The Radheshyam Ramayan in Text and Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract A new Ramayan for a new age. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, a brahmin poet and singer-storyteller, Pandit Radheshyam Kathavachak (1890-1963), rewrote and published the classic story of the Ramayan with stunning success. Guided by Tulsidas’s sixteenth-century Rāmcaritmānas in Avadhi, immersed in the sociopolitical climate of Gandhi’s India, and shaped by technological advancements of the early twentieth century, Kathavachak composed his religious epic, the Radheshyam Ramayan, to update the story for modern audiences and to sing and explicate it in devotional concerts (kathā). To this end, he initially composed his Ramayan in the vernacular, a mixed register of Hindi-Urdu, a decision he would come to regret. Based on extensive literary, archival, and ethnographic research, and the observation of performances, The Radheshyam Ramayan in Text and Performance takes readers on a journey through Kathavachak’s hometown of Bareilly and his cosmopolitan world of Hindi letters and performance, unravelling the mysteries of why Kathavachak heavily revised his Ramayan over many years, how two other authors assisted him in writing it, and how the work quickly made its way onto Ramlila stages all over North India. The book also considers Kathavachak’s Ramayan in contrast to that of Tulsidas, and includes vignettes of actors who have recited verses from the Radheshyam Ramayan in the annual Ramlila festival. Ultimately, this book illustrates how Kathavachak contributed to the “epic modernity” of India.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".