The silence of Rama: Mapping devotional absence

The relative marginality of Lord Rama in many Bengali folk song traditions is not simply a matter of textual omission but a patterned feature of specific devotional and performative contexts. While Rama occupies a central place in pan-Indian religious narratives and literary traditions, in many Hindu vernacular song traditions of Bengal—particularly within Vaishnava-leaning oral and performance-based repertoires—Krishna emerges as the more affectively proximate and musically adaptable deity. In the corpus surveyed here, drawn largely from Bengali Hindu devotional performance circuits such as kirtan, padavali, and related oral traditions, Krishna repeatedly appears as the preferred centre of emotional and aesthetic expression, whereas Rama remains comparatively less prominent in song-based performance.

This observation, however, requires careful qualification. Bengal is not devoid of Rama-centred traditions. A substantial body of performance genres, such as Ramayan Gaan and Kushan Gaan in West Bengal and adjoining regions, actively narrate and reinterpret the Ramayana through music, theatre, and oral storytelling. Mukherjee and Zakaria demonstrate how Ramayan Gaan functions as a performative retelling that circulates across Bengal, Assam, and Bangladesh, embedding Rama within regional performance ecologies.Footnote ¹ Similarly, Barman shows that Kushan Gaan operates as a narrative musical tradition that adapts the Ramayana into localized storytelling formats,Footnote ² while Sen emphasizes its mnemonic and performative dimensions in sustaining collective memory.Footnote ³ These traditions confirm that Rama is present within the broader cultural field. Yet they tend to function within narrative or theatrical frameworks rather than within the affectively immersive, bhava-driven song traditions where Krishna predominates. The issue, therefore, is not Rama’s absence from Bengal as such, but his relatively limited centrality within particular devotional soundscapes that prioritize emotional immediacy and performative intimacy.

The cultural landscape of Bengal—shaped by Vaishnavism, Shakta traditions, and diverse vernacular spiritual practices—has historically cultivated a devotional ethos that privileges affect, embodiment, and relational experience. As Dimock observes, Bengali Vaishnavism, especially in the wake of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, foregrounds ecstatic love (prema-bhakti) and emotional surrender as primary modes of religious expression.Footnote ⁴ Within such a framework, Krishna—figured as lover, child, and playful divine—becomes especially compatible with the performative and emotional grammar of folk traditions. The performative spaces of kirtan, jatra, and padavali do not merely transmit doctrine; they generate affective participation, inviting singers and listeners into an experiential relationship with the divine. Krishna’s mythic flexibility allows him to inhabit these spaces with ease, functioning less as a distant moral authority and more as an emotionally accessible presence.

By contrast, Rama’s narrative persona—often defined through ideals of kingship, duty, and moral restraint—does not always translate as readily into these affect-driven performance traditions. This does not render him insignificant, but it does affect how and where he is culturally mobilized. The difference may be understood as a form of aesthetic and performative misalignment: a gap between the ethical gravity of Rama’s narrative world and the emotive, improvisational tendencies of Bengali folk expression. This distinction becomes especially visible in gendered retellings such as Chandrabati’s Ramayana, where the narrative is reoriented around Sita’s experience rather than Rama’s moral authority.Footnote ⁵ In this sense, Rama’s relative marginality is not simply a lack but a reflection of how different mythic figures align differently with regional expressive forms.

This selective prominence establishes the foundational theoretical premise for the entirety of this article: that devotional visibility is a product of cultural discourse and repetition. Relying on Foucault’s core insight that what is systematically withheld from a discourse is as critical to its structure as that which is explicitly articulated,Footnote ⁶ this article reads Rama’s limited lyrical circulation not as ignorance, but as a patterned, deliberate cultural choice. What enters the cycle of performance becomes culturally central; what remains outside it is subjected to performative abstention and assumes a peripheral position. This understanding of discursive silence—alongside the broader hegemonic forces that attempt to normalize dominant symbols—serves as the primary theoretical anchor through which the mechanics of regional devotional memory will be analysed in subsequent sections of this article.

