Ramayana: Historicizing Myth and Mythologizing History 65was an amalgamation of all the major Ramayanas, and the new laundered
national version was presented through the state-sponsored high-tech
unifier, Doordarshan, in the "national language," Hindi. All in all, it was a
modern national-integration project of the liberalizing state.
An added attraction to this modern storytelling project was the rigid
one-way transaction that put the state at a tremendous advantage. Tradi-
tionally, as Anuradha Kapur explains, the various Ramlila (Ram's play) the-
atric performances include almost the whole town and last over a month,
where the Ramcaritmanas is both sung by the Ramayanis and enacted by
the actors concurrently. While the less dramatic parts are just sung, the
dramatic portions are both sung and enacted. The text is laid open to see-
ing, reading, and hearing, and the performance makes its own text. The
audiences have a choice: the eye or the ear; to see the acting or to hear the
Ramcaritmanas. (Many do both, and some simply fall asleep.)
Above all, as Kapur points out, there is "play" in the whole performance:
for instance, in constructing supplementary theatric images so as to add
and subtract from the shown, and in the effortlessness and humor with
which the grotesque and the sublime are reconciled. There is also play-
fulness and imagination "in the way meaning is given to the actors and
gathered from them." In other words, there is ample space and avenue
for play for everyone involved in the performance. The audiences enter
into a transaction when they not only receive from the actors but also give
something—laughter, tears, booing, applause—in return, and alter the
texture of the performance. The performance goes beyond the spatial or
architectural frames, and the audiences are allowed to construct their own
images and complete the picture represented on stage. This human voli-
tion, "the intervention of the imaginative will," makes theatrical objects
volatile, and the transformation requires creativity of sight, or the ability
to construct.^62
Erasing this human volition and cultural articulations altogether, and
eliminating the public space with an opportunity for interpretation and
emphasis, the grand high-tech national Ramlila dumped the entire popu-
lation of the country into one group of passive and pious audience and
"schooled" them for the emerging "new era" of liberalization and global-
ization. The religious sensitivities of the people came in quite handy. Con-
currently, the "Syndicated Hinduism" that had been in the making for a
century or so emerged more clearly at this time with more political rather
than religious vigor and strong sympathy for the new social class.^63
Sagar's serial, to some extent, cemented these forces together. Although
the epic contained "fundamental truths" for Sagar, he defended the showy
grandeur and heavily made-up people by saying that his audience would
have their own vision of Ram and Ram's palace, and that "Ramayan
screened with the background of a plain blank wall would be unaccept-
able to these people." The epic that had been passed down to them "is full