an open-air ramayana. 131
of separation. Ram, whose every desire
is fulfilled, the summation of happiness,
unborn, indestructible, was acting
like a man.^14He whose grace removes all pride
and delusion—could he be angry
even in a dream? These acts
can be understood only by enlightened sages
devoted to the feet of Raghuvir.^15Ram behaves the way we humans do not because he is like us, but to get us to re-
alize that we are like him. We are in a dream of conflict, gain, and loss. If we could
wake up we would see, as the Lord sees, that it is all a Lila. He is mirroring us (which
is, by the way, a time-honored theatrical exercise).
Though the literalness of Lila piety—the rush to touch the feet, to taste the
prasad,to wear the garland, to commandeer a prop like a lotus or a bamboo arrow,
to shout, to hear, and above all to seethe forms of the gods—may seem naïve to an
outside observer, it is indeed one of the great secrets of the Lila’s power.
The belief that God is everywhere—the literal-minded belief that God is in you
and me or a stone, that God has physical and mental attributes, that he takes on those
attributes to make himself accessible to his devotees—is so broadly inculcated and
deeply imbibed that it seems to shape the way consciousness is structured. “Sym-
bolic” is too flat a word for this type of consciousness, because it suggests that
“there” is a reality and “here” is something else symbolizing it. In this universe, as
Ernst Cassirer has said, “by a sudden metamorphosis, everything may be turned
into everything.”^16 God enters the shape of Ramchandra, Ramchandra enters the
body of the boy named Ramakrishna Bandhavkar, the earth enters the form of a
cow, past time and eternity enter the twentieth century, Ramnagar’s huge Durga
pool expands to become the Milky Ocean, last-gap image of the unmanifest cosmos.
These transformations, I am imagining, occur naturally in the minds of people who
grew up in easy intimacy with the God of personality and paraphernalia, the God
who has characteristics like their uncles and cousins and is often as common and un-
heeded as a household item. Though I learned as a college student to talk of God-
immanent and God-transcendent, such transformations are not natural for me. That
is why during the Ramlila I kept trying, with fascinated curiosity, to find out how
people could believe that cosmic divinity was incarnated in Ramakrishna Ban-