At a broader level, this pattern reflects the regional differentiation inherent within the bhakti traditions of India. Rather than a uniform devotional field, bhakti operates through locally embedded practices that privilege certain deities, narratives, and emotional registers over others. In Bengal, Krishna’s prominence in many folk song traditions aligns with a longer history of vernacular devotional expression that emphasizes intimacy, fluidity, and affective participation. Scholars such as Nandy and Banerjee have noted that Bengali cultural identity has often been shaped through inward-looking, imaginative, and subaltern-inflected modes of spirituality—conditions under which Krishna’s mythic persona proves particularly resonant.Footnote ⁷

At the same time, the positioning of Rama cannot be separated from wider cultural and political contexts. In contemporary India, Rama has increasingly been mobilized within national and ideological narratives, particularly in North India. While this does not determine his status in Bengal, it contributes to the conditions under which regional traditions negotiate devotional emphasis. Folk performance traditions, which often function as spaces of local identity and cultural autonomy, may selectively foreground figures that align more closely with their affective and aesthetic priorities.

To map Rama’s relative marginality in Bengali folk songs, therefore, is not to posit an absolute absence but to recognize a differentiated devotional economy—one in which cultural memory, performance practice, and emotional resonance shape which divine figures become central within specific contexts. The question is not whether Rama exists in Bengal’s cultural world, but how he is positioned within its diverse expressive traditions. In many song-based devotional circuits, Krishna occupies the core of this affective universe, while Rama remains present yet less frequently sung into its living archive.

Gods in power, gods unsung: The devapolitik of performative abstention

Krishna’s prominence in Bengali folk devotional traditions reflects an alignment between his mythic form and regional performance aesthetics. Rama’s comparatively limited presence in these same lyrical contexts reveals how vernacular devotional cultures selectively circulate divine figures through performance, repetition, and affect. Two interconnected frameworks illuminate this dynamic: devapolitik and performative abstention.

Devapolitik provides the conceptual vocabulary for describing how cultural practices shape the visibility, authority, and hierarchical positioning of gods within specific regional and sociopolitical contexts. It is the cultural politics of divine memory. However, this politics is not typically enacted through explicit theological rejection or iconoclastic rebellion; instead, it is executed through performative abstention, a patterned, selective process through which certain figures are granted centrality through relentless, ecstatic repetition, while others are relegated to the margins by being systematically underperformed in the affective life of the community. In this merged framework, devapolitik is the cultural strategy of regional autonomy, and performative abstention is the sonic and performative method by which that strategy is realized.

In Bengali folk performance traditions, deities are active participants in a living cultural economy of song, ritual, and collective memory. Their prominence depends less on scriptural pedigree than on performative circulation. Krishna’s centrality is sustained through repeated, embodied enactment—kirtan, Baul songs, and other vernacular forms—whose emotional and improvisational structures his narrative readily accommodates. Rama, while universally known and respected within textual, ritual, and theatrical traditions across Bengal, appears with markedly less frequency within these affect-driven, song-based contexts.

Devotional centrality is produced through the labour of circulation: what is sung repeatedly becomes emotionally proximate, culturally intimate, and socially central. Conversely, what is less frequently performed—what is subjected to performative abstention—remains conceptually present but is effectively excised from the immediate, lived, affective life of the community.

The inherent structure and socioeconomic origins of the folk traditions themselves play a determining role in shaping this unequal distribution of divine presence. Many of the most vital Bengali folk genres, such as Baul, Bhadu, and Jhumur, emerge from socially diverse, predominantly agrarian, and often non-elite or subaltern contexts. In these spaces, devotional expression is inextricably tied to the hardships and joys of lived experience, emotional immediacy, and collective, egalitarian participation. Within such subaltern settings, divine figures that can be easily adapted into intimate, vulnerable, and affect-driven performances tend to be aggressively foregrounded. Krishna’s mythology, with its heavy emphasis on relationality, human frailty, separation, and play, aligns organically with the expressive needs of communities seeking spiritual catharsis and emotional release.

