ABSTRACT
On January 25, 1987, a new program premiered on India’s government-run television network, Doordarshan. Broadcast on Sunday mornings at 9:30 a.m., it represented an experiment for the national network, for it was the first time that the medium of television was to be used to present a serialized adaptation of one of the great cultural and religious epics of India. The chosen work was the Ramayan – the story first narrated in Sanskrit some two millennia ago by the poet Valmiki, and retold numerous times in succeeding centuries by poets in every major regional language, most notably, for north India and for Hindi, in the sixteenthcentury epic Ramcarimanas of Tulsidas (“The Holy Lake of Ram’s Acts”). The television adaptation, produced and directed by Bombay film-maker Ramanand Sagar, was itself an epic undertaking: featuring some 300 actors, it was originally slated to run for fifty-two episodes of 45 minutes each, but had to be extended three times due to popular demand, and eventually grew into a main story in seventy-eight episodes, followed after an interval of several months by a sequel incorporating the events detailed in the seventh book (the Uttarakaa or epilogue) of the Sanskrit epic. Long before the airing of the main story concluded on July 31, 1988, Sagar’s Ramayan had become the most popular program ever shown on Indian television, and something more: a phenomenon of such proportions that intellectuals and policy-makers struggled to come to terms with its significance. Why and how, observers wondered, had this serial – almost universally dismissed by critics as a technically flawed melodrama – elicited such a staggering response? Did its success point once again to the enduring power of sacred narrative to galvanize the masses, or was it rather a cue to the advent of a new force in Indian culture: the mesmerizing power of the television screen? Inevitably, the airing of the serial provoked lively debate over such topics as the relationship of folk and élite traditions, the
marketing of religion and art, the politics of communalism and of government-controlled mass media, and indeed over the message of the Ramayan story itself. In seeking to make a modest contribution to this debate, I will first present a brief account of the making and airing of the serial and of its public reception, and then consider its relationship to the Manas epic (its principal literary source) and to older and ongoing traditions of performance. The concluding section of the essay will examine some critical responses to the serial and the debate it
engendered over the impact of television on Indian culture.2
