On the road to Phetchaburi: Notes from a journey through the Ramayana, puppets, memory, and Thailand

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06-07-2025

Light and salt
The highway unfurls southwest from Bangkok, the skyline yielding to a gritty industrial sprawl, like flesh giving way to bone. Rusting factories and half-abandoned warehouses line the road. Amid this landscape, roadside shrines appear. Spirit-houses on pedestals, garlanded with wilting marigolds and red soda bottles. Traffic thunders past, but these shrines remain still.
In Samut Sakhon, the road flattens into a horizon of salt fields where rectangular pools mirror the bleached sky, white pyramids of salt crystals luminous in noon light. A lone worker rakes slowly, gathering the crystals into neat rows. His labour, a salve against poverty, appears, at this privileged distance, like meditation. The river behind the fields was once a key trading route, when Phetchaburi's jaggery ferried along these waters, sweetening distant tongues.
Past the flats, in Samut Songkhram, a colossal Buddha rises in suspended creation. Its torso unfinished, scaffolding clinging to his arms, a crane stooped at his shoulder like a mechanical surgeon. The Buddha's face half-formed, gaze impassive, he watches a stream of cars below.
For six years, through many trips like this one, I've followed the Ramayana through Southeast Asia – not as scripture, but as tradition shaped by artists, belief, rural and ecological rhythms, and politics. In Laos, I met a monk who preserves temple carvings of the Ramayana. In Java, a mask-maker recalls staging the Mahabharata by oil lamp in a village without electricity. The epic lives in Prambanan's walls and in Angkor's monumental friezes. I've come now to meet my Wayang Orang dancer friends from Indonesia, who draw tales from the Old Javanese epic the Kakawin Ramayana. They are scheduled to perform at a festival in Phetchaburi, a small town on the western tail of Thailand. But before I reach the summer palace grounds where the dance is being organised, I find another Ramayana.
The Ramayana entered Thai life not as a book but as sculpture, ritual and masked dance. In the 11th to 13th centuries, Khmer-era temples in places like Phimai and Lopburi, now in Thailand, carved scenes of Rama, Hanuman, and Ravana into stone walls. Earlier cultures in the region had absorbed elements of Hindu cosmology through Buddhism, weaving Vaishnavite motifs like Garuda and Vishnu into court and religious art.
Much later, during the Ayutthaya period (1350–1767), the epic took literary form. The Ramakien, the Thai Ramayana, emerged as court literature and performance, often staged through Khon masked dance to illustrate the virtues of kingship and a preordained cosmic order. Though the Ayutthaya texts were lost in the 1767 Burmese sacking of the capital, King Rama I commissioned a new recension in the late 18th century, now considered canonical. He also oversaw the painting of Ramakien murals along the inner walls of the Grand Palace's Temple of the Emerald Buddha. Tourists can still admire this visual epic stretching nearly a kilometre, where demons, gods, and monkey warriors flicker across gold-leafed walls. Finally, in a courtyard in Phetchaburi, I found that a child could lift a bamboo stick and become Rama, for a moment.
A temple courtyard
Light slants golden through tamarind trees as I enter the temple courtyard of Wat Phlapphlachai. A boy taps bamboo sticks in rhythmic sequence, overhead, then on the wooden stage on which he sits. Around him, other children animate Nang Talung puppets hoisted on bamboo sticks: small, intricately carved shadow figures made of cowhide, meeting and battling each other in measured dance. Beside them, a rough ensemble of cymbals, double-headed drums, and the occasional cheer from their teacher fills the space. The scene is a skeletal memory of full piphat orchestras that once filled royal courts. A teacher keeps rhythm with her clapping hands.
To one side, a banana trunk rests on twin stands, incense planted into the trunk like small spears of smoke. The altar cradles the puppets when not in use, silhouettes cut from hide and hoisted on a bamboo stick.
The children perform with grave solemnity: fierce one moment, faltering the next. Then more guidance arrives, from the lady selling Thai sweets in the courtyard, sitting cross-legged in front of her wares. She calls out, 'Hanuman needs to leap! And the beat's too slow.' To my surprise, the teacher nods respectfully, adds her orders to the kids. The rhythm resumes, sharper now, the children adjusting mid-motion. The sweet seller, Pa Bow is satisfied: she used to be a dancer, before she had to settle with her small business. This is rehearsal as a community inheritance: temple-trained, street-polished.
The head trainer is Miss Noi or Noi Romyakorn Erawan, who also joins this rehearsal. In her sixties, with a white blouse and striped sarong, she moves with a family elder's authority. When she steps forward, the children respond. She doesn't raise her voice. She counts the beat. She corrects posture, listens to the other teacher and to Pa Bow, who is organically part of the troupe for the day. When rehearsal concludes, the kids run to Pa Bow's sweet cart. The performance is in the evening, but sweets can start in the afternoon. Each night, Miss Noi stops to pray at the Hanuman temple by the river. 'He protects our riverside,' she says, not bothered with whether he's Hindu or Buddhist, for he is both in the region. He's the one who crossed the oceans.
