a ramayana on air. 147
equipped with television sets, where driver and passengers piled out to watch the
episode. On occasion, trains were delayed when passengers refused to leave plat-
form sets until a broadcast was over.^12
Many articles described the devotional activities that developed around the
weekly “auspicious sight” (darfan) of epic characters:
In many homes the watching ofRamayan has become a religious ritual, and the
television set...is garlanded, decorated with sandalwood paste and vermillion,
and conch shells are blown. Grandparents admonish youngsters to bathe before
the show and housewives put off serving meals so that the family is purified and
fasting before Ramayan.^13Local press reports detailed instances of mass devotion: a Banaras newspaper reported
on a sweet shop where a borrowed television was set up each week on a makeshift altar
sanctified with cow dung and Ganges water, worshipped with flowers and incense, and
watched by a crowd of several hundred neighborhood residents, who then shared in the
distribution of 125 kilos of sanctified sweets(prasad),which had been placed before the
screen during the broadcast.^14 Such ritualized public viewings were not uncommon:
throughout the country, crowds gathered in front of video shops to watch display sets,
and some community groups undertook to place sets in public areas. During the final
months of the serial, electronics shops reported a dramatic surge in television sales, and
all available rental sets were engaged for the crucial Sunday morning slot—sometimes
by whole villages that pooled their resources to allow residents to seeRamayan.Spo-
radic incidents of violent protest resulted from power failures during the weekly
screening, as when an angry mob in the Banaras suburb of Ramnagar (home of North
India’s most acclaimedramlilapageant) stormed and set fire to an electrical substation.^15
The duration of the serial itself became a cause célèbre. Doordarshan initially
contracted for fifty-two episodes, but as the story unfolded it became clear both that
the audience did not want it to end on schedule and that the pace of the narrative
would not allow it to; indeed, by late summer of 1987 it appeared that a termination
the following January would leave viewers stranded somewhere in the fifth of the
epic’s seven books. The slow pace consistently annoyed critics, who complained that
Sagar was deliberately drawing out the story to increase his profits, but a public out-
cry coupled with the financial windfall from advertisers prompted Mandi House to
grant two extensions of thirteen episodes each. But as the battle for Lanka raged
during June and early July of 1988, concerns were again voiced as to whether the