Ritual and Theatrical Performance in Ramdilla

An examination of Ramlila performance in Trinidad and Tobago, particularly the multinight performance by children, organized each year by the Hindu Prachar Kendra (HPK). Performances such as the HPK's annual Ramdilla demonstrate ways in which the distinction between ritual and theatre is artificial. The HPK's Ramdilla adapts conventional Ramlila elements in order to dramatize the history of people of Indian origin in the Caribbean island nation, extending back to a more-or-less forced relocation from India in the mid-nineteenth century. This Ramlila adaptation operates to create Trinidad and Tobago as a genuinely Hindu home—not the representation of a romanticized India, but Ram's sacred land, per se. The creative force of the Ramdilla shows how neither ritual nor theatre is fundamentally mimetic, even if both involve representation and meaning. The activity that we call, variously, ritual and theatre emerges to satisfy a core, human urge to make something, and in bringing into being something that was not there before, we experience ourselves as participants in an otherwise alien cosmos.

David Mason is the editor of Ecumenica, a journal that attends to the intersection of performance and religion. He is also the South Asia area editor for Asian Theatre Journal. He is the author of The Performative Ground of Religion and Theatre (Routledge, 2018), Brigham Young: Sovereign in America (Routledge, 2014), and Theatre and Religion on Krishna's Stage (Palgrave, 2009). He is the co-convenor of the Performance, Religion, and Spirituality working group of IFTR.

Pre-ramble

We would like ritual and theatre to be different things. Ritual cannot be theatre because ritual invests in repetition that resists creativity and operates to conserve and perpetuate social bonds, often very serious business, while theatre is a pastime of pretense, sought out as an escape from serious business. Ritual works, effecting, as prominent theorists in the field tell us, lasting change on people and communities, while we don't need any theorists to tell us that theatre plays (Sørensen 2008: 523–531). Anyway, ritual is inextricably bound up with religion, with which theatre is not obligated to have anything to do. Ramlila (Rāmlīlā), however, troubles this neat distinction, because rituals, which almost unfailingly precede (or more rarely, follow) Ramlila performances in India, do the work of securing sacred ground outside of which the playing cannot occur. In this case, then, theatre depends existentially on ritual. Furthermore, the playing itself, when the playing proceeds, works. Ramlila theatre undertakes very serious business, even while playing in the free, chaotic, and creative mode that the term līlā implies. Writing in 2010 about Ramlila in Trinidad and Tobago, Paula Richman identifies some of Trinidadian Ramlilas' unique elements as indicative of the conflict between ritual and art—whether, in the scenic design, wire can be substituted for bamboo, for instance. But it seems to me that the coincidence of ritual and theatre is brought into relief in the interstices of the performative acts in these Ramlilas. Rather than illustrating how ritual and art resist and wrestle with each other, Ramlilas suggest that we often misread as struggle what is actually play. At least, I would argue that Ramlilas make it clear that the distinction between ritual and theatre is simply a paradigm of western modernism rather than a description of human activity.

Considering what people do, as modeled in one specific manifestation of Ramlila, I want to recommend that the things that we variously call ritual and theatre (as well as play, games, and art), are not fixed in categories apart from each other on account of being ontologically distinct from each other. The inclination to speak of ritual, over here, as having characteristics and qualities that cannot be claimed by theatre, over there, derives from language and not from what the phenomena in question do. Such things that we call ritual and theatre emerge together from a singular, human urge to do that only doing can satisfy (and, then, only temporarily). Where we are inclined to call something that occurs ritual, that something is only a snapshot snatched from someone's doing; and, contrary to what the snapshot suggests, the something is not an object that persists in time, but is, rather, some running fluid that transforms in time. Where the philosopher Bruno Latour defended iconophilia by pointing out that any particular image is not a thing, in itself, but the indication of movement and ever-morphing flux, similarly, where we can point and cry theatre!, we have only cut and removed an instant from a phenomenon that has no such solid form—is not so nameable—insofar as the thing on which we have placed a finger is, in the instant and always, in a state of transition from one form to another.¹