Rama’s narrative, on the other hand, operates on a fundamentally different aesthetic and moral frequency. Strongly associated with strict adherence to duty (dharma), rigid social order, and epic narrative resolution, Rama’s persona functions differently within this performative framework. The figure of the Maryadā Puruṣottama—the ideal king who sacrifices personal and familial intimacy for the sake of statecraft and moral law—resists the kind of emotional permeability that folk song demands. As a result, performative abstention takes hold: Rama is recognized as a sovereign, but he is not invited into the courtyard to weep, dance, or yearn alongside the devotee. He may be granted prominence in structured narrative and formal theatrical forms like Ram-Jatra, but he appears far less frequently in the lyrical, improvisational, and deeply vulnerable song traditions that form the heartbeat of Bengal’s folk spirituality.

This distinction is further illuminated by the fraught relationship between textual permanence and oral fluidity. The Ramayana, as a widely circulated textual and performative archive, undoubtedly continues to shape religious knowledge and ethical frameworks across Bengal. At the same time, vernacular song traditions inherently privilege modes of expression that emphasize mystic interiority, emotional volatility, and improvisational freedom over fixed epic recounting. Traditions such as Baul practice frequently foreground the radical philosophical concept of the maner manush (the ‘person of the heart’) promoting a form of interiorized, experiential spirituality that deliberately transcends and often subverts fixed, externalized narrative structures. Within such esoteric and highly localized frameworks, divine figures are valued far less for their historical or epic grandeur than for their capacity to be deeply internalized and spontaneously performed. An epic king bound by external laws of state and scripture is philosophically incompatible with a tradition seeking the formless divine residing within the human body. Thus, the devapolitik of the Baul tradition naturally employs performative abstention against Rama, systematically decentring the epic sovereign to make room for the intimate, internalized companion of the soul.

Gendered patterns of expression and subaltern feminist critiques also contribute profoundly to this selective emphasis. In many Bengali women’s folk songs, figures such as Sita appear as powerful, enduring symbols of suffering, resilience, and complex moral negotiation. These vernacular songs frequently foreground Sita’s localized experience—detailing her pain, her exile, and her relationship with nature—often without giving equivalent or even sympathetic prominence to Rama. In these spaces, Rama is frequently positioned not as the saviour, but as the distant, patriarchal source of the protagonist’s sorrow. Such selectivity reflects not a passive omission but an active, critical reinterpretation: the epic narrative is retained, but its emotional and moral centre of gravity is radically shifted.

Women’s expressive traditions often rework dominant patriarchal narratives through localized experiential and affective lenses, carving out spaces for female solidarity and emotional truth. In this specific context, the reduced lyrical centrality of Rama can be understood as part of a broader, gendered devapolitik through which folk traditions reorganize inherited, male-centric stories according to local, female emotional priorities. By refusing to sing the praises of Rama’s righteousness while actively mourning Sita’s banishment, these women singers deploy performative abstention to critique the very foundations of the epic’s moral architecture. In stark contrast, Krishna-centred narratives—particularly those involving Radha’s active, transgressive desire and her vocal lamentations of separation (viraha)—often provide a much wider, more forgiving range of emotional and relational expressions for female performers within devotional spaces.

This deeply patterned exclusion can also be situated within the broader, overarching structure of regional devotional organization. Religious traditions in the Indian subcontinent have historically developed through heavily decentralized and locally articulated practices rather than through the imposition of uniform, top-down canonical structures. Within such a federalized framework of faith, different deities naturally assume varying degrees of prominence depending on how seamlessly their foundational narratives align with distinct regional forms of expression, geography, and linguistic heritage. In Bengal, Krishna’s overwhelming centrality within the vast majority of song traditions perfectly reflects this alignment. He is the vernacular sovereign. Rama’s role remains culturally significant but is differently distributed across alternative genres, carefully compartmentalized into specific narrative performances and formalized ritual practices.

