Ramnagar's Ramlila Plays the Ramayana Over 31 Evenings Across a Whole Town Without Microphones, and UNESCO Counts It Among India's Most Representative Ramlilas

Ramnagar, a town on the eastern bank of the Ganga facing Varanasi, stages the whole Ramayana every autumn in roughly 31 evening episodes, with sites across the town standing in for Ayodhya, Janakpur, Chitrakoot, Panchvati and Lanka. UNESCO inscribed Ramlila, “Rama’s play”, on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, after first proclaiming it in 2005, and its entry names Ramnagar and Benares among the most representative Ramlilas of northern India. Navbharat Live reported that the 2026 season opened on 25 September, Anant Chaturdashi, the day the cycle traditionally begins.

What UNESCO lists, and where Ramnagar sits in it

UNESCO’s entry describes Ramlila as a performance of the Ramayana in a series of scenes that include song, narration, recital and dialogue, given across northern India during the festival of Dussehra. The most representative Ramlilas, it says, are those of Ayodhya, Ramnagar and Benares, Vrindavan, Almora, Satna and Madhubani. The Ministry of Culture’s 2021 backgrounder on India’s intangible heritage repeats the same description and counts Ramlila among the country’s inscribed elements.

The entry says the staging rests on the Ramcharitmanas, the Hindi version of the Ramayana that Tulsidas composed in the sixteenth century so the Sanskrit epic could reach everyone. Most Ramlilas run ten to twelve days, UNESCO notes, but some, such as Ramnagar’s, may last an entire month. It adds that the Ramlila brings the whole population together “without distinction of caste, religion or age”. For the poem and its author see Tulsidas and the Ramcharitmanas; for the epic itself, what the Ramayana is.

A town that becomes the map of the epic

There is no single stage. Incredible India, the Ministry of Tourism’s portal, says Ramnagar turns into Ayodhya, Janakpur, Chitrakoot, Panchvati and Lanka as the story moves chapter by chapter, and that devotees walk beside the performers carrying their own copies of the Ramcharitmanas.

The scale is given differently by different reporters. A Hindustan Times feature of October 2013 says permanent structures and parts of the town within a five-kilometre radius carry names from the epic, and that on many days the cast, the Kashi Naresh (the head of the former royal house of Banaras) and the audience all move together, sometimes over a kilometre. Navbharat Live, in its 25 September 2026 report, puts the number of open-air sites at about 40, spread over roughly 5 to 10 kilometres around Ramnagar. Lanka alone is a large tract, the 2013 feature says, with Ravana’s court at one end, Rama’s camp at the other and the Ashok Vatika grove in a corner.

Richard Schechner, an American performance scholar who studied the Ramlila from 1976, wrote in the New York Times in 2000 that the town becomes a living model of the subcontinent from the Himalayas to Sri Lanka. There are no seats. People sit on the ground, stand on walls and rooftops, and follow Rama’s route on foot. For one scene the stage is the Maharaja’s own palace, the Ramnagar Fort.

Lamps, voices and a poem that is never spoken in Sanskrit

Incredible India says the performances are traditional and largely free of modern theatrical effects. Schechner reports no microphones and lighting by kerosene lanterns and flares. He adds that microphones were tried once in the 1940s and angry spectators smashed them. Navbharat Live describes the same practice in 2026: torches and petromax lamps, actors who raise their voices to be heard, and audiences standing or sitting in open ground.

The words follow the Ramcharitmanas. Schechner writes that twelve men sit in a circle near the Maharaja each night and chant the whole poem, and that the Sanskrit original is never spoken. Until the mid-nineteenth century, he says, the performers mimed the action. Then Maharaja Ishwari Prasad Narain Singh commissioned poets and scholars to write dialogue in everyday Hindi, which the actors now deliver at full volume. Karan Madhok, in a photo essay for The Chakkar, describes a vyasi, the arranger of the performance, calling the crowd to silence and prompting the actors from a notebook while scholars follow in their own copies of the poem.

Philip Lutgendorf, whose fieldwork in Banaras produced The Life of a Text, writes that the Ramcharitmanas has always reached its largely illiterate audiences mainly through oral performance, which includes ceremonial recitation, folk singing, spoken exposition and theatre.