Characterizing existence as a thing that is not a thing, but that is, instead, ceaseless movement and flow, scholar Thomas A. Tweed uses gerunds such as dwelling and inhabiting to discuss what he sees in ritual, generally, as an inclination to operate in time and space in a way that creates an experience of arrival in the midst of movement. Tweed points to churches, shrines, statues, groves, etc., as places at which moments in time coalesce. Places, Tweed argues, can be experienced as combinations of locations, historical events, and narratives, so that they seem to transcend time and space. Where Cuban exiles in the United States, as Tweed's own example goes, carry a longing for their lost home and a yearning for a future return, the Shrine of Our Lady of Charity in Miami—in the very concrete of which soil from every part of Cuba has been ritually embedded, as well as water from the intervening sea—facilitates an experience of the site at Biscayne Bay as "simultaneously Cuban terrain and American land" (Tweed 2006: 89). In the moments of rest that it seems to fashion, Tweed asserts, religious ritual's salient quality is homemaking (Tweed 2006: 113).

Just as surely as in ritual, in theatre we find the collaborative, cooperative performance on which Tweed's homemaking depends. There may be reasons to distinguish between ritual and theatre, but such reasons are secondary to the primary coincidence of ritual and theatre in the doing through which people make home—even more so, it seems, for those with a history of involuntary or coerced exile. Tweed acknowledges people in the ritual homemaking phenomenon. It is always "embodied beings" who make religious places, he writes, "even if culturally constructed tropes, collectively enacted rituals, and socially produced artefacts play a decisive role in that process" (Tweed 2006: 91). If ritual consists of embodied enactment, surely theatre does, too, and theatre brings into relief what Tweed overlooks about the body's role in creating home. Cultural construction, enacted rituals, and social production not only play a role in the process that produces a place, they are the process. People perform such things, and when and where place manifests, people have performed it and are materially constitutive of it. It is precisely because people are embodied that they can perform construction, enactment, and production, and where and when people don't construct cultural tropes, enact rituals, or produce sociality—where people don't perform it—place does not materialize.

Performing entails some experience of home because embodied expression elides the alienation from nature—the flow of time and the yawn of space—that attends human consciousness. As Beckett dramatized in Waiting for Godot, a sensation of separateness is a fundamental, inescapable quality of the reflexive comprehension of existing with which people are burdened. The reflexive experience of genuine creating that attends performing knits with the ceaseless creativity that people experience as time and space. What Tweed characterizes as a rest in what never stops is the momentary experience of participating in the flow, rather than the otherwise common experience of standing apart from and against it. "This is what the church does," playwright Amiri Baraka writes, using the term "church" to indicate both a building and the creative, expressive human activity that occurs there. "The preacher gets people 'happy,' makes them 'possessed' so that they jump up in the aisles, spinning like James Brown. They become a part of the animating element of existence" (Baraka 2002: 379; emphasis added). Floating the river, even when the river is swift and turbulent, offers the restful sensation not only of belonging in the river but also of doing what the river does.

A Model

Owing to colonial machinations in the mid-nineteenth century, forty percent of the one million or so people living in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago have distinctly South Asian ancestry. Not a majority, but the country's largest single ethnic group. The same colonial designs kept this self-identifying Indian population distinct from other populations of the island and more isolated from typical processes of creolization. The consequence, today, is a sizeable community of people in this Caribbean island nation who hold tightly to an Indian identity and who assert that identity in order to distinguish themselves from other communities with which they coexist, even while claiming natural Trinibagonian identity.

Ramlila theatre is among the devices by which Trinibagonian People of Indian Origin sustain cultural cohesion in their community and preserve the community's distinction within the greater population. Each fall in Trinidad and Tobago—on days that roughly coincide with the Dussehra holiday as observed in India—between twenty and fifty Ramlilas are performed.² The several separate Ramlilas in Trinidad and Tobago seem to speak out the determination of the country's people of Indian origin to be a community—and, perhaps, to thrive as a community—in spite of what they perceive as government neglect, at best, and even persecution, at worst.³

One of Trinidad's many proudly Hindu organizations is the Hindu Prachar Kendra. Headquartered in the Longdenville area south of the nation's capital Port of Spain, the Kendra sustains an active program of promoting Indian identity and Hinduism—efforts that include a Ramlila performance that takes place over several, successive fall evenings. In this case, Ramlila is referred to as "Ramdilla," a term asserted as an ancestral colloquialism. The text of the Kendra's original Baal Ramdilla (Children's Ramdilla) script is written and performed in English, the version consulted here being from 2014.⁴ While the text changes little from year to year, each year's staging emerges from the Kendra's summertime educational program for children and teenagers. This annual development process adjusts each instance of the Kendra's Baal Ramdilla to take advantage of circumstances. In October

Figure 1.

