Many Rammans in Uttarakhand: Jak and Bhumyal Renditions

Many Rammans in Uttarakhand: Jak and Bhumyal Renditions

by Prateek 

This essay is meant to serve as a compendium to my documentary, Many Rammans in Uttarakhand: Jak and Bhumyal Renditions, which can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISJ3Mnea0MU (and below). The film highlights the diversity of the folk performance tradition of Ramman in the Indian hill state of Uttarakhand by analyzing two variants of the ritual, each dedicated to a village patron deity: one to Jak (alternatively known as Jakh) and the other to Bhumyal. Although the tradition is prevalent in many villages in the Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, the documentary focuses on the Ramman (dedicated to Jak) of Jaal Malla and Choumasa, two villages in the Rudraprayag district, and the Ramman (dedicated to Bhumyal) of Salud and Dungra, twin villages in the Chamoli district.

Before filming, I sought permission to shoot footage in these four villages from the village council or elders. In most cases, I took this permission orally for two reasons: First, the participants felt more comfortable with oral permissions due to my position as a village outsider, as well as their local cultural norms and low literacy rates. Second, some participants insinuated that the written word intruded upon a terrain that venerates the oral traditions of the Himalayas. So, rather than seek written permission, I did what my grandmother, a native of Uttarakhand, taught me: seek the blessing of the village deity in front of those whom I filmed. The villagers also underlined their implicit permission by providing me with accommodation, as these hamlets are in peripheral locations that lack easy road access and hotels.

D. R. Purohit, former faculty member at Hemvati Bahaguna Garhwal University, Srinagar, and a historian of the Garhwal region, provided guidance on identifying the four filming sites, which would have been otherwise difficult to locate. He has remained a significant influence on my ethnographic research. Purohit is a well-regarded expert on Garhwal, with a strong desire to assist other scholars researching the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand. Meanwhile, the credit for the documentary and my ethnographic process goes to my grandmother, Parvati Pandey, who since childhood has enriched me with regional folklore from the hill state while sensitizing me to the nuances of Uttarakhand’s demigods and deities. Her pedagogy instilled in me a critical eye toward oral traditions without succumbing to the desire to sensationalize or exoticize certain rituals, such as the possession ceremony. Nonetheless, I have deemed it necessary to restrict the documentary to audiences ages 18 and above due to the sensitivity of its content. This discerning gaze further allowed me to subject oral traditions to a critical analysis similar to that of written documents, a methodology advocated by Belgian historian and anthropologist Jan Vansina in his seminal work Oral Tradition as History.¹ My grandmother remained a regular port of call whenever the subtleties of the form puzzled me. Her interpretations and interpolations of Uttarakhand folklore set the stage for the documentary and kept me motivated throughout a difficult shoot. We often stumbled along narrow roads on our way to these villages. On one side sat a mountain where landslides are common; on the other lay a deep ravine. The cab driver who accompanied me was scared to drive, especially after a landslide compelled us to change the route. He suggested retreating several times, reminding me of the common belief in Uttarakhand that mountains and lakes seek annual balis (human sacrifices). Writer and Uttarakhand cultural historian Namita Gokhale has articulated this belief when describing how in the hill station of Nainital, Uttarakhand, it is thought that a popular lake “exacts a bali, a human sacrifice, every year . . . locals recognize that the elements are demanding their due.”² These challenges have made me understand the transformative character of these elements. Thus, I pay my obeisance to all beings—humans and nonhumans—especially the mountains who have made it possible for me to make this documentary.

This introductory essay provides context to Ramman and its difference from Ramlila, the folk staging of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, a translation of Valmiki’s Sanskrit epic Ramayana in the Hindi dialect Awadhi. I focus on two Uttarakhand variants: the Ramman (dedicated to Jak) of Jaal Malla and Choumasa, two villages in the Rudraprayag district, and the Ramman (dedicated to Bhumyal) of Salud and Dungra, twin villages in the Chamoli district. I argue that the prevalence of these two variants—privileging the patron deities of Uttarakhand over the Lord Rama of Ramayana—makes the folk tradition of Ramman what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “rhizomatic,” a structure celebrating “multiplicity” and “aparallel evolution” with the world.³ Like the rhizomatic narrative, which challenges arborescent models (“hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification”),⁴ Ramman offers an aparallel evolution of the Ramkatha in Uttarakhand by concentrating on Uttarakhand’s patron deities.

