501

Product details:

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0197552501
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0197552506
• Author(s): Paula Richman, Rustom Bharucha

The Ramayana, one of the two pre-eminent Hindu epics, has played a foundational role in many aspects of India’s arts and social norms. For centuries, people learned this narrative by watching, listening, and participating in enactments of it. Although the Ramayana’s first extant telling in Sanskrit dates back to ancient times, the story has continued to be retold and rethought through the centuries in many of India’s regional languages, such as Hindi, Tamil, and Bengali. The narrative has provided the basis for enactments of its episodes in recitation, musical renditions, dance, and avant-garde performances. This volume introduces non-specialists to the Ramayana’s major themes and complexities, as well as to the highly nuanced terms in Indian languages used to represent theater and performance.

Two introductions orient readers to the history of Ramayana texts by Tulsidas, Valmiki, Kamban, Sankaradeva, and others, as well as to the dramaturgy and aesthetics of their enactments. The contributed essays provide context-specific analyses of diverse Ramayana performance traditions and the narratives from which they draw. The essays are clustered around the shared themes of the politics of caste and gender; the representation of the anti-hero; contemporary re-interpretations of traditional narratives; and the presence of Ramayana discourse in daily life.

Table contents:

Part I: Orientations and Beginnings
1. The Ramayana Narrative Tradition as a Resource for Performance
2. Thinking the Ramayana Tradition through Performance
3. Where Narrative and Performance Meet: Nepathya’s Rāmāyaṇa Saṃkṣēpam
Part II: The Politics of Caste
4. Shambuk’s Severed Head
5. Recasting Shambuk in Three Hindi Anti-Caste Dramas
6. The Killing of Shambuk: A Retelling from a Director’s Perspective
Part III: Interrogating the Anti-Hero
7. Ravana Center Stage: Origins of Ravana and King of Lanka
8. Ravana as Dissident Artist: The Tenth Head and Ravanama
8a. Script of The Tenth Head
8b. Script of Ravanama
Part IV: Performing Gender
9. The Making of RāmaRāvaṇā: Reflections on Gender, Music, and Staging
10. Writing Her “Self”: The Politics of Gender in Nangyarkuttu
Part V: Conversations and Arguments
11. Reflections on Ramayana in Kutiyattam
12. Questions around Rām Vijay: Sattriya in a Monastic Tradition
13. Performing the Argument: Ramayana in Talamaddale
Part VI: Beyond Enactment
14. Revisiting “Being Ram”: Playing a God in Changing Times
15. The Night before Bhor Ārti: Play and Banarasipan in the Ramnagar Ramlila
16. The Challenges Ahead: Researching the Ramayana Performance Tradition
List of Performance Traditions
Glossary
List of Contributors
Index

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