Review-essay: Documenting Ramayan: Leela in Kheriya and In the Shadow of Time

This review-article focuses on two documentary films on the Ramayan performance tradition in India – Leela in Kheriya (2016), directed by Molly Kaushal, which focuses on a Ramlila performance in the village of Kheria Patiwara in Uttar Pradesh, where the role of Ram is played by a Muslim in the larger context of inter-community harmony, and In the Shadow of Time (2016), directed by Shankhajeet De, which documents the cultural appropriation of Ravana Chhaya, a shadow-puppet tradition from Odisha, by Indian state agencies and urban cultural entrepreneurs. Both films are linked through the affinities of the filmmakers to subaltern communities and the ways in which the Ramayan narrative continues to resonate within the everyday life struggles of local communities.

Rustom Bharucha retired as Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the author of several books including Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (Routledge, 1993); The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (Wesleyan University Press, 2000); Rajasthan: An Oral History—Conversations with Komal Kothari (Penguin, 2003); Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (Oxford University Press, 2006); and Terror and Performance (Routledge, 2014). He has recently completed the volume, Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, co-edited with Paula Richman.

This essay provides some critical notes on two documentary films focusing on grassroots manifestations of the Ramayan performance tradition. The first film, Molly Kaushal's Leela in Kheriya (2016), records, in a poetic and self-reflexive register, an intercommunity/Hindu-Muslim performance of Ramlila (Rāmlīlā) in the village of Kheria Patiwara (hereafter Kheria), located in the district of Firozabad in Uttar Pradesh. The second film, Shankhajeet De's In the Shadow of Time (2016) focuses on the problematics of cultural appropriation relating to the shadowpuppet tradition of Ravana Chhaya (Rāvaṇ chāyā), from the eastern state of Odisha (Orissa). Both films focus for the most part on rural locations, calling attention to the social and economic dynamics of everyday life in remote Indian villages, which are not readily found on the map. However, neither of the films presents a romanticized view of marginal performance traditions, highlighting instead critical insights into poverty, labor, and creativity, enmeshed in a larger network of political forces.

While both films need to be examined within the minutiae of their own contexts, I attempt to frame them in this review-article within the larger challenge of documenting the Ramayan performance tradition. Significantly, both films were produced by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi, and released around the same time by its Janapada Sampada division, which focuses on the oral, literary, visual, and kinetic heritage traditions of "tribal, rural and other smallscale societies."¹ Building on its earlier conferences and festivals on Ramayan and Mahabharat, IGNCA has recently focused its attention on lesser known Ramlila traditions in Mathura-Vrindavan, Ayodhya, and Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, Almora in Uttarakhand, Sattna in Madhya Pradesh, Madhubani in Bihar, and Boudh in Odisha. The two films under consideration here are part of a larger project entitled "Folk and Tribal Traditions of Ramkatha," with Molly Kaushal serving as its principal investigator and academic director since 2008. While De's In the Shadow of Time, winner of the Best National Film Award on Art and Culture, New Delhi, 2016, does not focus on Ramlila as such, he is in the process of completing a feature-length documentary sponsored by IGNCA on seven Ramlila traditions in the eastern state of Odisha.

Having provided some factual background on the larger production framework of the two films, let us now focus on their content and relationship to diverse modes of enactment, audio-visual representation, the invention and appropriation of traditional forms, and the imbrication of Ramayan narratives in the cultures of everyday life.

Inter-Community Ramlila

Kaushal begins her film on the Ramlila in Kheria with a glass factory in the neighboring city of Firozabad. While there is no attempt to link the material labor in this factory with employment opportunities for Kheria's male population or the cultural labor that goes into performing Ramlila over three weeks of all-night performances, Kaushal's voice-over at the start of the film attempts to link the "smoldering heat of Firozabad's furnaces" to the "lanes and by-lanes of Kheria."² Framed like a poetic text, which reflects on the action in the film at a metaphorical level, the voice of the director compels us to be vigilant of "the wheel of Time absorbed in the ceaseless lila of life and cosmos." From the opening beats of the film, therefore, we are introduced to a multilayered counterpoint of voice and image where the Ramlila performance in Kheria is set against larger allusions to the cosmos and the daily grind of everyday life, epitomized in the darkened interior of the factory illuminated with red-hot furnaces. In an interview, Kaushal has acknowledged that these furnaces reminded her of what "hell must look like" (The Fast Mail 2019).

