In my intervention, I stated the great impact of the Ramayana and Ramlila enactments on the life of the people of Mauritius. Mauritius is known as the country of the Ramayana where Ramlilas were enacted from the very arrival of the Girmitias in every baithka and Street Shows, in village squares known as Indra Sabhas.
Ramlila in Trinidad
However, in the West Indian islands of Trinidad and Tobago’s Divali Nagar, Ramlila takes a more grandiose and spectacular approach. It is indeed remarkable that there is a National Ramlila Council in Trinidad, which in collaboration with the Faculty of Humanities and Education, University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine, T&T, recently hosted a two-day First International Ramleela Conference from July 12-14, 2013 which was attended by several Mauritian scholars and heads of institutions including Raju Mohit Officer-in-Charge of the Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund. What is more praiseworthy is that Trinidad’s Ramlila has been acclaimed as Intangible Cultural Heritage of World Patrimony by UNESCO in 2008.
We have in Mauritius a long tradition and culture of Ramlila enactment. But since a few years, there has been a slow degradation in the quality and grandeur and the very concept of culture. The time has come to encourage the revival of the Ramlila pageants in the face of a degenerating value system, with appropriate incentives and prizes.
There is already a rich tradition of Ramayana singing on jhal and dholak, encouraged by the Mauritius Sanatan Dharma Temples Federation and the Ministry of Arts and Culture. Hundreds of women Ramayana singing groups have been thriving over the past three decades. Some of these winning groups have benefited from cultural tours in India with the help and support of the Indian High Commission, the ICCR and Government of India.
We would wish to reiterate here the request that some of the Ramlila experts of India be invited for a joint collaboration between India and Mauritius to train and mount a local Ramlila pageant. By default, they could equip financially the numerous local groups and institutions to stage Ramlilas all over the villages and towns instead of importing stale, pale, Bollywood imitative backyard troupes for Divali shows.