Reviewed by:

• Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments ed. by Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha
• Amanda Culp

Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments is a volume that positions itself at the intersection of impossibilities. To start, the Ramayana is not a single text but a rich tradition of iterations of a story—a collection so vast that it defies summary, synthesis, or simplification. As Richman notes in her introductory essay, the body of work that we call the Ramayana does not even have a clearly defined beginning or end. To further complicate things, this volume focuses on the Ramayana as it is reimagined—over and over and over—in India’s impossibly extensive catalog of performance styles. After this we must confront one final layer of impossibility. It is one that seems to be inherent in our field, namely, that the study of performance challenges us to engage in scholarship with an evanescent primary event that never translates fully into writing. In spite of these innate challenges, Performing the Ramayana Tradition is a remarkable volume, successful in large part because of the way it frames these impossibilities as strengths. Here they become immensely productive sites for discourse.

Richman and Bharucha have divided the volume into six parts, each containing two to three essays. In “Part I, Orientations and Beginnings,” Bharucha and Richman each contribute an opening essay that situates the project’s goals as they pertain to the fields of both Ramayana and Theatre and Performance Studies. In these opening chapters, Richman and Bharucha complicate the relationships between narrative, text, and performance by approaching them from different vantage points. In Richman’s chapter, “The Ramayana Narrative Tradition as Resource for Performance,” she looks to the “textual lineages” of the story’s many iterations to illuminate how “playwrights and performers interpret, enact, and innovate within the Ramayana [End Page 228] tradition” (pp. 9–10). Bharucha’s chapter follows but takes the reverse perspective. It considers the process of performance as a site of invention and creation wherein the process of making Ramayana narratives emerges from enactment itself. The section culminates with Rizio Yohannan’s essay “Where Narrative and Performance Meet: Nepathya’s Rāmāyaṇa Sa kṣepam.” This essay does double duty: it demonstrates how the categories of text and performance collapse into one another in the case study of the South Indian performance tradition of kutiyattam; at the same time, it introduces the framework of the epic’s narrative to an unfamiliar reader.

“Part II: The Politics of Caste” explores interpretations of Shambuka, a Shudra who is executed by Rama for practicing austerities forbidden to his caste. (The story is first recorded in the Sanskrit Ramayana.) The section begins, however, with a poem by twentieth-century writer Omprakash Valmiki, who succinctly transposes the ancient story into the world of contemporary caste politics. This poem is followed by Aaron Sherraden’s essay “Recasting Shambuk in Three Hindi Anti-Caste Dramas,” which traces the use of Shambuk’s character in anti-caste activism during the last century, and Sudhanva Deshpande’s essay “The Killingof Shambuk: ARetellingfroma Director’s Perspective,” whichdocuments Delhi-based Jana Natya Manch’s 2004 adaptationofthe story into the open-air production Shambuk-Vadh.

“Part III: Interrogating the Anti-Hero” takes on the character of Ravana. In “Ravana Center Stage: Origins of Ravana and King of Lanka,” Richman juxtaposes a Kathakali performance from the eighteenth century with a Tamil mythological play from the mid-twentieth to argue for a complex history of interest in and innovation with the purported anti-hero of the epic narrative. Bharucha’s essay, titled “Ravana as Dissident Artist: The Tenth Head and Ravanama,” compares works by contemporary artists Vinay Kumar and Maya Krishna Rao that deconstruct Ravana’s mythology through avant-garde performance techniques. These are mirrored by Bharucha’s avant-garde approach to scripting both the performance texts and his experience of them as a spectator within the essay’s analysis.

“Part IV: Performing Gender” pairs case studies from South India in...

