Kanika Pruthi, Piyush Kukrety and Borayin Larios(v0.1, 20 May 2026)
Not every repetition of the name carries the same force.
Elsewhere in the city, “Rām Rām” may pass quietly as a greeting, a prayer, a habit, or a simple gesture. But in other moments the name gathers differently. It is raised through loudspeakers, carried by processions, printed across banners, tied to flags, shouted in crowds, circulated through mobile phones, and repeated until sound becomes atmosphere.
“Jai Śrī Rām.”“Jai Siyā Rām.”“Jai Rām.”
In these settings, chant, image, slogan, and crowd intensify one another. The name no longer simply accompanies movement through the city. It begins to occupy space.
Saffron spreads across the city in fabric, powder, light, paint, flags, clothing, and digital graphics, transforming repetition into a visible atmosphere. Saffron flags gather above intersections and temple entrances. Posters overlap on walls already layered with older images and fading announcements. Processions move through narrow lanes with drums, amplified songs, and chants that echo long after the crowd has passed. Television screens replay mythological scenes beside news broadcasts and political speeches. Stickers bearing the name of Rām appear on motorbikes, storefronts, donation boxes, and mobile phone covers. During festivals, elections, and moments of political mobilization, the visual density of the city shifts perceptibly as certain colors, slogans, and images multiply rapidly across public space.
The political life of the name did not emerge suddenly in the present. Throughout the twentieth century, Rām circulated simultaneously through devotional practice, anti colonial thought, popular cinema, print culture, public ritual, and projects of national imagination. The idea of Rām Rājya moved across these worlds in strikingly different ways. For Mahatma Gandhi, it signified an ethical horizon grounded in justice, restraint, and coexistence rather than a Hindu nation state. Yet the same language would later acquire very different political intensities within projects of Hindu nationalism.
Digital reproduction of archival print used for scholarly and research purposes within the MANTRAMS project.All images reproduced in digital form for non commercial academic and research purposes within the MANTRAMS project.
Popular media both reflects and shapes these transformations. Newspapers, television serials, political broadcasts, films, devotional music, social media, and public spectacles alike circulate competing visions of Rām across domestic and global audiences. Generations rediscovered the epic through televised serializations such as the Rāmāyaṇa broadcast on Doordarshan in the late 1980s, while contemporary digital media continues to fragment and reproduce these narratives across reels, livestreams, memes, clips, and WhatsApp forwards. The same figure appears simultaneously as deity, king, moral exemplar, nationalist symbol, cinematic hero, and political sign.
At moments of political mobilization, repetition itself begins to operate differently. Chants become synchronized across crowds. Loudspeakers extend the reach of the voice far beyond the immediate gathering. Television cameras, recordings, posters, and mobile phones continue to circulate these moments long after the event itself has ended. The name no longer only marks presence. It produces momentum.
Anand Patwardhan’s documentary Rām Ke Nām captured the intensifying atmosphere surrounding the Ayodhyā movement in the years preceding the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Slogans, songs, crowds, and televised imagery transformed the repetition of the name into a powerful instrument of political mobilization. Yet even here, the meaning of the name never remained singular or uncontested.
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Not every instance carries the same force. But none exists outside these histories.
The same name appears in mourning processions, devotional songs, family altars, political slogans, handwritten notebooks, WhatsApp statuses, temple chants, roadside shrines, and mass rallies. It moves between intimacy and spectacle, prayer and performance, devotion and ideology. What is at stake is not only what the name means, but who gets to define its meanings, its publics, and its futures.
