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The story of Rama has been known on Java and mainland Southeast Asia since before the 9th century. The strong divergences in West Java and Malaysian puppet versions from Valmiki show patterns of intensification and localization that make the narrative at home in the region. In the 1960s, the Ramayana was not seen as bearing overt religious or political implications for Muslim performers, and its trans-Southeast Asian popularity boosted its currency. In 1965 the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) held a pan-Southeast Asian Ramayana festival – spurring countries where this epic, preserved in puppetry/mask performance, was only modestly popular (e.g., Indonesia and Philippines) to increase attention to this central narrative for traditional Southeast Asian mainland puppetry. Since the 1990s, however, transnational religio-political forces, including the Hindu revival in India (which sees Rama as proto-ruler of a Hindu realm) and the Islamic revival in the Muslim world (which sees the story as shirk, worshipping a god other than Allah), may problematize the narrative in Indonesian and Malaysian puppetry.

Anurupa Roy, director of a troupe of puppeteers in Delhi, India, discusses with Paula Richman, emerita professor at Oberlin College (USA), various facets in the creation of her puppet play About Ram. Roy wanted the audience to experience the diversity of the Ramayana tradition as a tragic love story about a hero (first a prince and later a king) who feels duty-bound to banish his wife with the result that he remains alone for the rest of his life. The play is filled with images of the hero’s past life through animation of his memories and weapons on a screen mounted on stage and music with no words but with a percussion emphasis that draws upon different musical instruments from various regions. Over the period of improvisation by which the performance developed, Roy made the war scenes very stylized and the animator contemporized the weapons to include jet propulsion and machine guns. As part of her goal to develop an embodied language for contemporary puppet practice in India, Roy incorporated dances based on martial arts, which led to a grammar of movement for the puppet performance that was contemporary and engaging.

Traditions of wayang puppetry in Indonesia realize what Philippe Descola refers to as an «animist ontology». Not only human figures, but also what Tim Ingold calls «nonhuman persons», including personal possessions, landforms, and animals, possess consciousness and interiority. Among wayang’s diverse story sources, the Ramayana stands out for its animistic qualities. Episodes depict interactions between humans, ogres, monkeys, deities, and other nonhuman persons, activating the potential of the medium for representing transformation and theatrically mining the suspension of natural laws. This essay, based on ongoing research into the wayang collection of Yale University Art Gallery, examines how the characters of the Ramayana reflect shifting theatrical styles and animistic beliefs. Analysis of these historical puppets is followed by an exploration of an experimental 2023 Ramayana production originated at the University of Con-necticut hybridizing wayang with the tholpavakoothu shadow puppet tradition of Kerala, India, in which the epic is retold from the perspective of the trees and wood inhabiting it.

According to classical Indian aesthetic theory, adbhuta, the ‘marvellous’, is one of the nine canonical rasas, ‘moods’, that can be aroused in the audience by a theatrical or literary work, and Sanskrit epics largely resonate with adbhuta features. An episode of the Rāmāyaṇa (Rāmāyaṇa [Critical Edition], IV 49-52) recounts how, during their search for Sītā, a handful of monkeys led by Hanumān find themselves entering and remaining for some time almost imprisoned in a cave created by Maya, the great architect of the Asuras. The description of this cave is steeped in the imagery that connotes, in the Sanskrit epics and Buddhist literature of the early centuries CE, paradises and remote, fabulous places. Recurring elements of these places include vegetation made of gold and jewels and the presence of birds, and brilliance is a constant attribute.

This article examines a collection of carved and painted wooden masks created by the Rājbanśīs, an ethnic minority of West Bengal and Southern Nepal, for the theatrical representation of the Rāmāyana. The collection was displayed at temporary exhibition of Himalayan handicrafts in the Museum of Oriental Art, Ca' Pesaro, Venice (April-September 2017) and has been introduced to the public by ourselves on occasion of a series of lectures, seminars and cultural activities on the great Indian epic and the ethnographic study of some distinctive features of the rapidly vanishing indigenous Indian handicraft. The present essay investigates the historical-ethnographic profile of the Rājbanśī ethnic group by analysing the exhibited pieces in the context of the multiple traditions of the Rāma epic, the importance of its regional and vernacular versions inside and outside India, and the theatrical tradition of Rāmlīlā.

A bird’s eye review of a few significant features of plant symbolism in Indian world, both in priestly and in buddhistic milieu: tree as axis mundi (the reversed tree, aśvattha, Ficus religiosa); bodhi tree in buddhistic context; the myth of the birth of human beings from vegetables (Lagenaria vulgaris) in the Rāmāyaṇa; the rice and the chaff (in relation with the law of retribution of acts) in the Paramārthasāra by Abhinavagupta; the celestial desire-fulfilling creeper (kāmavallī) and the transformation of the celestial nymph Urvaśī into a creeper. Within brahmanical tradition a significant range of sources is used, mainly Vedas, upaniṣads, Bhagavadgītā and purāṇas.