Tradition · village masked festival
Ramman, Saloor Dungra
Also known as Ramman, Bhumiyal Devata, Saloor Dungra, Ramman — Saloor Dungra, Garhwal
A festival held in a single pair of Chamoli villages each April at the Bhumiyal Devata temple: masked dances, a local Ramayana recital, and the reading of the village's own histories. The masks are kept by particular families and worn by particular castes, by hereditary right.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 30.450, 79.470
Worth knowing
UNESCO listed it in 2009, and the listing is unusual in being for the practice of two villages rather than a region — the point being that everything in it, including who may hold which mask and who may drum, is fixed by the social arrangement of those villages and does not exist anywhere else.
Connections (2)
- Patronage networkGopeshwar
Ramman is held at Saloor Dungra in Chamoli district, of which Gopeshwar is the headquarters, and the whole apparatus is village property: particular masks belong to particular families, particular castes drum, and the Bhumiyal Devata is housed for the year in the home of a villager chosen by rotation. UNESCO listed the practice of two villages rather than a region in 2009, precisely because none of it is transferable.
- Shared sacred geographyNanda Devī pilgrimage region
Garhwal's ritual year runs on village deity festivals of this kind, and the Nanda Raj Jat — the goddess carried two hundred and eighty kilometres on foot to the foot of her mountain every twelfth year — is the largest of them. Ramman at Saloor Dungra and the Raj Jat are the small and the great ends of one system, in which a deity belongs to named families and villages rather than to a priesthood.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Ramman (festival)”. Sangeet Natak Akademi documentation; UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage nomination files where the practice is listed.
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