Omprakaash Singh as Ram. (Photo by the author)

Figure 2.

Sita in the center of the grong with the stage for Ayodhya in the background. (Photo by the author)

2016, for instance, the Ramdilla was shaped to showcase the skill of national archery champion Omprakaash Singh in the role of Ram.

The Kendra's Ramdilla reiterates elements that are common in India's rural and neighborhood Ramlila performances. Performances take place outdoors. The performers are amateurs and community members. Almost all are younger than eighteen and few are older than fourteen. As they do for Ramlilas in India, musicians provide the Kendra's Ramdilla with a running score of percussion-based rhythms that, frequently throughout the performance, join with harmonium and vocalists in folk tunes that complement the narrative and amplify the scenes' devotional purport. Preliminary ceremonies, including the formal acknowledgment and honoring of dignitaries, seem obligatory. A narrator—and several people fill this role, in turn—serves the essential purpose of delivering exposition as action plays out, since the performers themselves are not miked and provide almost no spoken dialogue. The style is broadly presentational—as more-or-less demanded by the space between performers and audience and by the ages of the actors. Forms of ritual worship of the divinities embodied by the actors are built into performances, during which moments adults who are not otherwise part of the play join the playing. The tone during any given evening's play oscillates between ridiculous, slapstick comedy and deep reverence. Some evenings are better attended than others. Crowds swell for the dramatizations of Ravan's defeat and Ram's and Sita's return to Ayodhya.

The performance proceeds in an open field of well-trimmed grass adjoining the Kendra's community center and school. The Ramdilla grong (ground) consists of a rectangular portion of the field, roughly forty by eighty meters, which is roped off expressly for the performance.⁵ Outside the roped area, spectators occupy bleacher seating under temporary canopies, and set up their own lawn chairs around the perimeter of the grong's boundaries. Patrons can drive their cars directly up to most of the grong's long boundary line on the west. Along the grong's eastern side, where the community center is located, musicians and narrators sit on a raised stage. Beside the musicians is another canopy with seating reserved for VIPs. Facing each other from the narrower ends, north and south, are raised stages with painted plywood scene panels—the northern stage operating, mostly, as Ram's city of Ayodhya, and the southern stage operating as Ravan's fortress in Lanka. A bare platform at the center of the grong becomes, in protean fashion, the various other locations for which the narrative calls.

The Kendra's grong certainly becomes the kind of place that Tweed has in mind as a moment sequestered from the flow of time and as an object fixed distinctly in space. As in India, some varying sense that Ram and Sita materialize in the performance of their story attends the Kendra's Ramdilla. But the ground and the grass on which this manifestation occurs are not, in themselves, special. At other times of the year, the same field serves for football games, concerts, picnics, etc. The field's suitability to serve as a frame for divinity is a function of several things—the festival cycle, the policy of the Kendra, the regard of the community, the musicians' expressions of devotion, the actors'

Figure 3.

Ram and Sita driven in an open carriage in procession around the grong. (Photo by the author)

comportment—all of which combine as the phenomenon of playing the Ramdilla. Generally, only performers step into the Ramdilla grong, and, when they do, they go barefoot. When ceremonies that precede each night's performance call for Kendra officials and visiting VIPs to address the crowd, these non-performers must remove their shoes before crossing the boundary between the performance space and the rest of the Kendra's field. Most nights, the performance of the narrative is preceded by a procession of the actors, in full costume, in several, clockwise circuits around the grong's periphery. Some of these processions conclude with arati (ārtī)—ritual veneration of divinity as present in the performers. Similar processions occur as the conclusion of some evenings' performances, such as the wedding procession following Ram's and Sita's marriage. Here, the divine couple progresses around the grong in an open carriage, accompanied by a crowd of nonactors carrying the oil lamps through which arati worship operates.⁶