The term “Ramman” refers to both the festival and the tradition of singing Ramkatha, the story of Lord Rama, in the native dialect Garhwali. Lord Rama, an avatar of Lord Vishnu, is a central figure in Hinduism and symbolizes the values of dharma, or righteousness. The festival is celebrated in Vaisakh, the second month of the Hindu calendar that corresponds to the harvest months of April and May in the Gregorian calendar, and sets the stage for townspeople to gather in one place to pay their obeisance to the patron deities of the village. Although both performance practices in Uttarakhand are called Ramman, I distinguish these practices as Jak and Bhumyal in order to highlight the centrality of these two titular spirits (yakshas) of Uttarakhand in contrast to other Hindi renditions of Ramkatha, where the primary focus is on the Rama pantheon. Another reason to call these performances Jak and Bhumyal is to facilitate comparative analysis and to underscore Jak’s and Bhumyal’s statuses in these stagings as ishta devta, meaning “chosen deity” or patron deity of the village.⁵

Yakshas are natural spirits or deities, often represented in ancient Indian folklore as custodians of the natural world and bestowers of boons. Despite these abilities, yakshas have remained restricted to subordinate positions in Hinduism—probably because of “an Aryan dislike and distrust of Aboriginal deities”⁶—and in contemporary times have acquired the designation of devtas (deities) to distinguish them from Ishwar (God), such as Lord Rama. In stark defiance of these hierarchies, Ramman brings together yakshas and the Hindu pantheon’s high gods. In discussing the reason behind the convergence of the yaksha cult and the Rama pantheon in Ramman, cultural historian D. P. Saklani writes that the local yaksha traditions have assimilated Ramkatha into their rituals and narratives in order to seek a place in the mainstream hierarchy of the Rama pantheon.⁷ This pantheon became popular after two Vaishnavites (a disciple of Lord Vishnu and his avatars) visited Uttarakhand. First, Ramananda, “a great devotee of Rama,” visited the Garhwal region in the fifteenth century and “laid the foundation of a cult for Rama worship.”⁸ Second, the saint and poet Tulsidas visited Badrinath in the sixteenth century and introduced the locals to his Awadhi rendition of Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana in the form of Ramcharitmanas.⁹ It must be emphasized that Tulsidas only popularized Ramkatha, which existed long before he arrived in the region. According to Saklani, the pivotal moment was Adi Shankaracharya’s visit to Joshimath and Badrinath in Uttarakhand, a visit that facilitated the introduction of Vaishnavite stories (such as Rama, an avatar of Lord Vishnu) to the Garhwal Himalayas.¹⁰ D. R. Purohit and Roma Purohit note that after Shankaracharya established the matha—a traditional educational institution for imparting training in Hindu religious practices¹¹—in Joshimath, Uttarakhand, the Vaishnava denomination extended its influence and reach across the Garhwal region.¹² In line with this perspective, Garhwali residents practiced Shaiva (Shiva-centric) and Shakta (Goddess-centric) traditions prior to the establishment of the matha.¹³

In contemporary times, these intersections no longer serve as attempts to confer legitimacy on the yaksha but instead allow people to commemorate their vernacular deities, whom they worship as “popular theistic cult” figures or “vegetation spirits directly controlling and bestowing upon their bhaktas [disciples], fertility and wealth, or to use a single word, abundance.”¹⁴ Participants in the Jak and Bhumyal Rammans believe in the power of these titular deities and consider them as protectors of their villages, thus calling them devta rajas (king deities) (5:32–5:36).¹⁵ This belief is renewed every year in an annual festival with the manifestation of the yaksha in human form. The pashu, or human mediums the yaksha possesses, interact with their disciples, ensuring their everlasting protection and blessing. Religious scholars such as Elisabeth Schoembucher, John M. Stanley, and Ernst Benz have classified possessions within a religious experience into two categories: Besessenheit, those by evil spirits, and Ergriffenheit, those by benevolent deities.¹⁶ In Ramman, possessions by deities bring blessings coveted by both human mediums and the audience, unlike those brought by evil spirits or ghosts.

