Pandit Radheshyam’s Ramayan: A sourcebook for Ramlila scripts in the orbit of Bareilly

Abstract

This essay recognizes the critical but largely unacknowledged role of the Radheshyam Ramayan in the theatre of Ramlila, which enacts the story of Ram in an annual, multi-day fall festival. Further, this essay illustrates the range of ways the text has been incorporated into Ramlila productions in the orbit of Bareilly, the homeland of the author, Pandit Radheshyam Kathavachak (1890–1963). Since the work was first published serially circa 1908-1924, Ramlila organisers have often turned to it for stirring dialogues, and a narrative template for the plotting of their productions. Based on the author’s participant observation and extensive interviews conducted between 2006 and 2019, this essay argues that the dialogues and plotting in Ramlila productions in the vicinity of Bareilly often owe more to Pandit Radheshyam’s Ramayan than to any other source, including Tulsidas’s sixteenth-century Rāmcaritmānas, despite the fact that the Radheshyam Ramayan was composed for the medium of Vaishnav kathā (devotional storytelling), not Ramlila.