Dhun / Dhūnī

The exhibition Dhun / Dhūnī: The Fires of the Name emerged through encounters with different yet deeply connected environments of repetition.

One encounter unfolds through movement and circulation: the dense presence of the name of Rām across the streets, shrines, markets, vehicles, posters, recordings, and media environments of contemporary Vārāṇasī. Here, the name appears in fragments and recurrences, returning across surfaces with such frequency that repetition itself becomes a mode of presence.

The other gathers around fire. Among Rāmānandī ascetics encountered during fieldwork at the Kumbha Melā and elsewhere in North India, repetition takes the form of bodily discipline, endurance, breath, ash, heat, and prolonged proximity to flame. In practices of dhūnī tap, ascetics undertake prolonged disciplines of ritual heat, at times sitting within circles of smouldering cow dung beneath the intense summer sun while silently repeating the name of Rām. Often pursued over many years and across recurring ritual contexts such as the Kumbha Melā, these practices gradually subject the body to increasing thermal intensity. Here, repetition does not spread across urban surfaces, but concentrates inward through pressure, exposure, exhaustion, and ritual transformation.

What brought these materials together was our interest in the different ways repetition takes form across human bodies, surfaces, atmospheres, gestures, and environments. Images, recordings, fieldnotes, devotional objects, fragments of conversation, and acts of return gradually accumulated into a shared field of materials.

The exhibition itself emerged as an attempt to communicate these environments through an immersive and multisensory experience. Visitors encountered the name not only through text and image, but through sound, smell, texture, movement, spatial arrangement, and bodily proximity. Chants echoed across rooms. Smoke, fragrance, and ash lingered as material traces. Images, objects, recordings, and documentation of the exhibition’s own installation process were arranged not simply to illustrate fieldwork, but to evoke some of the sensory worlds through which the name of Rām is experienced, repeated, carried, and inhabited. Visitors moving through the installation also became part of this unfolding environment of circulation, attention, and encounter.

While practices such as dhūnī tap are often performed in near silence, with repetition carried internally through breath, concentration, and bodily endurance amidst intense smoke and heat, the exhibition’s soundscapes functioned as sensory and curatorial mediations rather than documentary reproductions of ritual conditions. The use of layered sound fragments, loops, and Super 8 film sought not to reproduce the ritual directly, but to evoke atmospheres of repetition, memory, saturation, and return.

Rather than presenting research as a finished argument, the exhibition approached fieldwork as something unfolding through repetition, selection, arrangement, and encounter. Sounds returned in loops across rooms and recordings. Images moved between archive and wall. Fragments gathered slowly into patterns. The installation itself became part of the research process: a space in which materials from different field sites could be juxtaposed, revisited, and experienced collectively.

Developed within Task Force 3 (“Materiality of Mantras”) of the MANTRAMS project, which examines how mantras become materialised, visualised, embodied, circulated, and lived across South Asia, the exhibition and accompanying multimedia essays approach mantra not only as sound or text, but as something seen, handled, worn, repeated, circulated, and inhabited across everyday life.

The two multimedia essays that follow, Dhun and Dhūnī, emerge from this wider field of encounters. Together they trace how the name of Rām moves across devotional, political, ascetic, domestic, commercial, digital, and funerary worlds: sometimes through circulation and accumulation, sometimes through concentration, discipline, and fire.

What emerges is necessarily partial and processual. The essays do not attempt to stabilise the name into a singular interpretation. Instead, they remain with the textures, recurrences, frictions, and afterlives through which Rām continues to move.