The Forgotten Artist

Ramlila recalls the battle between Rama and Ravana and consists of a series of scenes that include song, narration, recital and dialogues. Ramlila is performed during the festival of Dussehra every year across northern India. Out of them the most representative Ramlilas are performed in Ayodhya, Vrindavan, Almora, Sattna, Madhubani, Ramnagar and Benares.

Staging of Ramlila is based on the Ramacharitmanas. Ramlilas recount episodes from the Ramacharitmanas through a series of performances. Ramacharitmanas are sacred texts devoted to the glory of Rama. It was composed in the Awadhi dialect of Hindi by Tulsidas in the 16th century with an objective of making the Sanskrit epic available to all.

The field trip to Chaina’s village this week gifted us a chance meeting with a Ramlila actor from his village who has been associated with this performance art form for over 38 years. Chaina is a cross dressing performer from Raimalpura village, close to Jaipur. The morning we visited him, Bhagwan Sai ji from the neighbourhood also happened to be visiting. Chaina informed Bhagwan ji of us and he rushed to his house to get changed from his ganji and dhoti into something more presentable. But seeing that we had arrived and not wanting to miss a chance to speak to us about his journey, he decided to stay. 
 
‘I am a poor man, and this is who I am. So why change?’, he said to us.

Bhagwan Sai performed Ramlila for nearly all his life in the village. First as an actor and gradually with old age, as a singer. ‘He was revered by all’, Chaina tells us. There was a time when 15-16 thousand people gathered from all across the state to watch his troupe stir their magic on stage.
We see him fidgeting with his hands and fingers. Stopping mid-conversations, seemingly getting lost in his own world of thoughts.
Times have now changed. 

‘People still like Ramlila. It's us they have a problem with now. ‘What is it that these people do!’’, are the remarks he hears so often. There never was any money in this profession. To compete with the changing world of entertainment - television and phones, one needs money. How do you make the grand stage, sets, costumes without finances? What did they have? What was their foundation? Their methods are now obsolete. 

We ask him about his favourite character. He tells us that he enjoyed enacting every role that he got a chance to play. Raavan, for instance, was one such role he really enjoyed essaying. But he stopped performing for the past 10-15 years. He has adopted the entire saga of Ramayan and sings the verses on religious occasions and spaces. But people don't have time anymore. It would take him 10-15 minutes to sing a verse before. Today, it's all hurried. They have to finish the entire Ramayan in the same time duration.

He started off as a dancer himself, he recalls. He juggled various roles in life. A dancer, a jester, actor and eventually a singer. It’s when he took charge of the troupe as a leader that he stopped dancing. But the life he enjoys the most is the one he leads now. Wherever he is, he can always rely on singing his verses on a harmonium to bring him peace.
 
‘But I couldn't become rich. Didn't earn enough money,’ he shares.
What is the importance of arts?
‘My life has become better, is all I know.’
‘Either people have no time or we lack something as artists that people have stopped watching us perform.’

What does he desire for his children we ask? He tells us that he would still want his children to take this art further. But they are scared, he tells us. The pressures of society have gotten to them and are trying to find odd jobs. There's so much to find here, in Ramayan. He found God's name, what more could he ask for.

He owns a small piece of land. Nothing grows on it. There's no water, no machines. He earns what he can with his music.

We listen to him and we reflect on the life of an artist and their vulnerabilities. With age, every artist finds himself at a crossroads of his artistic journey and the weight of becoming irrelevant looms large. The arts have never had a lot of money in it anyway. We look at Bhagwan Sai and we look at so many forgotten artists past their prime, now struggling to make ends meet.