Against this "hell," we are presented with engagingly convivial interactions of Kheria's community members, who spend their evenings rehearsing their roles in Ramlila like "passionate amateurs,"³ while engaging throughout the day with agricultural work in the fields and household tasks like cooking. What makes the conviviality all the more nuanced is the palpable intimacy of Hindus and Muslims, whose close relationships have traditionally existed in Kheria's social life. At one level, there is a utopian quality to this intimacy, which is conveyed most emphatically by Anil Johri, the chief spokesperson of the film, who affirms that, "We are one. … We grew up this way not knowing how to tell a Muslim apart from a Hindu." The "living proof," if not "example" (Johri's word used in English) of this unity, can be found in the joint celebration of both communities in the performance of their Ramlila. Significantly, the role of Ram is played by Shamshad Ali, a Muslim teacher in the community, a model of composure and discipline, who has been chosen by the community at large to play the coveted role.⁴ Clearly, there is a consensus at work in this casting, where all actors, Hindus and Muslims, seem to be not merely happy but closely identified with their characters, whether they are playing Sugriv or Hanuman or Lakshman or Ravan.

Probing more closely into the fragments of dialogue spoken by these actor-cum-mythical-personae, we are made to engage closely with the dynamics of "forgetting." Anil Johri, who plays Ravan, tells us that, "All joys and sorrows (sukh-dukh), cares and strains of poverty (dardoṃ, literally pains) are forgotten as Ramlila approaches." An elderly female singer narrating Sita's lament, Anguri Devi, who does not play a role as such in the Ramlila, nonetheless acknowledges how, "we forget our own misery while thinking of [Sita's] misery." The most beloved crowdpuller in the village, Shahabuddin Khan, who cracks jokes and plays the

Figure 1.

Shamshad Ali, reviewing his lines, in preparation for his role as Shri Ram in a still from Leela in Kheriya. (Photo courtesy of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts)

master of ceremonies in the performance, has suffered deeply in his own life following the death of his children. But he too acknowledges that Ramlila reminds him of life's struggles, and that he tries to "forget" his sorrows in the act of performance. As Johri puts it, this Ramlila in Kheria is clearly a collective enterprise which the performers view as their means to "salvation" (prāpti). This dimension is conveyed in idiomatic expressions by the performers who share their insights into performative energy at highly personal levels along with glimpses of their spiritual experience.

Therefore, in regarding Ram as the most uttam (superlative) representative of maryādā purushottam (ideal being), actor Shamshad Ali (see Fig. 1) acknowledges how the energy (ūrjā) builds from within himself, as he prepares to play the role. Other actors convey their sense of "itching" or "yearning" (lalak) to go on stage, while others share a sense of a "current" running slowly through their bodies. At times the word "energy" is used both in English and in Hindi to convey how it intensifies in performance, as in "unkī jo energy level, jo ūrjā hai, vah baṛhtī jātī hai." This energy, which induces "tears" (āṃsū) and reopens "wounds" (jakhm), is perceived as a "spiritual energy" (ādhyātmik ūrjā), a "symbol of holiness and service" (pavitratā aur sevā ka pratīk). The climax of the Kheria Ramlila, in Anil Johri's words, is represented as a culmination of "absolute bliss" in which there is a meeting of one's being with "the creator" (parvardigār, the one who nourishes).

Against this somewhat metaphysical idiom of spiritual experience, one is never allowed to forget that performing Ramlila in Kheria

Figure 2.

