20. introduction
In the essay that follows Philip Lutgendorf shows us what happened when the
Ramayanamoved into the medium of television. For eighteen months in 1987 and
1988, the writer-producer Ramanand Sagar succeeded in gluing the eyes of the en-
tire nation to the screen on Sunday mornings. Lutgendorf plays close attention to
the changes that occurred when Tulsidas’s sixteenth-century Hindi Ramayanamade
its transit from stage (as in Banaras) to screen, but he also comments on the sur-
prising continuities from medium to medium. Sometimes the new medium was un-
able to solicit audience participation in the same way the svarupsdo as they move
around the ramlilagrounds at Ramnagar, but television also made it possible to
breathe new life into certain beloved moments in Tulsidas’s epic, particularly those
that required close-up intimacy to be savored. To the surprise of many, the TV Ra-
mayanasucceeded in generating its own brand of ritual etiquette. Television sets
were often garlanded in preparation for the weekly episode, and the producers
paced the performance to allow for the long moments ofdarshanthat worshippers
would have expected in other settings. Since 1988 television has become a major
force in the daily life of countless Hindus living in India. The early morning hours
are packed with discourses, meditation, and religious singing: some of Hinduism’s
best-known preachers—Murari Bapu, Asaran Bapu, Kripalu, Jai Guru Dev—ad-
dress the public there on a daily basis. As for Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana,it ’s gone
on to a happy afterlife in video shops around the globe.
The final essay in part 4 deals with medium and performance of quite a different
kind: religious possession. As this term and its correlates in Indian languages imply,
there is a certain way in which we are approaching this important aspect of lived
Hinduism backwards by grouping it with other examples of performance. Here,
after all, there is apparently no script. Kathleen Erndl, in introducing possession as
she has encountered it in the Punjab, says this quite explicitly. Preferring to see ac-
tuality here rather than acting, she remarks that it “presents the greatest challenge
to the Western worldview...to meet the Goddess face-to-face.” Yet like others
who have reported on the reality of possession in various Hindu settings, only some
of which occur as part of larger staged events we would naturally call dramas, Erndl
acknowledges that the Punjabi women possessed by Durga do respond to dramatic
protocols. Their performances in the course of all-night vigils called jagratas are not
as unscripted as they might seem. Still, in understanding this whole process it makes
a big difference to be aware, as Erndl says, that “Hinduism does not draw a clear di-
viding line between divine and human; gods can become humans, and humans can
become gods.”
This observation provides the perfect segue to the next section of this volume,