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Dr Vayu Naidu – The Evergreen Epic: Ramayana as Forest Literature and its Reinventions
Ramayana was told and sung in regional dialects and languages by itinerant storytellers travelling across India. Festivals created infrastructures for pageants, at rituals in temples and in homes for celebrating Diwali, and this story spread with interpolations. It also travelled across the seas with tradesmen and craftsmen across to south east Asia. Ramayana offers a complex matrix of statecraft, relationships between parents, siblings, men and women through its predominantly linear narrative. More than any other epic, the relationship between humans, animals, and plants in the forest is very marked in this exploration of Ramayana. It is the epic that travelled across land and sea, as metaphor and with migrants. The Living Legend draws every being is connected, sustaining the equilibrium of love as life between conflicting forces.
Dr Vayu Naidu has followed the different tellings of Ramayana in rural and urban location. Her transposition of the epic as Storytelling in English for theatre audiences began in 1988, and her research methods experiment with Indian aesthetics and British Contemporary performance with the AHRC. She has completed more than 2000 performances of telling Ramayana. Sita’s Ascent is the sequel to this, also published by Penguin. The Sari of Surya Vilas (Speaking Tiger books/Affirm Press: India – Australia) features the importance of oral tales in pre-independent India. Manimekalai is a new composition that the Chettinad Heritage Festival commissioned her to compose and perform in 2025, featuring the Sangam Tamil literary epic.
This evening she will talk on her discovery of what makes the forest so significant in the epic and how oral traditions are the swiftest technology of keeping the philosophy alive and why it means so much now. Combining performance practice with a source from the Yoga Vasistha Sara for sadhana on Advaita philosophy, The Living Legend is part of the oral tradition about the flora and the flaming spirit of this epic. It endeavours to bridge the original context of an epic age with the contemporary listener’s daily reality in the 21st century.
She was Founder and Artistic Director of Vayu Naidu Intercultural Storytelling Theatre funded by Arts Council England. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and an Editorial Member of Writers Mosaic. She is Professor of Practice at SOAS. She teaches Indian Theatre Influences at RADA. On the Advisory Committee of the Chelsea Physic Garden, and as a volunteer, her research on plant life is owed to her work there. www.vayunaidu.com. As a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, this is her first talk.
Free and open to all at 14 Stephenson Way, NW1 2HD
To join us online email: mb@royalasiaticsociety.org