This is the season of festivity. The weather is extremely pleasant and winter is almost knocking at our doors. The days between Dussehra and Diwali are so beautiful! Almost everyone whom I know says that this is their favourite time of the year. These two festivals take us back to our roots as we all celebrate the victory of good over evil, meet our friends and relatives, take time off from our busy work schedules and get in touch with ourselves and our families.
As children, the most exciting part of these festivities for us, besides the crackers, was the Ramleela. In those days, staging of the Ramleela was a convention more popular than it is now. It was staged on the colony, village, district, city and State levels. The colony Ramleelas were extremely interesting and involved our attention completely for almost a month. We felt very proud of it and all the activity was monitored by us though we never tried going on stage and becoming part of the cast! We were too young and perhaps did not understand the significance of the performance totally. There are many humorous incidents and episodes connected to these Ramleela days of our childhood which I would like to share with the readers today.
In the colony in the Doon valley where we lived, the excitement about Ramleela was especially high and people from neighbouring colonies were a bit envious of the team of good actors we could boast of. There was a serious problem which the colony faced. While everyone was away at the Ramleela in the evenings, some small thefts began taking place in peoples’ homes. This caused anxiety among the residents and people began leaving the performance early and going back home. One evening, when the scene between lakshmana and Surpanakha was being staged, one of the women in the audience began to get up and go home. Her friend asked her why she was leaving. the lady replied that she was afraid that her house may be robbed. The friend took her hand and made her sit down again. “Don’t worry. The thief is on stage today. See, there he is. It’s Mannu, dressed as Surpanakha. He was suspected by the colony people and they gave him this role. Now you can watch safely!” It was indeed a wonderful strategy to make Mannu give up his nefarious activities! A great idea.
In another incident, our neighbour Om Prakash Sharma was playing Hanuman on the stage when his little son, Anurag (who was in school with me) was suddenly overcome by emotion and climbed the stage. He began pulling his father’s (Hanuman’s) tail and would not leave him. The father tried his best to explain that at the moment he was playing a character but little Anu ( who was around four years old) could not understand this and began weeping loudly, with the result that Hanuman had to descend the stage and take a break. “Sharmaji, please go back on stage! “Aap kya kar rahein hainIJ” were the cries one could hear from the colony audience. These kind of episodes greatly added to the fun of these Ramleelas.
And then there was a children’s Ramleela we had in school where the child who became Ravana simply refused to die! The boy who was playing Shri Ramachandra kept shooting arrows at him and ordering him to die but little Subir (that was the boy’s name) firmly told him: “Main kyon marunIJ Tum maro!” The innocence of this episode has always stayed with me as a lovely childhood memory. Those were the days!
When we were in Delhi for a few years, the scenario was a bit strange. Young boys working in the shops of the colony’s market mostly played the female roles in the Ramleela. The announcements one could hear in the middle of the scenes were something like this “ Variety Storewale Bahadur jo Manthara ki bhumika nibha rahe hain, kripya manch ke peechhay pahunchein!”
The audiences were simple and so were the actors. Informality was the basic element of these shows. People forgot their lines and were prompted by the audience, children went off the stage and began fighting along with the armies, women in the audience began singing along with the actors. There were no rules or restraints. The only rule was to have fun, to enjoy the festival and be happy. It was symbolic of those days when life was simple and ambitions were small.