Sunil Kumar playing two roles—Shurpnakha, in pink (above) and Sulochana, in white (Fig. 3)—from the Kheria Ramlila. (Photos courtesy of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts)

is a lot of fun. The stage has the capacity to draw its players "like a magnet" (cumbak kī taraf), as they dress up in colorful costumes, apply make-up, and wear masks, memorizing lines from the Radheshyam Ramayan,⁵ with generous doses of improvised dialogues. Some of these dialogues can be positively raunchy, with a vamp-like Shurpnakha (see Fig. 2) startling Shri Ram with bold questions: "Ham āp se śādī karnā cāhte haiṃ.Kyā, karoge? Ab to jabān band ho gayī āpkī" (I want to marry you. Will

Figure 3.

you? You've gone silent). "Nahīṃ samjhe? Samajh jāoge jab bagal me āoge" (You don't get it? You'll understand when you come alongside me). She then goes on to reprimand Ram for referring to her as Devi (a goddess): "Ham se to sīdhī sīdhī direct bāt kare, indirect nahīṃ" (Talk straight. Speak directly, not indirectly). One needs to keep in mind here that the sexual innuendo in Shurpnakha's witty lines resonate within the dynamics of the all-male cast of the Kheria Ramlila; the specific rhetoric of improvised dialogues is reminiscent of the Swangs (svāṅgs; satirical sketches), which are said to have stimulated the origin of this līlā since its inception in the early 1970s when children in the village spontaneously began to improvise their own play relating to the lives of Ram, Sita and Lakshman. The play of gods, as critics have pointed out, is not essentially different from children playacting gods.

While the 53-minute film cannot be expected to document all the episodes in the Ramlila enactment—and therefore, there is no way in which it becomes possible to know what gets included or excluded from the Ramayan story—what stands out are those seemingly minor characters like the tribal chieftain Guha and the boatman Kevat; Indrajit's widow Sulochana; and the demoniac presence of Ahiravan. Guha appears bare-bodied with leaves and feathers decorating his arms and wrists, while Kevat is shown washing the feet of Shri Ram with actual water in a bowl. This almost naturalistic rendering of a gesture resonates more powerfully than the recitation of any formal text, its tactile component of bhakti (devotion) communicated with direct immediacy.⁶ Likewise, the widowed Sulochana (see Fig. 3) makes a powerful impact in white—all the more powerful because the same actor (Sunil Kumar) had played Shurpnakha in shimmering pink. Chaste, yet strong, Sulochana appears to challenge Shri Ram's associations with an "ocean of compassion" by demanding her husband's severed head. Sugriv's counter-demand that she should get the head to laugh to prove her chastity adds to the emotionally charged nature of the scene—a charge that becomes palpably expressive as the camera focuses on the women in the audience, visibly moved by Sulochana's affirmation of honor in a state of widowhood. Following the Sulochana episode, the Kheria Ramlila builds towards a carnivalesque display of dark forces from the netherworld (pātāl-lok), as the killing of Ahiravan by Hanuman is enacted on stage with gusto. Young demoniac imps run around the performance space with flaming torches in their hands, while other actors simulate the gestures and motions of spirit possession.⁷

Tellingly, Kaushal juxtaposes the closing images of the Kheria Ramlila and the burning of the Ravan effigy with the glass-factory images that opened the film. Here, to the strains of a bhajan (devotional song), intoning "Come back home, Ram" (ā jā Rām), we see the embers of molten metal melting into darkness. At one level, this is a lyrical ending, but it is also one that compels one to recognize an underlying dimension of faith, which assumes the quality of light persisting through layers of darkness.

At a more social level, Kaushal's film provides the barest hints of the actual darkness in Kheria at social, economic, and political levels. We learn from Anil Johri, the chief spokesperson of the Kheria community, that his village has not been free of crimes, anti-social activity, and gangster violence by men whom he regards affectionately as "fatherfigures." From the chillum-smoking, robust Baba Dhyangiri, who appears to be the spiritual head of Kheria, we hear candid confessions of his own decision to "pick up the gun" to defend his village from random acts of arson and theft by unnamed marauders. Shahabuddin Khan also acknowledges that one of his sons is in Tihar Jail in New Delhi and that he has no means to plead for his release. All these details of Kheria's underworld reality are mentioned in passing, with both Johri and Dhyangiri emphasizing that the path of violence has been abandoned, as the people of Kheria have collectively committed themselves to the annual ritual performance of the Ramlila.