The boys who are gods for a month

The cycle opens, the 2013 Hindustan Times feature says, with the birth of Ravana, the king of Lanka, and closes after Rama’s coronation with an episode on his teachings. In between come Rama’s own birth and wedding, the exile, the abduction of Sita, and Rama’s victory over Ravana.

Schechner reports that the five most sacred roles, Rama, his three brothers and Sita, are played by boys of about 8 to 13, whose voices have not yet changed. He writes that it is believed these children, still innocent, are the only ones fit to embody the gods. They are “gods for a month”, in the phrase he quotes, and people touch their feet and take darshan, the act of gazing at the divine. Other roles pass down in families. In 2000 Ravana was played by Kaushal Pati Pathak, a farmer who lived about eight miles away. When Schechner first saw the Ramlila in 1976, Kaushal’s elder brother had shared the role with their father.

The Chakkar piece adds that the same holds behind the scenes. Its author met a member of the organising committee whose father had been vyasi, as his grandfather and great-grandfather had been before him.

The evenings that draw the crowds

Schechner puts audiences at a few thousand for some episodes and up to 100,000 for others. The 2013 feature names the heavy-attendance evenings as Rama and Sita’s wedding, Dussehra, Bharat Milap (the brothers’ reunion) and the coronation, which Schechner says does not end until dawn.

On Dussehra, the tenth day of the month of Ashvina, the Maharaja first worships weapons and horses, then rides an elephant in procession from the Fort to the Lanka ground and withdraws before the fight. “It is not proper for one king to witness the death of another,” Schechner quotes him as saying. Ravana, in Schechner’s description, surrenders by touching Rama’s feet, and Ravana’s giant effigy is set alight at about ten at night, in the account of the theatre director Anuradha Kapur that Schechner quotes. The 2013 feature gives the effigy’s height as 60 feet.

When it began: the accounts do not agree

Every source places the beginning in the Kashi Naresh’s court, and none gives a founding document. The Incredible India page says only that the Ramlila is believed to have been patronised by the Kashi Naresh in the early nineteenth century. Schechner also writes of the early 1800s.

The Hindustan Times feature of 2013 names Maharaja Udit Narayan Singh and gives the story as told by Jai Prakash Pathak, then personal secretary to the Kashi Naresh and head of the Ramlila’s organising body: the Maharaja went to watch a Ramlila that traders had organised at Chhota Mirzapur, arrived after it had ended, and his wife suggested he start one at Ramnagar. The same feature calls the tradition nearly 200 years old.

Other counts run longer. The Hindustan Times of September 2021 refers to a span of 238 years. A member of an organising family told The Chakkar the Ramlila has run for “at least 250 years”, and the same article says Kashi Naresh Balwant Narayan Singh is said to have started it inside the fort before his successors took it out to the townspeople. These are local and press figures, not archival findings.

Patronage, two missed years and the pressures it faces

Schechner argues that the Maharajas of Benares used the Ramlila to hold up their religious and cultural standing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when their military and economic power was shrinking, and that the patronage continued after the princely state merged into India. According to The Chakkar, the Ramlila cannot begin unless the Kashi Naresh is present.

The Ramlila was not staged in 2020 or 2021. In September 2021, Hindustan Times reported that the royal family had postponed it a second time because of Covid-19, and that this was the second cancellation in a span of 238 years. Kunwar Anant Narayan Singh of the royal family wrote to Varanasi’s Commissioner of Police with the decision. The Chakkar’s photo essay, written after the pause, describes the cycle running again.

UNESCO’s own entry flags a wider concern: television soap operas, it says, are reducing Ramlila audiences and weakening the role that brings communities together. Schechner, writing in 2000, listed the practical strains, among them the month of free time the cycle asks of participants, shrinking open land and the difficulty of finding younger actors. He also recorded the casting rules in force then: virtually all actors were Brahmin men and boys, with exceptions such as a boatman and the small boys who play the monkey and demon armies. Navbharat Live reported on 25 September 2026 that the season would run for a month and close with Rama’s coronation.