Kanika Pruthi, Piyush Kukrety and Borayin Larios(v0.1, 20 May 2026)
Who is invoked when the name of Rām is spoken?
The question appears simple at first, yet the answers multiply quickly. Across Vārāṇasī, the name moves through radically different forms and environments: as image, chant, slogan, mantra, memory, greeting, vibration, political sign, handwritten repetition, bodily discipline, and devotional longing. Sometimes Rām appears vividly embodied: blue-skinned, crowned, bow in hand beside Sītā, Lakṣmaṇa, and Hanumān. Some other times the name circulates with little or no image at all, repeated through sound, breath, rhythm, or interior practice until language itself begins to loosen from fixed form.
These movements are often described through the distinction between saguṇ (with qualities or form) and nirguṇ (without qualities or form). Within many bhakti (devotional) traditions, saguṇ devotion approaches the divine through image, embodiment, narrative, personality, and relational intimacy, while nirguṇ traditions emphasize the formless, unmanifest, and ineffable dimensions of the divine beyond representation.
Yet in practice these categories rarely remain separate.
In Vārāṇasī, the name constantly crosses the boundaries that doctrine attempts to stabilize. A roadside shrine may center on a vividly colored image of Rām while devotional songs drifting from a nearby loudspeaker speak of the divine as beyond all form and description. A name written repeatedly across a notebook page slowly becomes pattern and abstraction. A chant directed toward a recognizable deity gradually dissolves into rhythm, breath, and sound.
The city itself sits within a much wider network of devotional circulation extending across the subcontinent. Pilgrims, ascetics, singers, manuscripts, performances, and sectarian traditions have long moved between South and North India, carrying different understandings of bhakti, embodiment, language, and divine presence with them. The many forms of Rām encountered in Vārāṇasī emerge from these layered movements and encounters rather than from a single coherent tradition.
In some contexts, Rām appears as maryādā puruṣottam, the ideal king and moral exemplar of the epic Rāmāyaṇa tradition. In others, the name points toward something less fixed: a sound, a vibration, a formless divine presence moving beyond image and identity. The same name may invoke intimacy and embodiment in one setting while moving toward abstraction and transcendence in another.
These distinctions are not only theological. They take shape materially through everyday acts of use and perception. Images are touched, carried, garlanded, printed, laminated, and repaired. Names are sung, whispered, written, visualized, and repeated silently. The divine moves between sound and surface, between icon and vibration, between the visible and the unseen.
What emerges is not a stable opposition between form and formlessness, but a field of overlapping orientations constantly negotiated through lived practice. It is within these movements that figures such as Tulsīdās and Kabīr continue to resonate so powerfully, each approaching the name of Rām through different devotional and poetic worlds while refusing to reduce it to a single form.
