INFINITE POSSIBILITIES. BUILT IN BITS. / EST. 2019
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ढाई कड़ी की रामलीलाPatoonda · Anta, Baran · Rajasthan
A Ramleela that has been staged in the same village, by the same families, every spring since 1864.
No hired singers, no playback — every line is delivered by the artist on stage.
Founded1864
Continuous161 years
StagedChaitra to Vaishakh
HomePatoonda, Rajasthan
Guru Ganpatlal Dadhich wrote it out by hand more than a century and a half ago, drawing on Valmiki’s Ramayana and Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, and setting the whole of it in the Hadoti dialect of Rajasthani — a folk idiom carrying the older cadence of Dingal. What he left behind is not a script so much as an inheritance: the same verses, learned by ear, handed down through generations of villagers.
Its defining rule is that nobody sings on the performers’ behalf. There are no hired vocalists and no playback — every artist speaks and sings their own lines at the microphone, in costume, through the night. The players are farmers from the village who train under the artists who came before them and take no payment for the work.
Dialogue is set to the Khadi Boli and Raila styles and carried by the artists alone. The singing was once accompanied by the chitara, a stringed instrument now largely replaced by the violin and the harmonium — one of the few things about the performance that has changed at all.
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Beyond the village
The Mandal took first place at the All India Sahitya Sammelan in Kota in 1950. Since then it has travelled to the International Ramayan Mela at Ayodhya, twice to Chitrakoot, to the Ramayan Mela at Bhopal, and in February 2024 to Hindu College, Delhi, for the college’s 125th anniversary. A chapter of a University of Queensland volume on festival traditions is given over to it.
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What Studio maintains
BitInfinity Studio keeps the tradition’s digital record: the website, the archive of manuscripts, the photo and video galleries, and the annual programme. Living traditions are not preserved by writing them down once — they are preserved by keeping the record current, year after year, for as long as the performance continues.