In conversation with Kaushal, who is well aware that a more empirical study of Kheria's social and political context is needed, I am struck by her candor in confronting the crucial question, which is not really addressed in the film: "Why this harmony in Kheria?" Most decisively, one witnesses an affirmation of communal harmony, with Muslims participating in Ramlila both as actors and worshippers of Shri Ram, which does not prevent them from doing their namāz (prayer) whenever the call of prayer is heard. This tangible evidence of the coexistence of faiths is moving, particularly within the context of Uttar Pradesh today, where outbreaks of communal violence in relation to cow vigilante activism, among other atrocities on Muslims, have been normalized and allowed to pass without any sustained judicial action.⁸ While Kaushal does not engage with any of the political tensions relating to electoral politics or the more volatile issue concerning the building of the Ram Mandir on the demolished site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, she does acknowledge, however elliptically in the film, a history of violence in Kheria. This, I believe, could be the underlying "reality" of the demonstration of communal harmony in the film.

"To deal with this history of violence," as Kaushal put it to me in conversation, "the only source of survival for the people of Kheria had to be a public manifestation of Hindu-Muslim unity"—a manifestation that is most visible in the performance of Ramlila. Not only does the Ramlila provide a platform for this unity, it is the tangible embodiment

Figure 4.

Rabichandra Das, one of the oldest puppeteers, holding a paper cardboard puppet of Ravan. (Photo by Shankhajeet De)

of this unity, which has been made possible not in response to any pañcāyat (local court) order or NGO intervention but through the will of the people in Kheria. In the widest possible sense then, it could be said that Kheria's residents are collectively performing not just the need for communal harmony but their own survival as a community in their cumulative support, enactment, and viewing of the Ramayan story. While there is no evidence in the film to suggest that this harmony is under duress, it remains an open question how the Ramlila in Kheria will endure over time through a negotiation of its internal, micropolitical tensions vis-à-vis the politics of the state.

Shadows and Realities in Rural Odisha

As in Kaushal's film, where the residents of Kheria make their presence felt in their own bodies and voices, at once linked to and yet distinct from their transformations in the līlā, Shankhajeet De's In the Shadow of Time focuses on a large cross-section of ordinary people, most of them based in remote villages in Odisha, who have had long-term relationships with the shadow-puppet tradition of Ravana Chhaya. At a mythical level, this tradition is imagined by its practitioners to have multiple points of origin. For puppeteer Rabichandra Das (see Fig. 4), Ravana Chhaya originated when Sita was abducted; a moment later in the film, he says that the tradition was created when Sita was abandoned in the forest and gave birth to Lav and Kush in Valmiki's hermitage. A

Figure 5.

New puppet of Ravan character influenced by the aesthetics of Pattachitra design. (Photo by Shankhajeet De)

more precise historical perspective would indicate that Ravana Chhaya, like most performance traditions, is not as old as it appears. If we keep in mind the evidence of its popular source-text, Bicitra Rāmāyaṇ, written by Bishwanath Khuntia in the eighteenth century, we understand that we are not dealing with an "ancient" tradition, but one that provides an accessible text which the puppeteers have used over generations to evoke the primordial power and energy of shadows in their retelling of the story of Ram and Sita. The insertion of Ravan in the title "Ravana Chhaya" continues to elicit the prosaic and down-to-earth explanation that gods are fair and cast no shadows, while Ravan is dark and therefore more likely to cast shadows, thereby facilitating the performance of shadow-puppet theatre.

In the Shadow of Time is less about the aesthetics of shadows and reflections, and more about the passage of time through which we see this remarkable tradition change through any number of interventions (see Fig. 5). On the one hand, the tradition is regarded with affection, honor, respect, and pride by the puppeteers, but, on the other hand, it stimulates bitter manifestations of anger and social exclusion precipitated by their sense of being exploited by external forces. Inevitably, the subaltern voices of puppeteers dominate the film, many of them embedded in fraught histories and internecine tensions and jealousies of rival families who regard Ravana Chhaya not only as their

Figure 6.

