Ramlila is not one production but a landscape of them, from neighbourhood stages with amateur casts to the great civic cycles of the Gangetic towns, and UNESCO's inscription named the strongholds: Ramnagar and Varanasi, Vrindavan, Ayodhya, Sattna and Madhubani among them. Ramnagar is the tradition's benchmark. Under the patronage of the maharajas of Banaras since the early nineteenth century, its lila runs thirty-one days, and it stages the epic across the whole town: permanent sites stand in for Ayodhya, Janakpur, the forest, Lanka, and the audience migrates nightly with the story, tens of thousands walking from episode to episode behind the svarupas, so that watching becomes pilgrimage and the town becomes the epic's map.
The maharaja attends in state as the first servant of Rama, and the whole cycle proceeds without amplification, by lamplight and voice, a deliberate conservatism its devotees prize. Elsewhere the form has adapted freely: urban lilas use loudspeakers, film songs and professional troupes, diaspora communities from Trinidad to Fiji and Mauritius stage their own cycles, descendants of indentured labourers who carried the Ramcharitmanas with them, and television broadcasts of the epic sit alongside rather than replacing the live tradition. The common thread is participation: Ramlila is produced by committees of townspeople, funded by subscription, and acted largely by amateurs whose service is itself devotion, a civic liturgy in which a community annually retells the story by which it understands the victory of good.