a ramayana on air. 151
reflected in his use of excerpts from the latter’s performances to introduce several
of his marketed cassettes. As the serial unfolded and as he prepared a permanent edi-
tion for international release, Sagar became increasingly concerned with his own
role as storyteller, frequently appearing in the introductory or concluding portions
of each cassette to comment (in typically rambling kathavacak style) on the events
being presented.^27 Like Tulsidas, he sought to place himself in a long tradition of
Ramayana narrators, claiming little originality for his screenplay (the credits for
each episode cite ten Ramayanas in various languages). Yet Sagar also realized that
he was creating a powerful, independent retelling—he remarked to one reporter
that “video is like writing Ramayan with a camera”^28 —and in the final, extravagant
episode of July 31, he took the ultimate step of placing himself in the narrative, hov-
ering cross-legged on a lotus in the sky above Ayodhya to join assembled deities in
singing the praises of the newly crowned Ram. Critics dismissed this as tasteless
self-aggrandizement, but viewers apparently took it in stride; wasn’t he everywhere
being hailed as the “Tulsidas of the video age”?
In both kathaand ramlila, performers enter a consecrated condition. The oral
commentator, no less than the young Brahman actor, purifies himself through di-
etary and devotional practices and performs rituals before ascending the ex-
pounder’s dais, where he is garlanded and worshipped as a temporary incarnation
of Veda Vyas, the archetypal orator of sacred lore. Sagar was mindful of such con-
ventions, and his widely publicized changes in lifestyle—renouncing alcohol and
tobacco and instituting a vegetarian regimen for the film crew—though mocked as
hypocritical posing by critics, revealed his concern to accede to his audience ’s stan-
dards for epic performers.
The iconography of the serial combinedramlilaconventions with the visual vocab-
ulary firmly established through a century of mass-produced religious art. For the con-
secrated boys oframlila,Sagar substituted adult actors and actresses carefully chosen
to reinforce popular conceptions of each character’s appearance. In casting his princi-
pals, the producer aimed for “exactly that Ram, that Sita, which is in the hearts and
minds and perhaps in the souls of millions of people”—and, one might add, on the walls
of tea shops and the pages of comic books.^29 That he was extraordinarily successful is
attested by numerous posters and calendars featuring garishly colored stills from the se-
rial, or costumed close-ups of Arun Govil with his now-famous enigmatic smile.
The “humanizing” influence of television’s close focus imposed its own restric-
tions on iconography, and certain stock conventions were dispensed with—thus
Ram and Bharat did not appear with blue complexions (though Vishnu did in his