The differential prominence of Krishna and Rama must ultimately be read in relation to broader historical and cultural processes of power, making the concept of devapolitik indispensable. Because cultural hegemony operates most effectively through the normalization of certain symbols, values, and practices—subtly shaping what becomes widely accepted, reproduced, and internalized as ‘common sense’—we must critically examine how these narratives function locally. In the broader Indian civilizational context, Rama has historically occupied—and continues to occupy—a pre-eminent place within many national, textual, and pedagogical narratives. He is frequently framed as the ultimate emblem of civilizational unity and moral perfection. However, vibrant regional traditions do not simply, passively replicate these hegemonic hierarchies; they continuously reorganize, resist, and remap them according to local aesthetic priorities and historical loyalties.

In Bengal, this reorganization takes the form of foregrounding devotional practices that align with vernacular aesthetics, thereby sustaining Krishna’s centrality. By prioritizing the līlā over the maryādā, the Bengali folk tradition enacts a soft, yet highly effective, form of counter-hegemony. The refusal to fully integrate Rama into the core lyrical repertoire is a refusal to fully submit to the cultural homogenization radiating from other dominant religio-political centres.

Contemporary political contexts further exacerbate and shape these dynamics, revealing the enduring relevance of devapolitik. In recent decades, Rama has acquired exponentially increased visibility and potent mobilization within national and majoritarian political discourse across large parts of India. While this modern political development does not retroactively determine his historical position within ancient Bengali traditions, it forms the highly charged contemporary cultural environment within which modern devotional practices are negotiated, performed, and understood. Folk traditions, which have always functioned as vital spaces of localized identity, spiritual autonomy, and subaltern expression, may respond to such aggressive macro-political shifts not through direct, polemical opposition, but through a doubling down on selective emphasis.

Devapolitik, therefore, does not describe a crude or antagonistic exclusion of Rama. Rather, it names a patterned organization of devotional emphasis through which regional folk traditions protect the affective core of their cultural life. Rama remains significant within Bengal’s broader religious landscape—in textual, ritual, and theatrical contexts—yet his role within the intimate domains of folk song differs from that of Krishna. This divergence reflects the diversity of devotional expression across genres, social classes, and historical contexts.

Religious life is defined not only by what is believed or written in texts, but by how belief is enacted. The prominence of certain deities within regional traditions reflects the interaction between narrative form, performance practice, and cultural memory. Through the act of performative abstention, the folk tradition reserves its most intimate melodies for the gods who weep alongside the devotee, leaving the gods of power respected, but pointedly unsung.

Decentralizing the divine: How folk traditions reframe the sacred

The silences of particular deities within vernacular traditions do not necessarily indicate absence; rather, they often reflect patterned ways in which devotional cultures organize and prioritize the sacred. In many Bengali folk contexts, especially those shaped by oral performance and song, the relatively limited prominence of Rama can be understood not as omission but as part of a broader process through which scriptural authority is reinterpreted within local expressive forms. This process, which may be described as scriptural decentring, highlights how vernacular traditions negotiate inherited religious narratives by adapting them to affective, performative, and social contexts.

In such traditions, authority does not rest solely with canonical texts but is distributed across practices of performance, memory, and collective participation. As Blackburn and Ramanujan demonstrate, oral traditions in South Asia frequently operate alongside, rather than beneath, textual traditions, generating alternative modes of narrative circulation.Footnote ²¹ In many Bengali folk settings, this dynamic allows devotional meaning to emerge through song, repetition, and embodied experience. Within this framework, divine figures become central not simply because of their scriptural importance but because of their adaptability to performance and emotional expression.

This shift reflects a broader reorientation in the locus of devotion—from textual authority to performative enactment, from formal doctrine to lived practice. The movement may be understood as a transition from śāstra (scriptural tradition) to lok (vernacular or popular practice), where religious meaning is shaped through everyday cultural forms. Such a transition does not imply rejection of scripture; rather, it involves a reconfiguration of its role.

Within this framework, the Ramayana retains its significance as a major narrative tradition, yet its integration into folk song cultures varies across genres. Its epic structure—characterized by linear progression, moral resolution, and narrative closure—operates differently from the episodic and improvisational logic of many folk performance traditions. As Hardy notes, devotional traditions centred on Krishna often emphasize emotional states such as longing and separation, which lend themselves to lyrical expansion and reinterpretation.Footnote ²² These features align closely with the performative structures of Bengali folk music, where affect and repetition play a central role.