This varied activity does not, collectively, indicate the grong's sacredness. The structuralist anthropology of the last century that might read ropes and barefootedness and worship as symbolically pointing to the grong's representation of the abode of divinity would fail to recognize the simpler notion that such things as ropes and barefootedness do the grong's sanctity. That is, sacredness does not exist independently as a quality that the Ramdilla rites can seize for the purpose, nor is sacredness an absent phenomenon that the Ramdilla references. The grong's holiness—it's home-ness, as Tweed might have it—emerges as a function of what people who comprise the Ramdilla do. In the manner often attributed to religious ritual, the roping of the grong's boundaries, the deference that the audience gives to that marked boundary, the removing of shoes ahead of stepping onto the grong—separately and taken together—are performative acts that do the sacredness that people can experience as a constitutive quality of the moment.

As a constitutive quality of the grong, sacredness is not made by performing. In the way that Judith Butler et al., conflate gender and the doing of gender, we can conflate sanctity and the doing of it. Sacredness is not part of the field's identity, nor do ceremonial and citational regard for the Ramdilla grong produce a sanctity that settles like dew on the grass and the ground of the field. The ceremonial doing of the grong's sacredness does, performatively, the grong's sacredness. Where Tweed asserts that such constructive, enactive, and socially productive activity as ritual plays a role in the process that makes the kind of place that he equates with home, I would suggest that ritual simply does place. With the end of the doing comes the end of the place, which is why Tom F. Driver—theologian, activist, and historian whose studies of vodou in Haiti demonstrate a ritual/theatre crossover—can describe ritual as "the performance of an act in which people confront one kind of power with another" (Driver 1996: 174). The Ramdilla's performative doing of the grong's sacredness can give way, in turn, to the field's football-ness the next day, but can restore the same sanctity in procession, arati, and resuming the play at sunset.⁷

Milla C. Riggio has noted a resemblance between Trinidad's Ramlila grongs and the playing spaces that Christian Europe arranged for Bible plays (Riggio 2010: 110). In the Kendra's 2016 Ramdilla, a raised stage with a "scene house" as a backdrop, occupied each of the narrow ends of the grong's rectangular arena, so that Ram's city of Ayodhya and Ravan's fortress in Lanka, as though the custodians of moral opposites, faced each other across a grassy, protean platea. The arrangement is not at all unlike the confrontational juxtaposition of good and evil in medieval, Christian cycle plays, such as the opposition of paradise and hell in Valencienne, or of heaven and Pilate at the town square in Lucerne. Furthermore, the Kendra's grong evokes such set pieces as the castle that sits in precarious, indeterminate space, around which are arrayed mansions for God, the demon Belial, and The World for, fifteenth-century performances of the Castle of Perseverance, a Christian morality tale performed in England.

For folks who are familiar with them, medieval Christianity's staging conventions can be a helpful heuristic, but we should be careful not to read too much into the correspondence between the medieval staging of a cycle drama and the arrangement of space and objects in the Kendra's grong. Although Ramlila theatre in India today is most commonly presented proscenium-style, it almost certainly began as an outdoor, arena-style performance, in which the confrontational juxtaposition of antagonists is simply intuitive.⁸ That is: Ramlila and Ramdilla found their form without Christianity's intervention. Nor does the Ramlila offer an allegorical narrative in which Good redeems

Figure 4.

Ravan's abode. (Photo by the author)

Mankind by transcending Bad—certainly not with an obligatory affirmation of the authority of a church institution.⁹ The Ramlila's purport is devotional, not redemptive. The allegory, if there is one, is that Good, in the form of Ram, preserves devotees by defeating Bad, in the form of Ravan, which is not the same thing as redeeming sinners.