In Ramman, the act of divine possession is intertwined with singing. The tradition of Ramman singing dates to “the reign of a Vaisnavite Katyuri dynasty (8 CE to 11 CE approx.) of Kartikeyapur.”¹⁷ This epiphanic singing, which calls upon a deity to appear, is called jagar (translated loosely as “the choral awakening song”). The singing is performed accompanied by musical instruments and near a sacred fire called dhuni. Jagars can vary immensely in its aesthetics and meaning from one variant of Ramman to another. The two versions of Ramman under discussion are a case in point. While the two-day Jak version of the Ramman festival begins with the jagar, which continues until the deity inhabits the human body on the second day, the Bhumyal festival, which can span around ten days depending on the Hindu calendar, performs jagar only on the last day (13:33–16:00).

The Jak Rendition

The critical moment in the Jak rendition is the manifestation of Jak devta, an avatar of Lord Hanuman, who is revered in Hinduism for his unwavering bhakti (devotion) to Lord Rama. Although there is a general agreement among the performers and participants that Jak devta embodies the spirit of Lord Hanuman, there is not a consistent storyline about the precise juncture of his manifestation within the Ramayana story (5:34–6:12). As the documentary depicts, some versions of the narrative focus on a threshold moment in the battle between Lord Rama and King Ravana, the demon king who abducted Sita, Lord Rama’s wife. The avatar of Jak devta manifests when Lord Hanuman crosses the Ram Setu bridge to aid Lord Rama during this battle (16:24–16:36). Other versions center on a part of the epic in which Lord Hanuman torches Ravana’s kingdom and extinguishes his flaming tail in the ocean (12:01–12:19).

Central to the Jak rendition of Ramman are jagars, songs that are based on episodes from Ramayana. Accompanied by musical instruments including the dhol (double-headed drum), damau (single-headed drum), and bhankora (brass instrument), jagars adapt the epic by providing a more focused and nuanced interpretation to selected scenes. The songs don’t narrate the entire Ramayana; rather, singing continues until the “Lanka Dahan” incident, when Lord Hanuman burns the kingdom of Ravana to brandish the might of Lord Rama. The Jak devta possesses a human during the reciting of this event (13:33–16:00). Once possessed, the human enters a trance state and accomplishes feats deemed beyond the grasp of mortals, such as walking on coals. This divine possession manifests in two steps: first, the quivering of the human body, signaling the arrival of the divine energy, and second, the sensation of fierce power (16:03–17:17). Therefore, the ultimate objective of jagars is not limited to the oral rendering of Ramkatha; they also call forth the deity. In this way, they work like incantations or sensory stimulants, invoking the deity to manifest.

As with all avatars in folk traditions that have distinct physical attributes, the Jak devta’s human manifestation is marked by a rigorous trembling of the body, articulating the deity’s warrior character. According to one version of the Garhwali legend preserved by villagers, the Jak devta is furious at Ravana, and the trembling of the human vessel demonstrates this fury. In aesthetics, the human embodiment of the deity expresses what the Indian treatise on performing arts Natyasastra calls the raudra rasa, or the sentiment of anger. The creation of this rasa is also apparent from the deity’s natural speech and gestures that aim to strike terror in the heart of Ravana’s army.¹⁸ The Jak rendition reaches its climactic moment when the devta walks on a bed of embers, representing the final release of kinetic energy among the participants. By showing their obeisance through the annual ritual, the villagers restrain the power of the yaksha, who, otherwise in his raudra avatar, is extremely powerful, as evident through the exuberant dance, loud monosyllabic shouts, and animated gesticulations of the possessed human.

The use of rituals to contain the power of yakshas is not limited to Uttarakhand; it can be identified in other regions of India. For instance, Tamil scholar George Hart discusses one such case in South India: “In ancient times, the Tamils put up memorial stones to house the spirits of dead kings, heroes, and satis so that they could keep these spirits under control by performing the proper rituals.”¹⁹ Thus, the Jak Ramman belongs to a broader category of rituals across India that exist to contain and harness deities’ power and thereby avoid untimely deaths and calamities.

