The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas
Abstract
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.
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India's vast epic traditions remained oral and performative into modern times and were certainly known to early Buddhists.
“The vast traditions of epic poetry in India continued their oral and performative modalities well into modern times, and were surely familiar to the early Buddhists.”
From Performing Theravāda: Introduction (2024) · cites this paper as Lutgendorf 1991
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Performing Theravāda: Introduction
Shulman, E. (2024) · Numen · doi:10.1163/15685276-20240001 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
- Authors
- Lutgendorf, P.
- Corresponding author
- Lutgendorf, Philip
- Venue
- University of California Press eBooks
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Published
- 1991-07-23
- OpenAlex
- W4239021806
- Cited by
- 209
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 22 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 22
- FWCI
- 27.85
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- University of California Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Indian and Buddhist Studies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Visual Arts and Performing Arts › Arts and Performance Studies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › South Asian Studies and Diaspora
- Keywords
- Tulsidas, Ramayana, Hindi literature, oral performance, performance art, theatrical representation, Varanasi, cultural expression
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