The tableau of the second coronation of Ram on his final return to Ayodhya by the Ravana Chhaya Natya Sansad, Odash village. The innovation of the cinema screen was introduced during a workshop conducted by Odisha Sangeet Natak Akademi in Bhubaneswar, 1986. (Photo by Shankhajeet De)

means of livelihood, but as cultural "property." These contested lifehistories of the puppeteers are punctuated with urban perspectives on the developmental possibilities and future of Ravana Chhaya, as provided by experts and entrepreneurs deeply invested in, yet curiously unconscious of their self-appointed task in re-inventing Ravana Chhaya for our times. Significantly, while the puppeteers themselves are not particularly concerned about issues relating to "invention" or "authenticity," it is urban researchers and interventionists who implicitly want to hold on to notions of Ravana Chhaya's pristine past even while acknowledging that its present condition needs to be "improved."

Unlike Leela in Kheriya, which operates in several registers, not least a self-reflexive journey that is audible in Kaushal's voice-over of her own poetic text, In the Shadow of Time has no voice-over but works through a subtly formulated argument on cultural appropriation. This argument is built through well-structured interviews with diverse players in the field of Ravana Chhaya. Inevitably, it is the appropriation of the tradition by Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA), the foremost official institution for performance research in India, which provides much of the fuel for the argumentative heat generated in the film. We learn that the Akademi began its research on Ravana Chhaya in the early 1970s with a seminal trip made by Jivan Pani, an acknowledged scholar in the field affiliated to the Akademi, who visited Odisha in 1971.⁹ During this trip, Pani "discovered" master puppeteer Kathinanda Das whom he designated as the only surviving Ravana Chhaya performer based in the village of Odash. In 1978, the Akademi held an international seminar on shadow plays in New Delhi and Kathinanda Das won the prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi Award. By 1985 he was appointed the President of the Ravana Chhaya Natya Sansad (see Fig. 6), which continues to be one of the leading organizations representing the tradition.

In a nutshell, we have all the ingredients by which "dying traditions" are discovered, revitalized, and institutionalized through urban intervention and expertise. The sharpest critique of Pani's intervention in the film comes from Gouranga Das, the retired head of the Department of Odiya in Ravenshaw University, Cuttack, who runs his own institution called the Sri Rama Institute of Shadow Theatre, also identified as Kandhei Ghar or the Puppet House, in the village of Kutarimunda. Gouranga Das dismisses Pani's valorized description of Kathinanda Das as the lone survivor in the field at a time when Odisha's villages had many other puppeteers with legacies of performance in their own right. More specifically, he targets Pani's privileging of one single village, Odash, as the centre of Ravana Chhaya knowledge, when other villages like Seepur, Bhaluki, and Kishore Nagar were also linked to the practice of shadow–puppetry. From a tape-recorded interview with Kathinanda himself, Das compels us to learn that Odash was not Kathinanda's native place; his father lived an itinerant life as he travelled from Puri to Jajpur to Dhenkanal where he performed Ravana Chhaya, before migrating to Seepur. Not only does this intricate constellation of different villages indicate that Jivan Pani was wrong in foregrounding Odash as "the" centre of Ravana Chaya practice, it also indicates that he undermined the essentially itinerant nature of the performance tradition.

Traditionally, Ravana Chhaya has been associated with the Bhata community, who are mythologized as singers of panegyric verses and lyrics in King Janak's court, where they also sang auspicious songs in celebration of Ram's marriage to Sita. In more recent times, they have been recognized as itinerant singers, collecting alms while singing songs, and wandering from village to village, in the tradition of the bhikshu (mendicant) rather than the bhikārī (beggar).¹⁰ From Siba Prasad Das, the only Bhata member of the Ravana Chhaya Natya Sansad, we get an insider's local knowledge of what he describes as the cunning (guṇī) of the Bhatas. He describes how members of his community were not only adept in praising kings to win favors, they also had their own strategies of extracting money from rich farmers through satirical songs. At one point in the film, Shankhajeet De gets Siba Prasad Das to sing such a song in which the woman of the house is targeted by Bhata singers for her miserliness, so much so, as the words in the song clarify, that she uses her own snot or nose-droppings as salt to season her food. As Das elaborates, any householder hearing this song would promptly respond with indignation, "How dare you say such things about my mother? Do you think that we cannot give alms?"¹¹ In this way, Bhatas would collect their alms with a combination of wit and cunning.