The devotional premise that can be found in the Ramayan features in the Kendra's Ramdilla, which performs the Ram story especially to assert the community's unique, collective character in Trinidad, in the face of what the community regards as an erstwhile, national bias against it.¹⁰ The first night of the Kendra's Ramdilla opens with a nod to the composition of the Ramayan, in India, in an ancient time, briefly dramatizing how Valmiki came to write the epic. The play then leaps to its principal purpose—dramatizing and valorizing Hinduism and Indian-ness in Trinidad—by way of a simple declaration: "It is now 1845" (Baal Ramdilla Day 01 2014: 5).¹¹ Still in India, the performance's narrator tells audiences that the British are appropriating Indians for cheap—if not enslaved—labor on Caribbean plantations.¹² As a replaying of history, this is straightforward enough, and the re-playing of this colonial history by the descendants of the exploited brings to the foreground, or to the fore-stage, the experiences of those who were not only exploited by colonialism, but also excluded from history.¹³ We can read the Kendra's dramatization of an earlier generation's removal from South Asia to the Caribbean as a still piece of time snatched from the flow and the ancestors, themselves, as material that spans separate spaces, constructing Trinidad as a Tweed-style place. In the way that selected soil and water mixed into the foundation of the shrine at Biscayne Bay makes the site "simultaneously Cuban … and American," as Tweed puts it, the Kendra's playing of the community's nineteenth-century genesis performs the whole of Trinidad as constitutively formed of South Asia as much as of anything.

On the other hand, the playing of this history in the Longdenville grong involves a characterization of India as a dangerous, hostile place, made that way not only by the British, but also by some Indians. The Kendra's dramatic history vilifies arkatiyas—Indians who, in the role of "emigration agents," colluded with the British to indenture their Indian fellows—as equally culpable with the British for the exploitation of their forebears.¹⁴ "The rakshasic force," goes the script, casting the British colonists as demons, "has formed an alliance with these Indians … the arkatiyas" (Baal Ramdilla Day 01 2014: 6–7).¹⁵ The British are villains, but the arkatiyas are just as demonic. In the explicit narration of the performance, when the satsangees—a "cohort of good folks" and the ancestral heroes of this meta-story—who survive the ocean leave their boat, filled with fear and "exiled from their own home just like Prabhu Sri Ram," they hear a voice from heaven, telling them: "Build this land according to dharma. Become enlightened citizens. Play Ramdilla. Make this your home" (Baal Ramdilla Day 01 2014: 7–8). We should hear italics in these lines. Build this land. Make this your home. The main aim of the Kendra's Ramdilla is to perform some homemaking on Trinidad and Tobago, and the home-doing is strengthened by keeping India at a certain distance. India's soil is not mixed into the foundation to make this Ramdilla shrine a thing that is simultaneously Indian and Caribbean. Rather, the play pours into this foundation the historical population who, by surviving treachery far away, transcended that treachery, for themselves and for their living descendants. Especially in the first couple of days of its program, the Kendra's Ramdilla labors to distinguish its community as unique, different, and deliberately detached from other groups—even detached from India.¹⁶

The home that the Kendra's Ramdilla builds on a genealogy, thus, is not necessarily Indian, but is most certainly Hindu. The exile of the ancestors of Trinibagonian Indians was a forced exile, but, in the way that Ram faced hardships in the forest yet built a simple, virtuous life there away from the Machiavellian ugliness of Ayodhya, so too Trinidadians have suffered, but are exhorted to see their new homeland as an alternative to India—one to be made an ideal alternative by religious doing. When the script proclaims that the satsangee migrants "will become Ramas and live a dharmic life …" (Baal Ramdilla Day 01 2014: 8), the message is not merely historical.¹⁷ Not only does each evening's performance proceed within a ritual bracket, but also each episode presents narrative in which ritual action plays a part, so as to construe the bodies of actors and audience as satsangees, present and even now in the labor of transforming Trinidad into a Hindu ideal. Hindu rituals that occur as part of the Ramdilla's narrative, such as Ram's and Sita's betrothal procession, often invite non-actors to participate. Where the performance does not expressly invite audience members to join ritual action in the grong, the script attaches to each moment of ritual consecration a collective shout, whereby the audience, even in its seats outside the grong, participate bodily and, in so participating, enact, themselves, the roles of satsangees. In the final night of the cycle, for instance, after Ram has defeated Ravan, the action proceeds as the narrator recites:

Vibhishan is taking Sita Devi to Shri Ram.

Sita Devi spots Shri Ram from a distance and she is overwhelmed. She is weeping.

Sita Devi is clasping the feet of Shri Ram. The divine couple is once again reunited.

SIYA [sic] PATI RAMCHANDRA KI … JAI!

