Dhun

In Vārāṇasī, the name of Rām is difficult to escape. It appears even before one actively begins to search for it: painted onto walls darkened by smoke and time, stamped onto the backs of rickshaws and trucks, hanging from rearview mirrors, printed onto cheap laminated posters curling at the corners, repeated across stickers pressed onto doors, counters, scooters, tea stalls, and shop fronts. The name surfaces on plastic keychains beside packets of incense, handwritten into notebooks, traced repeatedly with fingers across metal grids cut into its shape, exchanged casually in a greeting of “Rām Rām,” amplified through loudspeakers that dissolve into static before returning again from somewhere deeper within the narrow alleys.

Moving through the city during fieldwork in 2025 and 2026, the research team rarely walked more than a few steps without being met by the name again. Sometimes carefully inscribed, sometimes hastily stamped, sometimes repeated so densely that language begins to collapse into pattern. Before it is heard as chant, Rām is already seen, touched, handled, worn, and carried. The name slips constantly between devotion and commerce, intimacy and spectacle, routine and performance. It gathers differently in each place, taking on new textures as it moves.

This essay begins from that condition of saturation rather than from origin, doctrine, or singular meaning. It follows Rām nām through passing encounters and everyday repetitions: through streets and markets, domestic shrines and temple spaces, songs, gestures, objects, inscriptions, media environments, and moments of interruption. The focus is not only on theology or textual tradition, but on lived religion, materiality, and popular culture: on the ways names acquire force through repetition, circulation, and everyday use.

Developed alongside the exhibition Dhun / Dhūnī: The Fires of the Name, and emanating from ongoing research within Task Force 3 of the MANTRAMS project, the essay continues an intentionally open and processual approach to research. Rather than presenting fieldwork as a finished conclusion, both the exhibition and the multimedia essays foreground some of the movements through which research itself takes shape: collecting fragments, retracing routes, listening repeatedly to recordings, following images and sounds across surfaces and media, noticing recurrences that initially seemed incidental.

The multimedia format therefore becomes part of the method itself. Images, sounds, and fieldwork materials are not included simply to illustrate preexisting arguments, but to participate in the production of meaning. The aim is not to stabilize Rām nām into a single interpretation, but to trace the environments through which the name circulates and becomes lived across devotional, political, domestic, commercial, digital, and funerary worlds.

What follows is not a single narrative of the name, but a movement through the spaces in which it gathers presence and force. Rām’s name becomes the thread moving across these worlds, linking spaces that do not always neatly align, yet remain connected through repetition, circulation, and return.