The Life of Hinduism

(Barré) #1

a ramayana on air. 153


character—each bhav of classical aesthetic theory—was conveyed visually, and in
scenes involving many characters (such as the assembly in Chitrakut, when Bharat
begs Ram to return to Ayodhya), the camera focused in turn on the face of each
principal to record his or her response—grief, surprise, anger, calm—to each new
development. Though appallingly overstated by contemporary Western standards,
this technique is consonant with the mime or abhinay of indigenous genres like
Kathakali and Bharat Natyam, in which the audience is expected to focus intently on
the performer’s facial expressions and gestures. The television screen is particularly
suited to this kind of close-up mime, and Sagar exploited its potential to allow his
viewers an experience of intense communion with epic characters.


NOTES

All references to the epic are to the popular Gita Press version (Poddar 1938; reprinted
in numerous editions). Numbers refer to book (kand), stanza (understood as a group of
lines ending in a numbered couplet), and individual line within a stanza. When a stanza
concludes with more than one couplet, these are indicated with roman letters (e.g., 12a,
12b, etc.). Throughout this chapter, the term Ramayana is used to refer to the overall tra-
dition of stories about Ram. The title of the Sanskrit epic of Valmiki is similarly translit-
erated Ramayana, and the Hindi epic of Tulsidas is generally referred to (as in Hindi
sources) as the Manas.Proper nouns from Indic languages are transliterated without di-
acritics, and certain common romanizations are used—e.g., Doordarshan for durdarfan.



  1. I am grateful to Cynthia Ann Humes, who collected articles on the serial for me
    (with the help of a newspaper vendor in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh) while carrying out re-
    search at the Vindhyachal Devi temple in 1987–1988. I am also indebted to Chitranjan
    Datt of the Landour Language School, who assisted me in translating several articles.

  2. Whaling 1980; Bakker 1986; van der Veer 1988.

  3. Lutgendorf 1989, 1991.

  4. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980, 15.

  5. A film often cited as one of the finest and most popular of the genre was the
    Marathi-language Sant Tukaram (1936). In the 1960s and 1970s, the Telugu film
    industry churned out a steady diet of mythologicals, featuring the star whose
    portrayal of epic characters in forty-two musicals (he played Ram in six films,
    Ravan in three others, and in one—through the miracle of the camera—both
    roles at once) earned him the leadership of a political party—N. T. Rama Rao.

  6. Mazumdar 1988, 2.

  7. India Today’s critic carped that “everything seems to be wrong with Ra-
    mayan....[It] has all the finesse of a high school function” (Bhargava 1987, 70). The

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