(Baal Ramdilla Day 06 2014: 7–8)¹⁸

At the instance in which narrator and actors synchronously start the line written in caps, the audience joins in so that the line finishes in a collective shout across the whole space of which the grong is a part. The ceremonial shout asserts Ram's and Sita's simultaneous presence in the Ramdilla and their transcendence of the physical dimensions of the grong.

It is important, perhaps, to reiterate that the audience's participation, here, is not merely symbolic. Even if it's true that, by joining the collective shout, audience members represent Ram and Sita devotees of a distant history or an immaterial story, the action of audience members' bodies in this particular fashion in this specific space and time, simply does what it is. An audience member's cry of RAMCHANDRA KI JAI! may, indeed, be a symbolic expression—a performance of "the way things ought to be," as Jonathan Z. Smith would say—but there is no escaping that the cry, per se, contributes to the material reality of the moment (Seligman et al. 2008: 27). The authors of Ritual and Its Consequences put it this way: "What you are is what you are in the doing, which is ofcourse an external act" (Seligman m et al. 2008: 24). The real moment that the collective cry, as a ritual act, creates can be read as figurative expression. At the same time, the act is just what it does, simply and irreducibly: May Sita and Ram triumph (here).

In the first evening's performance, having accounted for the history that calls for Ramlila performance in the Caribbean, the Kendra's Ramdilla then makes the first insinuation that the Ram story corresponds not only with the displacement of the ancestors of the island nation's Indian-origin population, but with the situation prevailing in the nation's present day. Ravan, the Ramayan's putative villain, appears at the southern end of the grong with a cohort of attendants, performed as inflated, vulgar brutes. In the Ramayan, Ravan is a cosmic problem, even prior to kidnapping Ram's wife Sita. As a consequence of ceremonial austerity and devotion to Lord Brahma, practiced over a long period of time, Ravan acquires an invulnerability to all but mortals, and with it, he runs amok in the universe, destroying and pillaging at will. It is mostly in order to do something about Ravan's threat to divine sovereignty that Ram is born. In the Kendra's Ramdilla, drug-dealing is the form in which Ravan and his retinue practice their existence-threatening evil (Baal Ramdilla Day 01 2014: 10). Ram's function in the Ramdilla is not only to facilitate the reenactment of the mythic defeat of Ravan, but also—as the incarnation of goodness—to

Figure 5.

Ravan. (Photo by the author)

bring into form the incompatibility of Hindu virtue, rectitude, and excellence with the vices of contemporary popular culture.¹⁹

In its second evening, the Ramdilla conflates the Ram story and the modern day even more explicitly. The competition for Sita's hand in marriage takes the form of a dance battle between caricatures of popculture icons. One after another, satiric versions of Bollywood film stars, soccer champions, and pop music icons bust a move in the center of the grong. The high point of the show involves the disco stylings of the spastic cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants—dubbed by the script "Spongeraj Dhoti Pants."²⁰

The greater part of the second evening of the performance concerns Ram's departure from Ayodhya. When Ram, Lakshman, and Sita leave Ayodhya behind for the uncivilized wilderness, they reach a river, where a ferryman insists on washing Ram's feet before allowing the protagonist on the boat. The script includes the following, expressly narrated commentary on this scene that reiterates the correlation between Ram's exile and the colonial project that literally shipped a population of Indians to the Caribbean. It also insists that Ram's story has an immediate import:

Such is Prabhu's (Ram's) leelaa that we are allowed to interact so intimately with divinity. In this beautiful scene, we see Prabhu—who is the one who helps us cross this ocean of samsaar—assuming the role of the passenger. Isn't it a declaration of us being the designer of our own lives? Whichever path we choose in life will ultimately affect whether we would find ourselves in the boat of Rama or other forces and influences that are so prevalent in our lives and in society.

(Baal Ramdilla Day 02 2014: 29–30)

On the final day of performances, Ram defeats Ravan, and, in keeping with Ramlila practice, the Kendra Ramdilla burns a Ravan effigy, at a safe distance away from the grong. As a victor obliged to return to his own domain, then, Ram appoints Ravan's brother Vibhishan to rule Ravan's kingdom, with a condition expressed in very modern language: "All I ask is the rakshas must disband all terrorism and you must rule justly" (Baal Ramdilla Day 06 2014: 4).

