Delhiwale: This way to Ramlila Maidan

Ramlila Maidan in Delhi hosts annual Ramlila performances, a cultural tradition reflecting history, community, and the lives of its diverse audience.

As part of our ‘Walled City dictionary’ series, that is chronicling every significant Old Delhi place.

The Ramlila at Ramlila Maidan in 2023. (HT Photo)

Bhagwan Ram exiled. Maa Sita abducted. In the end, sinful Ravan punished.

As is the tradition every year around the Dusshera, hundreds of Ramlilas are currently being staged in Delhi. This theatrical representation of Bhagwan Ram’s epic revolves around both mortals and immortals, as familiar to us as our own family and friends. One of the places hosting the Ramlila is Ramlila Maidan, the vast grounds outside the Walled City’s vanished walls. The Maidan’s Ramlila began on Thursday evening. (This photo of the crowded audience is from the previous year’s Ramlila).

Once upon a time there was no Ramlila Maidan. The whole area was a keekar jungle teeming with geedar. This is the inherited memory of one Old Delhi dweller. Another dweller’s story talks of a garden called Shahji ka Baag, which was later turned into a vast ground, which at some point started to stage the Ramlila.

Purani Dilli businessman Fareed Mirza recalls his childhood days of being a part of the Maidan’s Ramlila audience. “Back then (in the 1970s), Ramlila would start long before the sunset. Winters too would arrive much earlier than they do now. We would wrap ourselves in blankets as we would walk from our home in Mohalla Qabristan to Ramlila Maidan.”

During the rest of the year, the Maidan would serve as a much-needed ground for the people of congested Old Delhi, where the only open public spaces tend to be the courtyards of temples and mosques. Boys would play gilli danda, making bets on who could hit the gilli over to the furthest distance. Young men exercised in a wrestling akhada nestled towards a corner of the Maidan. The goatherds would bring their goats to the grassy Maidan: the goats would graze, the herders would play taash. It is said that quite a few Walled City wale used to sleep in the Maidan during the unbearable summer nights.

Over the decades, Ramlila Maidan has hosted iconic women and men of our times—Prime Minister Nehru, Queen Elizabeth, Lata Mangeshkar, Jai Prakash Narayan, and so on. The political rallies held here have occasionally set off tumultuous reverberations across the nation. That said, the Maidan’s peripheries stubbornly stay on the margins, sheltering the homeless rickshaw pullers and daily-wage labourers. Each of these men being the protagonist of his own unique but anonymous lila.