审阅者：

• 执行罗摩衍那传统：制定、解释和论证ed。作者：保拉·里奇曼 (Paula Richman) 和鲁斯托姆·巴鲁查 (Rustom Bharucha)
• 阿曼达·卡尔普

《执行罗摩衍那传统：颁布、解释和论证》是一本将自己定位于不可能的交叉点的书。首先，《罗摩衍那》不是一个单一的文本，而是一个故事迭代的丰富传统——一个如此庞大的集合，以至于无法进行总结、综合或简化。正如里奇曼在她的介绍性文章中指出的那样，我们称之为《罗摩衍那》的著作甚至没有明确定义的开始或结束。让事情变得更加复杂的是，本书重点关注《罗摩衍那》，因为它在印度极其广泛的表演风格目录中被一遍又一遍地重新想象。在此之后，我们必须面对最后一层不可能。这似乎是我们领域固有的一个问题，即表演研究挑战我们从事学术研究，因为一个转瞬即逝的主要事件永远不会完全转化为写作。尽管存在这些固有的挑战，《履行罗摩衍那传统》仍然是一本非凡的著作，其成功在很大程度上是因为它将这些不可能的事情视为优势。在这里，它们成为极其富有成效的话语场所。

里奇曼和巴鲁查将本书分为六个部分，每个部分包含两到三篇文章。在“第一部分，方向和起点”中，巴鲁查和里奇曼各自撰写了一篇开篇文章，阐述了该项目的目标，因为它们涉及罗摩衍那和戏剧与表演研究领域。在这些开篇章节中，里奇曼和巴鲁查从不同的角度探讨叙事、文本和表演之间的关系，使它们变得复杂化。在里奇曼的章节“罗摩衍那叙事传统作为表演资源”中，她着眼于故事多次迭代的“文本血统”，以阐明“剧作家和表演者如何在罗摩衍那传统中解释、表演和创新” [完第 228 页] ”（第 9-10 页）。巴鲁查的章节紧随其后，但采取了相反的观点。它将表演过程视为发明和创造的场所，其中制作罗摩衍那叙事的过程是从表演本身中产生的。该部分以 Rizio Yohannan 的文章“叙事与表演相遇之处：Nepathya 的Rāmāyaṇa Sa kṣepam ”为高潮。本文具有双重作用：它通过对南印度表演传统kutiyattam的案例研究，展示了文本和表演的类别如何相互融合；同时，它向不熟悉的读者介绍了史诗的叙事框架。

“第二部分：种姓政治”探讨了对 Shambuka 的解释，Shambuka 是一位首陀罗，因实行其种姓禁止的苦行而被罗摩处决。 （这个故事首先记录在梵文《罗摩衍那》中。）然而，这一部分以二十世纪作家奥普拉卡什·瓦尔米基（Omprakash Valmiki）的一首诗开始，他简洁地将这个古老的故事移植到当代种姓政治的世界中。这首诗之后是亚伦·谢拉登 (Aaron Sherrden) 的文章“在三部印地语反种姓戏剧中重铸沙姆布克”(Recasting Shambuk in Three Hindi Anti-Caste Dramas)，该文追溯了上个世纪反种姓活动中沙姆布克角色的运用，以及苏丹瓦·德什潘德 (Sudhanva Deshpande) 的文章“沙姆布克的杀戮：从导演的角度重述， 》记录了德里的贾娜·纳蒂亚·曼奇 (Jana Natya Manch) 2004 年将这个故事改编成露天制作的《Shambuk-Vadh》。

《第三部分：审问反英雄》扮演拉瓦那这个角色。在《罗波那中心舞台：罗波那和兰卡之王的起源》中，里奇曼将十八世纪的卡塔卡利表演与二十世纪中叶的泰米尔神话戏剧并置，以论证一段复杂的历史，即对所谓的反宗教的兴趣和创新。史诗叙事的英雄。巴鲁查的文章题为“作为持不同政见艺术家的拉瓦那：第十头和拉瓦纳玛”，比较了当代艺术家维奈·库马尔和玛雅·克里希纳·拉奥的作品，他们通过前卫的表演技巧解构了拉瓦那的神话。巴鲁查以前卫的方式编写表演文本，以及他在文章分析中作为旁观者的体验，反映了这些。

“第四部分：执行性别”将印度南部的案例研究与......