The boy who carried his friends
Miss Noi, now the caretaker and manager of the famed Phetchaburi puppets, takes me through the temple that serves as both a religious site and an archive. Behind glass panels suspended from the ceiling of the vihaan, or the main assembly hall, hover puppets two centuries old. Gods, demons, Hanuman: all carved during the time of Luang Por Rit, the 19th-century abbot who established a leather carving workshop here during the reign of King Rama V. He hired local craftsmen who produced giant leather shadow puppets based on the Thai Ramakien's iconic characters. The main material was cow leather, but tiger hide was used for hermit figures. Revered figures such as Shiva (Phra Isuan), Miss Noi explains, were sometimes crafted from the hides of cows struck by lightning, creatures touched by heaven's fire. The puppets are cracked now, their natural plant dyes fading, yet they glow under soft spotlights, as if still carrying traces of that lightning.
In the adjacent pavilion, the rehearsal yields to gentler percussion: small chisels tapping cardboard, creation in miniature. Children punch stencils, tracing the arched eyebrows of monkey kings and demon crowns. Miss Noi sits among them. Traditionally, women are not permitted to carve buffalo hide. This was an interdiction against female hands shaping sacred forms. So, she teaches on paper, quietly circumventing the rule. At one table, a mother joins in. She handles the tools with delight, a soft cheer rising as she punches out the curve of Ravana's crown. The teakwood floor is soon speckled with confetti from the paper cut-outs.
For years, Miss Noi prayed to be allowed to work with puppets. Then one day, Khru Veera, the ageing master, fell ill and asked her to take over the training and the shows. 'But I don't break the rules,' she insists. Her own large puppets, which she presents in long, slow movements in a private showing for me the next morning, were carved by her nephew; she only guided the work.
Twenty years ago, she knew the whole Ramakien by heart. Now she is growing old herself. Sometimes she forgets the first word of a chapter and the whole chapter is gone, memory unravelling like poorly woven cloth. She asks a student to help. An eleven-year-old boy named Frame is wearing lady's slippers, a gift from Miss Noi. He rises and his voice lifts above the stencil-tapping. 'Where is she?' he calls in Miss Noi's loose translation, 'Without her, the forest speaks only in cicada clicks. Even the champa turns away its scent. The trees have dried to silence.'
I ask Frame who his favourite character is. Not Rama or Hanuman, but Ravana, Totsakhan. 'He can carry his friends,' he says with a huge triumphant smile. In the battle scene, the other actors climb on Totsakhan's legs or back, and Frame has the strength to hold them. A rice farmer's son, he's taught and fed every weekend by Miss Noi at her guest house, alongside other students she's taken in. Most came from fractured homes or poverty, some were facing issues at school. They now have a new obsession, the Ramakien. Frame's father, who works a job and his fields, has never attended a performance. But Frame's friends are always there, cheering from the wings or standing on his shoulders.
How is an epic kept alive? Does God help define a community? Get conscripted into the service of political assertions? What happens when the gods are shared or don't serve our political ends anymore? There are gentler ways to keep the faith alive – in Phetchaburi, as shared inheritance, passed through incense, crackling leather, and the light click of bamboo.
Nightfall performance
That night, the road near Phetchaburi's palace becomes a theatre. A temporary stage stands at its centre, fronted by a large white screen. The Nang Yai puppets flicker behind the screen. These are larger than Nang Talung, held overhead with two arms by adult dancers, like royalty.
It is flanked by three other screens. Rows of plastic chairs sit mostly empty. A few elders watch. The musicians do not falter or wait for an audience. Xylophones chime, drums pound, cymbals crash, as if for kings or commoners or empty chairs alike.
On screen, a battle rages. Rama's soldiers versus Ravana's demons. Then, a surprise: a motorcycle puppet, complete with engine sounds, weaves through the chaos. Hanuman rides it, wearing a baseball cap. A trickster in traffic, a god updated. Now, an audience gathers, drawn from the shadows, street vendors, and families from the cramped tenements between the palace and the temple. Light laughter ripples through the rows. Children squeal.
Later in the evening, I meet the dancers from Jakarta: Pandu Bhimawan, who plays Hanuman and also performs as a backup western dancer, and Kartika Ampiranti, the troupe's Sita, continuing a Ramayana tradition passed down through her family, both carrying traditions that are generations deep. I want to ask them what keeps the epic alive, but I already know. It's the same thing that stirs a farmer's child in Phetchaburi to lift a puppet and step into the light: not just memory, but the will to make it move.
With thanks to Noi Erawan, the members of the Phetchaburi Wat Phlapphlachai puppet troupe and Miho Watanabe for generously sharing their time and insights.
The author of two novels, Kaushik Barua, won a Sahitya Akademi award for his first novel Windhorse, set in the Tibetan refugee community. This article is based on the research he's conducting for his next book, a nonfiction work on the versions of the Ramayana across Southeast Asia to be published by Penguin Random House in 2025/26. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Open Democracy, Indian Express, and elsewhere. He works with an international development agency and has managed rural development projects across Africa, the Middle East and East Asia.