a ramayana on air. 141
mayan 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 television? Inevitably the airing of the serial provoked lively debate about such
topics as the relationship of folk and elite traditions, the marketing of religion and
art, the politics of communalism and of government-controlled mass media, and in-
deed the message of the Ramayana story itself.
In seeking to make a modest contribution to this debate, I first present a brief ac-
count of the making and airing of the serial and of its public reception, and then
consider its relationship to the Ramcaritmanas epic (its principal literary source) and
to older and ongoing traditions of performance. The concluding section of this
essay examines some critical responses to the serial and the debate it engendered
over the impact of television on Indian culture.^1
SUNDAY MORNINGS WITH RAM
To suggest that the making of a television serial began several millennia ago may
appear to risk mimicking studio promotional hype, yet it must be observed that the
success of India’s most popular serial derives largely from the enduring appeal of
the narrative tradition on which it draws. Although the textual and historical prob-
lems associated with Valmiki’s Sanskrit rendering of the Ram story have fascinated
generations of scholars, only recently has significant research focused on the de-
velopments that, from the eleventh century onward, contributed to the proliferation
of the devotional cult of Ram in northern India and created a religious climate in
which its ultimate vernacular vehicle—the epic Ramcaritmanas—could acquire
throughout much of the region the status of preeminent text for religious perform-
ance.^2 Elsewhere I have traced some of the factors contributing to the adoption of
this text by ever wider audiences for both ritual and entertainment purposes—fac-
tors that included the patronage ofrajas and zamindars in the post-Mughal period
and of urban mercantile groups during the latter half of the nineteenth century, as
well as the advent of print technology, the rise of literacy among the middle classes,
and the ongoing effort to define an orthodox Hindu identity.^3 One result of these
trends was the proliferation of increasingly standardized genres ofManas (Ram-