The differential prominence of deities in these contexts can also be understood in relation to linguistic and cultural history. The spread of the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi contributed to the centrality of Rama in North Indian devotional publics, while in Bengal, traditions such as padavali kirtan, and Chaitanya-influenced Vaishnavism developed a strong association with Krishna-centred narratives. As Stewart shows, these traditions achieved their authority not solely through textual status but through sustained oral performance and communal participation.Footnote ²³ Scriptural authority, in such cases, becomes performative, emerging through repetition and circulation rather than remaining fixed within canonical texts.

Scriptural decentring, therefore, does not signify the decline of canonical traditions but their transformation within regional contexts. It describes a process through which devotional cultures redistribute sacred authority across multiple sites—textual, performative, and experiential. In Bengali folk traditions, this redistribution produces a plural and dynamic devotional landscape, where the prominence of particular deities is shaped by their compatibility with local expressive forms. The sacred, in this sense, is not fixed within texts alone but is continually reconstituted through song, performance, and collective memory.

Towards a theory of sacred margins: Rethinking devotion beyond the canon

The relatively limited prominence of Rama in many Bengali folk devotional contexts is best understood not as an anomaly but as part of a broader pattern of regional devotional organization—a form of cultural selection that reflects how vernacular traditions prioritize certain modes of devotion over others. Rather than treating this as a gap in an otherwise uniform religious structure, it becomes more productive to read it as a form of cultural selection—one that reflects how vernacular traditions prioritize certain modes of devotion over others.

In many Bengali song-based devotional traditions, Krishna-centred narratives have acquired sustained prominence through their adaptability to musical, emotional, and communal forms of expression. Within such contexts, Rama remains significant within the broader religious landscape, yet his role is differently distributed—more closely associated with textual, ritual, or theatrical traditions than with affect-driven lyrical performance. As McDaniel observes, Bengali devotional practices—particularly those associated with Baul and related traditions—foreground experiential and embodied approaches to spirituality,Footnote ²⁸ creating conditions in which some mythological narratives are more readily integrated into performance than others.

The conceptual vocabulary developed in this article—terms such as mythopoetic dissonance, bhakti federalism, devapolitik, performative abstention, and scriptural decentring—may be understood as heuristic tools for describing these patterns rather than as fixed theoretical claims. Together, they point to a common insight: that devotional traditions are shaped not only by belief but by the forms through which belief is expressed. As Hawley notes, bhakti in practice has always taken multiple regional forms, shaped by language, performance, and local histories.Footnote ²⁹

This pattern can also be situated within wider cultural histories of the region. As Nandy suggests, Indian cultural traditions often accommodate multiple, sometimes competing, modes of religiosity, allowing space for localized reinterpretations. Similarly, Sarkar highlights how regional histories engage with broader religious and political frameworks through processes of negotiation rather than simple adoption.Footnote ³⁰ In Bengal, such negotiation has produced a devotional landscape in which vernacular practices coexist with canonical traditions, each shaping the other without collapsing into uniformity.

These observations invite a reconsideration of bhakti itself. Rather than viewing it as a singular, unified movement, it may be more accurately understood as a constellation of regionally embedded practices that differ in emphasis, form, and affective orientation. As Tharu and Niranjana argue, cultural and religious traditions often evolve through multiple, intersecting trajectories rather than through linear or homogeneous development.Footnote ³¹

Ultimately, what emerges is not a narrative of exclusion but a model of distributed devotion, where different traditions foreground different aspects of the sacred. Bengali folk devotional culture, with its emphasis on musical performance, emotional intensity, and vernacular expression, offers one such configuration. Within it, divine figures are not uniformly central but variably situated, depending on how their narratives align with the expressive and affective structures of the tradition.

A regional devotional theory, therefore, must attend to these variations without reducing them to deficiency or deviation. It must recognize that devotional life is shaped as much by how it is performed and experienced as by what it proclaims. In doing so, it becomes possible to read patterns of prominence and marginality not as gaps to be corrected, but as meaningful indicators of how communities continuously reshape the sacred within their own cultural horizons.