Tellingly, it is through such songs and commentary that the everyday realities of life in rural Odisha come alive in the film. Significantly, instead of focusing on how specific characters like Ram, Sita, and Lakshman are interpreted in the Ravana Chhaya tradition, De pays more attention to the figure of the barber, in the form of father and son, who used to open Ravana Chhaya performances with a commencement ritual in the past. Barbers, who are ubiquitous figures across the social landscape of India, particularly in rural areas, are known to have an intimate knowledge of all the gossip that exists in everyday life. Cutting hair and nails is an ideal pretext for extracting information of all kinds of intrigues in individual households. Moreover, as De reminds me, barbers are viewed as "necessary evils" by upper-caste patrons, because their presence is mandatory for all ceremonies relating to birth, marriage, and death.

How and why the performativity of barbers-as-puppets got marginalized in Ravana Chhaya over the years would be well worth studying, but it is possible to speculate that the creation of new performance standards in a reduced temporal framework meant that their roles became increasingly marginalized over time. One could also study the processes of de-ritualization and secularization from which no Indian performance tradition is entirely free, even as the changes vary from tradition to tradition. In his tape-recorded interview with Gouranga Das, for instance, Kathinanda Das vehemently acknowledges how he had thrown his family collection of puppets into the river, declaring his inability to worship them through evening prayers in order to keep them appeased. Today, as I learn from De, these rituals of appeasement are no longer followed, even as the chanting of the holy name of Ram (Rām nām) in Bhagabat Tungi, the village chapel, continues along with readings of other sacred texts.

Inventing Tradition

Having indicated some fragments of everyday life in the social landscape of the film, let us now turn to the politics of appropriation. Along with the expert Gouranga Das, who views himself somewhat ironically as yet another outsider in the field—unlike the traditional Bhata performers, for whom Ravana Chhaya is "in their blood," he acknowledges that the tradition has been "transfused" in his blood—there are other distinguished interventionists in the field who are interviewed in the film. These interventions can be accurately contextualized within the rhetoric of the "invention of tradition," where the borderlines between "intervention" and "appropriation" become blurred.¹² In this regard, there are interviews with the late veteran filmmaker Gobind Tej who refers specifically to Ravana Chhaya as a "dying art form" that should be "well presented to the world and gain recognition." He is entirely pragmatic about how this intervention should proceed by recommending that workshops should be conducted in which graduates of acting from neighboring universities could be introduced to the Ravana Chhaya form by the puppeteers. In this way, Tej declares, "there will not be any need [in the future] to depend on the traditional puppeteers." It is hard to believe that such well-meaning intentionality could be so indifferent to the fact that nondependence on traditional puppeteers could be tantamount to killing their livelihood. Likewise, in another interview with the well-known composer Shantanu Kumar Mohapatra, we hear him praising the power of the solo, unaccompanied voice to the rhythm of a khañjarī (tambourine) in Ravana Chhaya, but at the same time he acknowledges that the sheer length of the puppeteers' songs needs to be "pruned" and refined through the introduction of new rāgs (melodies) and tāls (rhythmic cycles).

The most egregious intervention that pushes the premises of "invention of tradition" into the priorities of a twenty first-century cultural economy is made by Vishal Dar, a fine artist based in New Delhi, trained as an architect working in digital media, who has created his own Ravana Chhaya on seventy-five digital scrolls with 100 layers, specifically designed for the iPad. Dar acknowledges seeing Ravana Chhaya for the first time at the Adishakti Ramayana Festival in 2009, which he candidly describes as "one of the most boring performances … that [he] ha[d] ever seen." However, he goes on to add that the performance was also "hypnotic and haunting." This is not an inaccurate description of the ambivalence one may feel on seeing Ravana Chhaya, even though it does compel one to redefine what "boredom" means in the context of such an aesthetic experience. Dar also goes on to affirm that what he is doing and what the traditional performers are doing is "not essentially different." This, too, is a refreshing perspective that does not reiterate the familiar divide between "traditional" and "contemporary" performers. However, Dar's grounds of similarity become more problematic as he tries, in a somewhat strained and mannered way, to account for the "purpose" of his Ravana Chhaya. This is what he has to say in a verbatim transcription: "I am getting my own emotional state across to another audience. It has nothing to do with, traditionally, what the text has to do with us as people. Nothing." What matters, as he emphasizes, is the projection of "the emotional state," but "if that comes into some sort of form, or a format, of tradition"—here Dar takes a dramatic pause—"death to all of us, you know, literally."