Skillful balladeers such as Chandra Singh Rawat often transmit these rituals through Ramman’s ballad form. Rawat, a 76-year-old balladeer of Jak Ramman in Jaal Malla, learned the artform from his father. Listening to him sing the Jak Ramman means not only partaking in the living history of the century-old status of the form but also being aware of one performance marker of this ballad: its knack for mastering the art of brevity. Like medieval ballads, the Jak ballad refreshes the listener’s memory by recapitulating important details of the Ramayana epic in a brief, dramatic, and rhythmic manner. Sometimes the dramatic character of the rendering is augmented with the help of specific figures of speech such as alliteration or consonance, as seen below. One classic example of this is the brief account of the abduction of Sita in the Jak Ramman:

In these lines, the balladeer narrates how Ravana’s deceptive attack—he assumed the guise of an ascetic—led to Sita’s abduction, the death of the vulture-like Jatayu who sacrificed his life while fighting to save Sita from Ravana, and Lord Rama’s killing of Bali. These concise melodies sung alongside the musical instruments provide a tune and refrain to segments of Ramman.

An essential difference between the Jak Ramman and Ramayana surfaces when we compare Hanuman’s dialogue between the two narratives. In the Garhwali variant, preceding his giant leap across the ocean to reach Lanka, Hanuman leaves Lord Rama with a crucial clue. He informs Rama that he will mark his success in Lanka by throwing fruits into the ocean; his defeat, on the other hand, will color the ocean red with his blood. In contrast, the Hanuman of Ramayana is confident of his success and expresses no misgiving or potential failure. This confidence is associated with Hanuman’s devotion (or bhakti) to Lord Rama, who, as an avatar of Vishnu, will not let him fail. In the Jak variant, Hanuman’s bhakti is embodied by the villagers who worship the patron deity as their protector. By shifting the bhakti ideal from Hanuman to these disciples, Ramman empowers the yaksha, helping him to ascend from a subordinate deity to the revered status of a high god within Hinduism.²¹

The Bhumyal Rendition

This version, which focuses on the mask dance of Bhumyal and seventeen other local deities, was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. As a result, this Ramman is well-documented compared to the Jak rendition.²² However, one aspect has been overlooked: the procession of Bhumyal devta, the patron deity of the festival, which I analyze in my documentary. Since Bhumyal is the chief deity of the village, his mask is the first to be brought out of the temple by disciples; it is then tied to one end of a wooden pole before it is taken on a procession to all the houses in the village. Each year, the village council chooses a few disciples who will be allowed to carry this pole vertically around the village. These disciples wear yellow dhoti (a loose piece of cloth wrapped around the lower half of the body) because the color is associated with “Bhumyal,” which refers to bhumi, or soil; thus, the deity is the protector of the land.

Like the Jak Ramman, the Bhumyal procession ritual fuses the narratives of the Ramayana with the local Garhwali folk stories. Unlike the Jak, however, it is also inspired by the Mahabharata, another Indian epic. According to Purohit, the mask-tying portion of the Bhumyal devta procession symbolizes an episode from the epic. He further explains that in the Mahabharata, Lord Krishna, another avatar of Vishnu, asks Bhima, one of the five Pandava brothers, to carry his own head to Badrinath, an important pilgrimage site for Hindus in Uttarakhand—and located right next to the village where the Bhumyal Ramman is celebrated (22:08–22:54).

The Bhumyal procession is more than a religious walk allowing villagers to seek the devta’s greeting when he visits their house. The walk also offers insight into the world of the yakshas. According to the residents, four yakshas—Vaman (Eastside), Raje (Westside), Kane (Northside), and Triyond (Southside)—protect the village, and Bhumyal, believed to be the king of the yakshas in this rendition, comes to meet them during the procession to safeguard the village.²³ Their meeting is performed as a dance (30:07–30:27) with two steps: first, the pole carrying the Bhumyal mask is bent horizontally, and second, the pole is moved in a back-and-forth motion. The first step, the pole’s shifting from vertical to horizontal, shows how the upright Bhumyal bends his head in greeting to a yaksha whose abode is a village farm. The second step represents a dance of friendship as Bhumyal and the yaksha meet after a year. This is one of the most beautiful moments in Bhumyal Ramman because it accentuates a bond of friendship between these two yakshas. Religious performance practices often tend to be concentrated on what British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner calls “liminal moments,” rather than highlighting what made these moments transformative.²⁴ This dance turns Ramman into a transformative act and a site illustrating the spirit of community. This spirit is not restricted to humans but flourishes in the yaksha pantheon.

