9. A Ramayana on Air
“All in the (Raghu) Family,”
A Video Epic in Cultural Context
philip lutgendorf
Rama incarnates in countless ways, and there
are tens of millions ofRamayanas.
tulsidas, Ramcaritmanas 1.33.6140
This essay was previously published as “All in the (Raghu) Family: A Video Epic in Cultural Con-
text,” in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, ed. Lawrence A. Babb and Susan
S. Wadley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 217–30.
On January 25, 1987, a new program premiered on Doordarshan, India’s government-
run television network. 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 cul-
tural and religious epics of India. The chosen work was the Ramayana—the story
first narrated in Sanskrit some two millennia ago by the poet Valmiki and retold nu-
merous times in succeeding centuries by poets in every major regional language,
most notably, for North India and for Hindi, in the sixteenth-century epic Ramcar-
itmanas (The Holy Lake of Ram’s Acts) of Tulsidas. The television adaptation,
produced and directed by Bombay filmmaker Ramanand Sagar, was itself an epic
undertaking. Featuring some three hundred actors, it was originally slated to run for
fifty-two episodes of forty-five minutes each but had to be extended three times be-
cause of 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 Uttarakanda, or epilogue) of the Sanskrit
epic. (See figure I at the Web site http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/vasu/loh.))
Long before the airing of the main story concluded on July 31, 1988, Sagar’s Ra-