ABSTRACT
This ethnographic project addresses the recent transformations of popular Hinduism by focusing on the religious cum artistic practice of Ramkatha, i.e., staged narratives of the Ramcharitmanas. One of the most successful contemporary Indian Ramkatha performers is Morari Bapu, a former school-teacher turned narrator. His career unfolded alongside the Hindu nationalist movement in India, since the late 1980s and today his Ramkatha performances reach widely dispersed audiences—live or televised across India and the globally dispersed Hindu diaspora. Focusing on the sensory and media experiences, the author examines the aesthetics and dynamics of the Ramkatha ethnoscape through participant-observation in everyday practices, and how it translates politics from the realm of religion. Negotiated through a telling of Hindu religious stories, the mediated voice of Morari Bapu is a major medium of performance transposed into multiple media such as theatre, stage, music and spectacle. I investigate how the transnationally disseminated practices re-contextualize religious subjectivities of an affective community enmeshed in spatio-sensorial modes. What are the effects of staging and processing of voice and how does the politics of spoken/sung forms affect sensory perception and political identity? How does the charismatic authority of Morari Bapu translate into a privilege of speaking/voicing Hindu concerns?