The diversity of the Jak and Bhumyal renditions reveals one common feature of Ramman: its ability to survive the onslaught of both time and colonization by reinventing itself in myriad Garhwali narratives. Linguistics and literature scholar Kapil Kapoor has argued that dynamic cultures like India employ “seven text maintenance/renewal mechanisms to keep the thought alive and re-contextualized,” one of which is adaptation.²⁵ Ramman qualifies this understanding by showcasing how the renewal process of adaptation is not limited to crossing different languages or cultures but also can be found within a given language/culture, leading to more than one variant of the same narrative. These rhizomatic variants of Ramayana stay antihierarchical and people-centric, giving greater power to the yaksha and local communities around which they revolve.

Footnotes

1. See Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (1961; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

2. Namita Gokhale, “Nainital,” in The Penguin Book of Indian Journeys, ed. Dom Moraes (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004), 233.

3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 9–10.

4. Ibid., 16.

5. Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 291.

6. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Yaksas: Part II (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1931), 1.

7. See D. R. Purohit and Roma Purohit, “Ramkatha in Performance in Garhwal Himalaya,” in Ramkatha in Narrative, Performance and Pictorial Traditions, ed. Molly Kaushal, Alok Bhalla, and Ramakar Pant (New Delhi: Aryan Books International, 2015), 117.

8. D. P. Saklani, “The Ramayana Tradition in Central Himalaya,” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 84 (January 2003): 118.

9. Ibid., 119.

10. Ibid., 118.

11. To understand how matha is a dynamic institution and differs from the Western monastic tradition, see Caleb Simmons, “Mathas, Toward Understanding the Public Religious, Educational, and Political Ascetic Institution in South Asian Religions,” Religion Compass 17, no. 9 (2023): 1–9.

12. Purohit and Purohit, “Ramkatha,” 118.

13. Ibid.

14. Ram Nath Misra, Yaksha Cult and Iconography (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1981), 1; Coomaraswamy, Yaksas: Part II, 13.

15. All timestamps are from the documentary Many Rammans.

16. See Elisabeth Schoembucher, “Gods, Ghosts and Demons: Possession in South Asia,” in Flags of Fame: Studies in South Asian Folk Culture, ed. Heidrun Brückner, Lothar Lutze, and Aditya Malik (New Delhi: Manohar, 1993), 239–67; John M. Stanley, “Gods, Ghosts, and Possession,” in The Experience of Hinduism: Essays on Religion in Maharastra, ed. Eleanor Zelliot and Maxine Berntsen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 26–59; Ernst Benz, “Ergriffenheit und Besessenheit als Grundformen religiöser Erfahrung,” in Ergriffenheit und Besessenheit, ed. Jürg Zutt (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1972), 125–48.

17. Purohit and Purohit, “Ramkatha,” 117.

18. Adya Rangacharya, The Natyasastra: English Translation with Critical Notes (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1984), 60.

19. George L. Hart, “The Manikkuravan Story: From Ritual to Entertainment,” in Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folklore of India, ed. Stuart H. Blackburn and A. K. Ramanujan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 259.

20. Balladeer Chandra Singh Rawat sang these lines during an interview with the author.

21. To learn more about mutations of Ramlila and bhakti, see Prateek, “Towards a Definition of Performance during the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Study of Ramlila in India,” Asian Theatre Journal 40, no. 1 (2023): 150–68.

22. Before inscribing the ritual on its list, UNESCO documented the salient features of the form: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/ramman-religious-festival-and-ritual-theatre-of-the-garhwal-himalayas-india-00281.

23. Vikram Bhandari, a native of this village, explained the significance of these directions in an interview with the author.

24. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), vii.

25. Kapil Kapoor, “Tika Parampara: The Tradition of Interpretation,” Kriti Rakshana 1, no. 6 (June 2006): 3.