To my mind, there is an extraordinary level of presumption and confusion at work here on at least three levels: one, when Dar declares "death to all of us, … literally," he seems to forget that "tradition" matters deeply to the puppeteers, despite the problems they may have faced in sustaining it; two, he implies that what he is doing (digital design on iPad) is without its own "tradition"; and three, contradicting this disingenuous rejection of tradition, he indicates that, "I want to point to people that there is another tradition [Ravana Chhaya]," thereby implicitly upholding his own "tradition" as a point of departure. It is somewhat ironic to hear Ravana Chhaya being described as "another" tradition, when it has been around for a much longer time than digital art, outside the privileged domain of the metropolis. But, more critically, there is the tricky issue of copyright, which is surely known to Dar given his exposure to Apple's corporate politics. Arguably, while Ravana Chhaya, like most traditional forms, operates without copyright, is it sufficient for a contemporary artist like Dar "to point people to another tradition" while using the name of Ravana Chhaya for his own digital artwork? How, one could ask, is this acknowledgment of "another tradition" actually inscribed in the aesthetics of a digital product? And can this acknowledgment also be supplemented by some kind of payment?

While accepting that these are thorny problems for which there are no established codes of negotiation, all one can ask for is a more mindful acknowledgment of how metropolitan artists position themselves vis-à-vis traditional forms, especially when the majority of its practitioners continue to survive in abysmal poverty. Shankhajeet De's documentation of poverty in his film is a telling reminder of how much remains to be done for the support of rural performers linked to the Ramayan tradition, both in Odisha and other states of India. Almost as disturbing as the actual conditions of poverty is the virulence of tensions and hostility that exist between rival groups, which is an inevitable outcome of income disparity, where some puppeteers are able to sustain their livelihood while others are destitute.

Here one needs to shift the focus from "appropriation" to "theft," even as the puppeteers seem to be fully aware of those "Dillīvālās" (people residing in Delhi) who request puppet designs on cardboard, which they never return. Exploitative in a different mode and emotional register are thefts within the families of puppeteers. Through interviews in the film, we learn of how a grandfather from Rabichandra Das's family is accused of selling all the puppets belonging to the family to the group in Odash. The 100-year old Gokula Das also narrates how he had inherited a basket of puppets from his ancestors who urged him to carry on with the tradition, only to confront the end of the tradition when his uncle sold the puppets. The stakes are desperately small: a pittance of Rs. 500 (about $7.00) for a basket of puppets. One is not sure to what extent these confessions can be believed, but what is only too evident is the disharmony within family structures resulting from poverty and distrust.

Clearly, the puppets themselves made out of deer and antelope skin are the very means of accounting for the "cultural capital" of the puppeteers, meagre as this capital might seem. But along with the puppets, there are also skills involved, by which rival puppeteers challenge each other with derisive comments. In this regard, we learn how Rabichandra Das challenges a Delhi-returned puppeteer by testing his skills: "Can you keep rhythm to the most difficult lines from the Sundara Kanda when Sita begs Hanuman to give her news of Rama?" When the competitor fails to keep rhythm, Rabichandra mocks him by saying, "And you people have returned from Delhi?" The question is ironic—and, to my mind, deeply sad—because it indicates that despite Rabichandra's obvious satisfaction that his rival does not have adequate skills, "Delhi" has become the arbiter of quality, to which all puppeteers have to pay homage, whether they like it or not. Throughout the film, one hears remarks like, "They go to Delhi, while our troupe is defunct," "We never went outside," and most emphatically, this from one of the youngest members in the Ravan Chhaya Natya Sansad, who has travelled extensively, and is nonetheless aware: "The reality is that money is on one side and I am on the other."

