Lord Ram plays the parking lot: Ramlila in the Diaspora

Abstract

Since 2010 the authors have been involved in the production and performance of the Morrisville, North Carolina Ramlila. In 2018 we conducted a participant-ethnography of the production. Many Hindu communities in India and in the Soulh-Asian diaspora have created, their own unique Ramlila productions, all of which are to some extent based on Maliarishi Valmiki’s millennia-old Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. The events of the story are dictated largely by religious tradition, but there is surprising variation in the textual and cinematic sources used to generate the performance’s spoken dialogues. The Hindu Society of North Carolina began mounting its Ramlila as a small-scale pageant in 2009, but in subsequent years it has grown to be a large-scale production that attracts thousands of audience members.