Epic catharsis: Ramleela in Tihar
Inmates of the country’s largest prison, drawn to Ram’s infinitely forgiving self, participate enthusiastically in the enactment of his life and struggles
The stand out moment in this year’s Ramleela performance by the Tihar Drama Class came when Kumbhkaran, facing Lakshman in battle, suddenly lost his voice. This was very disappointing, because the audience in Jail no 3 at Tihar love their Kumbhkaran. For four years now, Basantlal, who plays the part, has been regaling them with his antics. A stout man in his late fifties, who sports a colonel’s moustache, his Kumbhkaran is able to tide over Lakshman’s jibes about his rotundity with swagger and elan. The most eagerly awaited part of his performance comes when he is woken up from his slumber and asks for meat and booze. The inmates cheer wildly when he tells his minions that, if there is any shortage, they should get booze from the Superintendent’s office. Saying that, he breaks one ghara after another. It was unfortunate, therefore, that he lost his voice this year at a critical point in the battle because, as everyone knows, battles in Ramleela are fought less with bows and arrows than with fiery and rhyming dialogues. But to compensate for that disappointment, this year there was the added attraction of background music. Using a beat-up old synthesiser, Francis and his associate Indal on the tabla provided the atmospherics that heightened the effect of the theatrics on stage.
Though everyone loves Kumbhkaran, the entry that is most awaited is Ravana’s. Bhanu, the inmate in charge of the Drama Class, plays Ravana. He is tall, muscular and has a booming voice and when he enters the stage reciting Ravana’s Shiv
stotram, it is as spectacular an entry as one would like Ravana to have. With his physicality, his energy and his supreme
confidence, Bhanu assays a Ravana that could give any professional actor a run for his money. Of Bollywood actors that I know of, perhaps only the late Amrish Puri could match Bhanu for the way he commands the stage and dominates other actors. It helps that he has been helming the part for four years now, and has played the lead in several full length plays. This year too, his entry was received with raucous applause. The most lusty laughter though, predictably, came when Firoz, who was playing Sita, proved inept in handling his sari and kept dropping his pallu. But all was forgotten at the Jaimala, which was accompanied by a song that is still played in weddings in Awadh and which evokes a very approachable image of Ram as a son-inlaw: Jhuk Jaiyyo Lala Raghubeer/ Lalli Mori Chhoti Hai
(Do please bow a bit my Lalla Raghubeer/ Because our Lalli is short)
I founded the Drama Class in Tihar when I was sent to prison after my conviction in 2016. I was working with inmates who were either illiterate or could barely read or write Hindi. We started with Premchand’s short story Nasha and, buoyed by its success, launched into Swadesh Dipak’s Court Martial, one of the most successful Hindi plays of the last few decades. To get illiterate actors to memorise long passages of dialogues, sometimes in English, was a challenge but for the same reason it was doubly rewarding. I learnt that provided the right atmosphere, anybody can become an Actor. The then Director General Sudhir Yadav took a keen interest in the Drama Class and would go on to host the historic Tihar
Kala Abhiyan in 2017 when inmates showcased their impressive artistic talent at different venues in Delhi.
The success of Court Martial emboldened us to perform Ramleela. Given our logistic limitation we would have to compress the 10-day performance to a single day. I started my search by poring through the Hindi translation of Valimiki’s Ramayana and Tulsidas’s Ram Charit Manas, texts that are easily available in prison libraries. It was Basantlal who disabused me of my ignorance. He rolled off the episodes that he said are a must in a Ramleela performance: the Sita Swaymwara, the Sita Haran, Jatayu Vadh, the Ram-Sugreev Samvad, Meghnad-Lakshman Sangram. I realised that my vaunted knowledge of the Ramayana was of little use here. Several members of my group had seen innumerable Ramleelas and knew that the performance of Ram’s Leela differed considerably from the sacred epic. When word got around about our intention to stage the Ramleela, we were surprised to meet several inmates who had actually participated in Ramleelas.
And so we tried to get the script. The one we first got our hand on was Radheshyam Katha Vachak’s Ramayana. But we wanted something that had the
rasa of performance, not of text to read. We were overjoyed therefore to find Raghunandan Sahir’s version of the Ramleela. It was replete with ghazals,
geets, nazms and shayari. It also had the right kind of dialaagbazi, which is the quintessence of a heroic performance in India, from NT Rama Rao to Amitabh Bachchan and Rajnikanth. In the end, the performance was extremely well received. Since then it has become an annual feature and now the senior inmates of the Class are able to put up a Ramleela on their own. When I went to watch the performance this year, I was impressed to see the scale of participation from people who normally stay far away from the Drama Class. The painting class spent hours doing the make up of the artistes, the music people, the carpenters, the stage decorators were all out in full strength. Although our plays are generally popular, this kind of participation is reserved for Ramleela alone.
A Ramleela performance not only reinforces our moral universe, but also creates and recreates a moral community, one which historically cut across religious lines. For two hours we were lost in Ravana’s mesmerising arrogance, Lakshman’s angry young man ebullience, and Ram’s dignity. Above all, what resonates with inmates is Ram’s infinitely forgiving self. Ram is the last resort of the poor, the dispossessed, the oppressed, the God who looks after the
deen-heen. Tulsidas calls him gareebnavaj, the ‘caretaker of the poor’, the epithet usually associated with the Sufi Saint of Ajmer. It needs no iteration that most inmates are poor and oppressed. When we watch the Ramleela therefore, the tyranny of the jail staff, the cruelty of interminable incarcerations and the sufferings of our families pale in the face of this epic battle and the wrongs that Rama had to suffer. This is catharsis in the best Aristotelian sense of the term. This year the performance stretched longer than expected and inmates were thus allowed to remain outside long after sunset. The performers reward was specially made
pakoris. These may seem small joys on the outside, but such is the meagre fare that a prisoner’s fantasies are made up of.
In the introduction to his Persian translation of the Sanskrit text Yog
Vashisht, Dara Shikoh writes of how he had a dream where Ram’s guru Vashisht introduces him to Ram by saying that this here Dara is your younger brother. The historian Muzaffar Alam suggests that Dara’s endeavour in this translation was to portray for us what a modern Ram Rajya may look like and how Dara may be the best person to execute it. Ram is an ideal for us because he treats everyone with equal respect. Ram reconciles, he heals, he unites. The Ramleela brings devotion and entertainment together. We can never have too much of Ram or his Leela. As the great Iqbal had said:
Hai Ram ke vajood pe Hindostan ko naaz/
Ahl-e nazar samajhte hain unko Imam-e
Hind (Hindostan is forever proud of the existence of Ram/The wise ones know that He is the leader of all Indians) Mahmood Farooqui is a Delhi based writer best known for reviving Dastangoi, the lost Art of Urdu storytelling