The power of In the Shadow of Time lies in the obvious empathy of the filmmaker with the condition of the puppeteers, which compels him to make the smallest and yet most decisive of interventions towards the end of the film. Here we see, the enormously talented but disgruntled Rabichandra Das, who had stopped practicing as a puppeteer, performing the opening scene of Ravana Chhaya with robust ebullience as he shows us the barber father-and-son duo hurling insults at each other. His puppets are not made out of leather, which is expensive and hard to find; instead, he works with cardboard puppets of his own design. The use of this material is an inevitable response to changing performative circumstances, far removed from the time when Rabichandra, an erstwhile avid hunter, had killed deer and antelope. It is heartening to see him perform with gusto, because it is in the act of performance that he seems to find his self-respect. In the closing image of the film, following his performance, we see him sitting in a field watching his grandsons collect large bales of grass, as he keeps a watchful eye. It is a quiet end that takes us back to everyday life in rural Odisha, providing a temporary caesura to the tensions and humiliation of puppeteers as recorded in the film.

Closing Reflections

Such is the empathy of interaction between the film-makers and Ramayan practitioners in both films that one should analyze Leela in Kheriya and In the Shadow of Time at length in their own contexts. However, for the limited purpose of this review-article, let me risk making some general points, keeping in mind that both films could provide useful teaching resources for the pedagogy of Ramayan performance traditions, both onstage and off. Leela in Kheriya's 53-minute duration, which is ideal for a classroom screening, is perhaps too short for its multilayered narrative, which inevitably results in some rough edits as the film juxtaposes the metaphysical, the religious, the social, and the material dimensions of the Ramlila narrative.¹³ In the Shadow of Time, which runs for 89 minutes, is more leisurely, yet focused, as it builds its argument relating to the multiple modalities of Ravana Chhaya's appropriation in Delhi and Odisha. Both films are less interested in researching the textual traditions of different Ramayan traditions (the Radheshyam Ramayan and Bicitra Rāmāyaṇ) than in recording their actual performances. This is more evident in Leela in Kheriya which has many sequences of "live" performance with visceral audience participation. In contrast, De's In the Shadow of Time focuses less on the immediacies of performance than on the after-effects of what happens to those performers when there is no longer any demand for their performances. In neither film is there any exclusive focus on performance aesthetics, even as both filmmakers are eminently capable of providing rich insights in this area, with Kaushal having curated a number of exhibitions and conferences on audio-visual Ramayanrelated material and De having made short ethnographic films on Gombeyaata (gombeyāṭa), the shadow-puppet tradition of Karnataka, and the marionette tradition of Kathputli (kaṭhputlī) from Rajasthan.

Instead of emphasizing what the films fail to do within their limited durations, one needs to call attention to what they succeed in doing within the limitations of their narrative frameworks. Both films in my view demonstrate with considerable conviction that the everyday lives of subaltern performers could be more complex and vulnerable than what one imagines them to be. These insights into the everyday require nothing less than for filmmakers to spend a considerable amount of time with performers in order to gain their trust and respect. These dimensions of "trust" and "respect" come through strongly in the verbal animation of the interviews in both films, where one never gets a sense of an academic, ethnographic approach to documentary filmmaking. Rather, there is a strong sense of relationality in both films between filmmakers and their subjects, which reveals the intimacy of a sustained interaction.

My own pleasure in seeing these films a number of times is inextricably linked to a curiosity and concern about the present condition of the individual performers recorded in both films. Therefore, I find myself asking questions not about Ram or Sita or Hanuman or Ravan, but about Shamshad Ali and Rabichandra Das, Baba Dhyangiri and Siba Prasad Das, among a vibrant cast of cultural practitioners, who come alive in the film with intelligence and argumentative force. I am grateful to Kaushal and De for making such interlocutors of the Ramayan performances come alive because they teach me what the Ramayan tradition on the margins means not just at the levels of narrative and enactment, but in terms of livelihood, creative labor, and struggle. These dimensions of everyday life, embedded in the archetypes of the Ramayan tradition, remain compellingly alive in the contemporary moment. It is to the credit of both films that they capture this moment with critical attention and a palpable connection to the ground realities of documenting Ramayan performances today.