
The Life of a Text
Description
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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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Content
- Cover
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Transliteration
- 1. The Text and the Research Context
- Introduction
- Tulsidas and the Ramayan Tradition
- Metrical and Narrative Structure
- The Fathomless Lake: Tulsi's Narrative Framing
- The Manas and the Western Audience
- On Poetry and Performance
- Banaras: City of Tulsidas
- 2. The Text in Recitation and Song
- The Varieties of Recitation
- Spreading the Word: The Puranic Recitation Model
- The Rites of Recitation
- The "Great Sacrifice" of Manas Recitation
- The Pleasures of Manas Singing
- 3. The Text Expounded: The Development of Manas-Katha
- The Telling and Its Milieu
- Epic and Puranic Exegetical Traditions
- The Manas-Katha Tradition
- Changing Styles of Katha
- 4. The Art of Manas-Katha
- The Economics of Katha
- Qualifications of a Performer
- Performance Structure and Techniques
- Katha in Context: The Contemporary Performance Milieu
- The Performer and the Text
- The Nature of Katha: A Cross-Cultural Perspective
- The Palace of Mirrors
- 5. Words Made Flesh: The Text Enacted
- The Ramlila Tradition
- The "Sport" of Kings: Evolution of the Banaras Ramlila
- Three Contemporary Productions
- Ramlila and Devotional Practice
- The Ultimate Commentary
- 6. The Text in a Changing Society
- The Paradoxical Paradigm
- The Rise of the Eternal Religion
- The Politics of Ramraj
- Cracks in the Mirror
- People of the Book
- The Future of Manas Performance
- Glossary of Names with Transliteration
- A
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- C
- D
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- P
- R
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- Bibliography
- Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- Y
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