The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas

2. The Text in Recitation and Song

TWO The Text in Recitation Whoever recites this with love, utters, hears, or ponders it, becomes enamored of the feet of Ram, free of the Dark Age's stain, a sharer in auspiciousness. 1.15.10-11 THE VARIETIES OF RECITATION The recitation of Tulsidas's epic is one of the most visible—and audible —forms of religious activity in Banaras. It forms a part of the morning and evening worship of innumerable households, is broadcast by loudspeakers from the spires of many temples, and periodically, at the time of major public programs, echoes for hours each day through large sections of the city. Similarly, the singing of the text to musical modes with instrumental accompaniment is a popular evening pastime, and recently, the playing of a commercially recorded version of the sung epic has become a virtually predictable background to functions ranging from annual temple srngars to family mundan and marriage ceremonies .1 In order to understand the presence and role of the Manas in these 1. Srngar (ornamentation): an annual ceremony in honor of the presiding deity of a temple or shrine, for which the shrine is lavishly decorated and a variety of cultural events are sponsored. Some data on these festivals are given in Kumar, The Artisans of Banaras, esp. 141-49; mundan (tonsure) is the ceremony of the first cutting of a child's hair. While many other childhood rituals have come to be rarely performed, mundan has grown in importance and, especiallyamong middle-class families, is often the occasion for elaborate celebrations. 53 and Song 54 2. The Text in Recitation and Song varied activities, it is first necessary to examine some of the implications of the indigenous notion of "recitation" (path) itself. Whereas the term puja is generally applied to the most common form of worship in popular Hinduism (the veneration of a deity with offerings of flowers, incense, and lights, accompanied by prayers or hymns of praise), the term more often used for personal worship is the compound pujd-pdth. The linking of these two terms is indicative of more than just the Hindi speaker's fondness for alliterative compounds. Path is a Sanskrit word meaning "recitation, recital, reading, perusal, study, especially of sacred texts";2 its presence in the compound reflects the importance of the oral/aural dimension of ritual and the notion that it should ideally include recitation of the sacred word. Since path can refer to recitation from memory as well as to reading aloud, it is an activity in which the illiterate as well as the literate can engage. In principle, texts for recitation can be drawn from a vast field of sacred literature, much of it in Sanskrit: the Vedas, Upanishads, epics, eighteen major and countless minor Puranas, and numerous sectarian works. Certainly there are individuals whose daily path is taken from some of these works, such as the Bhagavadgita and the Valmiki Ramdyana. But in practice, access to Sanskrit literature is restricted to a small segment of the Hindu population, and most path selections of any length tend to be taken from vernacular religious works, of which the most popular is the Manas. Since the Manas is a narrative, the most logical way to recite it is sequentially from beginning to end. This is referred to as pdrdyan path—"complete recitation"; most Manas reciters are engaged in a pdrdyan of one kind or another. But because the text is of epic proportions and the amount of time most people can devote to daily recitation is limited, it becomes necessary to divide the book into segments that can be conveniently covered in daily installments. A common approach is to read a fixed number of stanzas daily, such as five, seven, or ten. At the charitable trust known as Chini Kshetra, near Dashashvamedh Ghat in central Banaras, the Manas is chanted each morning from 8:00 to 8:30 by some thirty small boys—Brahman students who have come to the city for religious studies—who proceed at the rate of five stanzas per day. Their pdrdyan takes about seven months to complete, whereupon they begin another. Other people have told me that they recite "ten stanzas each morning and evening," "thirty-six stanzas a day," or some similar regimen. One young man, an aspiring vyds, or expounder of the 2. Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 580. Varieties of Recitation 55 text, told me that he...