142. performance
caritmanas) performance: ritualized recitation (path), oral exposition (katha),and
dramatic enactment (ramlila). All three involve sustained, episodic recitation of the
text and use it as a foundation for creative elaboration. As will be shown, the con-
ventions and interpretive strategies of these still-popular genres are reflected in the
screenplay of the television serial.
Another background against which the success of the serial must be viewed is the
history of motion pictures in India, particularly the film genre “mythological.”
Drawing on the story traditions of the epics and puranas and imbued with the emo-
tional piety of regional devotional traditions, mythological films have been part of
Indian cinema since the beginning. The pioneer of the Bombay cinema, the Maha-
rashtrian Brahman Dadasaheb Phalke, was inspired by a film on the life of Jesus to
create a series of mythologicals beginning with Rajah Harishchandra (1912)—the
first feature-length film made in India—and including Lanka Dahan (The Burning
of Lanka, based on an episode from the Ramayana, 1917) and Krishna Janma (The
Birth of Krishna, 1919). Although film had been on the Indian scene since 1896
(when the Lumière brothers cinématographe was unveiled at Watson’s Hotel in
Bombay), the actors and themes of early foreign-made films failed to engage the
deepest sympathies of the Indian audience. In Phalke ’s films, however, “the figures
of long-told stories took flesh and blood. The impact was overwhelming. When
Ram appeared on the screen in ‘Lanka Dahan,’ and when in ‘Krishna Janma’ Lord
Krishna himself at last appeared, men and women in the audience prostrated them-
selves before the screen.”^4 The devotional behavior of the audience—so striking to
a foreign observer—would remain a common response to the screening of religious
films and, as we shall see, to the television “Ramayana.” Yet the worship of the
“flesh and blood” (or celluloid or video) image, far from being a consequence of the
“revolutionary” impact of film, was a response with a long indigenous pedigree,
rooted in the ritualized but complete identification of actor with deity that is central
to Hindu folk performance.
Over the years, a modest number of mythologicals scored as major hits with na-
tionwide audiences. Two of the most notable were versions of the Ramayana: Vijay
Bhatr’s Ram Rajya (1943; the only film, it is said, that Mahatma Gandhi would con-
sent to see) and Homi Wadia’s Sampoorna Ramayana (1961). The stronghold of
such pictures, however, has not been the Hindi film capital of Bombay, but regional
production centers that cater to less urbanized audiences.^5 As was the case in the
American film industry, where the 1950s and 1960s saw a flurry of epic religious
films, mythologicals have tended to come in clusters, as one successful film gener-
ated a series of spin-offs. But while the occasional low-budget effort has produced