ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the spatial dimensions of performances and addresses issues of place and their concomitant practices such as in familiarizing, mapping, mobilizing and imagining. The Ramkatha landscape is explored by tracing its everyday spaces to understand how they are experienced and framed with wider meanings and linked to other mythical/historical places that intensify their significance from the local to the translocal. Since place(s) associated with the Ramkatha are often understood, spoken about or felt with distinctive subtleties such as physical property or something imagined/produced/remembered, the aim is to inquire into how they are informed by aspects of performance, socially constructed and mobilized. The sense of place shifts across direct experiences in physical locations of the present to symbolic/mythic landscapes from the past. The unique capacity of mobility acquired by the satsangi engages Hindu landscapes and is linked to much broader circuits of flows or ethnoscapes. Unfolding new socialities through intricate processes of placing, this ethnography shows how newly sacralized places and place-experiences are recognized, shaped, altered and relived in the culturally relative and entangled individual imaginations of the shrota-satsangi.
