a ramayana on air. 149
common in Hindi publications, and many viewers protested that the epic was end-
ing too quickly. When asked by India Today why he could not fit the events of
Valmiki’s final book into the original sequence, Sagar himself ingenuously replied,
“I had no time. I was given only seventy-eight episodes, fifty-two to begin with....
So much had to be omitted.”^23
Perceptible beneath the various responses were varying conceptions of the Ra-
mayana itself. The English-language critics repeatedly referred to it as a “literary
treasure” that Sagar was butchering by dragging it out to enhance his own and the
network’s profits. Such critics, who often made reference to C. Rajagopalachari’s
three-hundred-page retelling or R. K. Narayan’s even shorter synopsis, could note
that films like Sampoorna Ramayana had reduced the whole story to three hours, and
that the modern ballet Ramlila, presented in Delhi each autumn, offered the epic to
urbanites and foreign tourists as a four-hour spectacle. For audiences accustomed to
such handy condensations, the pace of the serial was irksome indeed. Yet there exist
other performance genres in which revered scriptures like the Manas are treated less
as bounded texts than as guidelines for imaginative elaboration, and if a storyteller’s
patrons and audience are willing (as Sagar’s were), such performances can be ex-
tended almost indefinitely. Indeed, the television version’s rambling main narrative,
weighing in at just under sixty hours, is far from being the longest popular seriali-
zation. The ramlilaof Ramnagar, which tells roughly the same story, averages three
hours per night for thirty-one nights and has been playing to enraptured audiences
for a century and a half. And an oral expounder like Ramnarayan Shukla, who pro-
ceeds through the epic in daily installments at the Sankat Mochan temple in Bam-
ras, may take more than seven hundred hours (i.e., two years or more) to complete
a single “telling”—a feat that makes Sagar’s effort seem like a condensation. Since,
as I will argue, the ramlilaand kathatraditions have greatly influenced the style and
content of the television adaptation, summarizing some of their conventions would
be useful here.
In Vaisnavakatha(narration or storytelling), a performer, usually called a
kathavacakorvyas,is invited by an individual patron or community to retell or dis-
course on a sacred story; a performer who specializes in the TulsiManas(the most
popular text forkathain North India today) is sometimes called aRamayani.Until
recently, such storytellers were often hired on a long-term basis to narrate the en-
tire epic in daily installments, usually in the late afternoon when the day’s work
was done. However, most patrons now favor shorter programs of fixed duration
(such as nine, fifteen, or twenty-one days), in which an expounder discourses on
only a small section of the text. In both styles ofkatha,the source text serves