An Attempt to Conclude

In her study of Ramlila performance around Trinidad and Tobago, Paula Richman notes several controversies, including whether Ramlila ought to be included in the country's Carifesta festival as representative of Trinibagonian culture, whether wire can be substituted for bamboo in the construction of a Ravana effigy, and even whether the term Ramdilla is appropriate. Richman rationalizes these controversies as emerging from "differing notions of the relations between ritual and art" (Richman 2010: 102). I would suggest that such controversies emerge not between factions for which Ramlila should serve a religious/ritual purpose and factions for which Ramlila ought to be theatrical play, but from the deep sense among all parties that Ramlila performance—rituals and plays, religion and art, altogether—do something, genuinely and truly in the real world that we all inhabit. Specifically, religion and art, ritual and theatre, create home. As trivial as using wire and not bamboo may seem, the act can bring something into existence that threatens the creation of the sort of home that some hope that the Ramlila will make. The Ramlila controversies in Trinidad and Tobago are not the manifestation of religion versus art, but of one home versus another home, and, in this, the controversies themselves also reveal that both ritual and theatre rise from the same creative impetus.

The Hindu Prachar Kendra's Ramdilla demonstrates how they perform … characterizes ritual and theatre, together. While the Kendra's grong might symbolize a mythic Ayodhya, and while the Kendra's immolation of an effigy might express the belief that good always, eventually, will conquer evil, the Ramdilla is not merely representational and meaningful. The Ramdilla works to recover and to preserve a certain Indian-Hindu-ness, in the manner of something apart from or transcending time and place, and it also endeavors to move creatively in time and space, affirming the story's transcendence and, in

Figure 6.

The Ramdilla audience. (Photo by the author)

the same act, constituting story in the material fact of the grong. Furthermore, the Ramdilla does the individual and collective identities of its participants—the actors and also the spectators, whose spectating actively does the belonging that coincides with the community's horizons.

The Ramdilla has at least as much to do with the stationary movement of doing as it does with belief in supernatural entities, the conservation of the sacred, or any other traditional notion of what makes ritual. This is to say that the Kendra's annual Ramdilla does home. A performance like the Kendra's Ramdilla manifests transcendence, history, religious ideals, cultural ideals, and political potency to immediate experience that is not apart from nor, perhaps, imposed on participants, but which issues from the participants, the performing Subjects of existence, themselves.

Consequently, the Kendra's Ramdilla demonstrates the performative quality that marks the broad overlap of ritual and theatre. The description that Tom F. Driver offers of what magic/ritual performance does might be offered, just as well, for theatrical performance: "transformation of a total situation by means of an enactment undertaken with strong subjective desire and producing an effect upon a number of subjects and objects together" (Driver 1996: 177). Indeed, when Driver writes that ritual regards reality as "essentially dramatic," the theologian does not identify pretense and symbolism as ritual's salient qualities (Driver 1996: 176). "Performance," writes Driver, on the contrary, "makes present" (Driver 1996: 185). The irreducible thing by which ritual and theatre coincide is They perform

…, as a doing in the world that gives form. The transformative inevitability in performance rests on the constitutive fluidness of form in space/time, with which only performing can interface.

The Kendra's Ramdilla makes Ram present, the hero and the divinity, by performing Ram, and in the same doing makes present the Indians indentured by colonial perfidy in a past century, the India of the past and the present, desired and dismissed, and a certain Hinduness, to guard against threats to the community and its ideal. The Ramdilla makes such presence really and not symbolically.²¹ The grong and the people there transform into all the Ramdilla's places and people—not because performance works a transformative power on them, like a battery actuating a clock through the transformative power of electricity, but because They perform … necessarily involves transformation, in the way that She runs … cannot be a true statement apart from the grammatical subject's transposition in space. Performance transforms is an irreducible statement.

Ramdilla, in this case, expressly identifies itself as the primary mechanism by which people of Indian origin perform homemaking on Trinidad. Not only does a particular instance of Ramdilla do the sanctity of the grong, it does a certain sanctity of the entire island nation. Furthermore, a particular instance of the Ramdilla, coming, regularly, each year, sustains the cyclical operation that creates—by continuously (re)creating—reality in a sacred register.