Twenty-five years ago, the Mahabharata was aired on Doordarshan which changed the rule of the game for Indian television. Utpal Kumar wonders if that was all about the show, and what if it had been launched before Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana
Growing up in Bihar in the 1980s had its charm — and so had its challenges. Things were worsening but the State had not yet hit the nadir. life was easy and innocence still in the air. But it was Sundays that would be particularly exciting. Anxiously we would wait for the day, and when it came we were often grappled with just one issue: What if the power went away — a recurrent phenomenon even to dateIJ One day electricity went just when Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana was about to begin. Disgusted,
I went to the roof seeking divine assistance to bring the power back, while simultaneously looking at a bulb hanging on an electric pole standing next to my house. lo and behold, the bulb started glowing in no time. Thereafter whenever there was a power cut, I would just go upstairs and stare at the pole. I wasn’t lucky at other times, however, but my faith would always take me there. Then one day I heard that a group of agitated people had burnt down an electricity substation. There was no power cut in the area thereafter, particularly on the Sunday morning. People in adjoining areas took the cue and gheraoed their respective substations. Soon the power situation in the entire region improved dramatically — at least for an hour between 9 am and 10 am when lord Rama and Krishna walked amongst us!
Such was the sway of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata that the streets in cities across the country looked deserted every Sunday morning. In rural areas, people would walk miles just to get to the nearest house with a television set. A bride would prefer to go missing for her wedding, because it clashed with the timing of the epic show. Even politicians — otherwise desperate to grab ministerial posts — would ask for their swearing-in ceremony to be delayed so that they didn’t miss the telecast. Interestingly, the show had to be shifted once to the evening so that there was a good voter turnout in the lok Sabha election! Even for kids, playing the characters of the Ramayana, particularly Hanuman’s, was a rage, and one would often hear them screaming: “Jai Sri Rama.”
Twenty-five years after this hysteria-like situation generated first by the Ramayana and then the Mahabharata, it’s interesting to note that the telecast of the two epics happened by chance. Bhaskar Ghose, the Director General of Doordarshan between 1986 and 1988, recalls in his memoirs that in 1985 Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had asked Information & Broadcasting Minister VN Gadgil and Secretary SS Gill to “broadcast serials that depicted the values enshrined in our ancient texts and philosophy, the kind of values that were contained in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana”. Gill interpreted it as the Prime Minister’s desire to see the epics being telecast on Doordarshan and, in a rush to please him, despite being a leftist by orientation and of the belief that the national channel should not have anything with ‘religious’ programmes, wrote letters to two prominent filmmakers — Ramanand Sagar and BR Chopra — who accepted the offer in no time.
As the fate would have it, Sagar managed to beat Chopra in shooting a few episodes of the Ramayana, thus ensuring it was aired first. Maybe he was more desperate to get things moving, as his filmi career, after a string of flops, was moving nowhere. looking back, one wonders what would have happened had Chopra got the Mahabharata on air first. Would Sagar still have created the magicIJ Would people have liked the Ramayana which, if senior journalist Madhu Jain is to be believed, appeared like “moving calender art pictures”, particularly after the telecast of the Mahabharata, which was much superior in content, style and actingIJ How could it, then, have shaped the contours of the Rama Janmabhoomi movementIJ
Rewriting history
To begin with, no one expected the Ramayana to do so well. As the story goes, Bhaskar Ghose was petrified to see the initial rushes of the show. Mark Tully quotes him as saying in his book, No Full Stops in India, “There was far too much ritual and not nearly enough story. He (Sagar) had used the worst extras he could get, because he was doing it on the cheap. The infant Rama looked half-starved. Some of the dance sequences were ridiculous.”
Most of these charges hold water. The extras, for instance, were brought from Surat, as the makers thought Bombay artistes were far too expansive! Scripts were written on a day-to-day basis and there was hardly any consistency in the making of the show. Everything was on an ad hoc basis. And yet, Sagar could do what no one had ever done in the history of television in India. Maybe it was because there existed no template for making a mega serial. Expectations would have been different had the Mahabharata been aired first. And since there was nothing worthwhile to look at, people took Sagar’s work as yet another Ramleela where, as Tully says, “you take a story which everybody knows. You remove any hint of sex and reduce violence to electronic gimmicks acceptable in a video parlour for nursery children. You slow the story down to a crawl. You use archaic language which even actors find difficult to speak, let alone the audience to understand. You deliberately choose unknown actors, although India is a country where the star system is very much alive and kicking”.
The Mahabharata was a different ballgame altogether. Compared to the Ramayana, which was celebrated annually in the form of Ramleelas, it had its challenges. Foremost was the fact that it wasn’t always given a pride of place in traditional Hindu households. I remember my grandfather telling me not to read the Mahabharata as it would lead to family feuds — and my mother still does! So, BR Chopra had to do something spectacular to get the Ramayana-like response. And he did pretty well with about 150 main actors and a production team of more than 100 people, dealing way too competently with the complex subject involving characters with different shades and equally complicating emotions and equations. Also, Chopra gave emphasis to sound screenplay and got some of the best minds — including a Muslim in Rahi Masoom Raza — to create some incredible lines, including Mein Samay Hoon. All this had its cost, and a conservative estimate suggests that no less than Rs 10,00,000 were spent on each episode, which was an huge sum in the context of the era in which it was made.
The Mahabharata held the collective attention of 200 million Indians across the nation for 45 minutes week after week for nearly two years. But more than popularity, what the show did well was that it changed the very rule of the game for Indian television. It helped Doordarshan transform from being a tool of socio-economic development to become, in the words of Tully, “almost exclusively middle class, promoting a consumer society whose products most Indians can’t afford to consume”. Sevanti Ninan discovers through her interviews for the book, Through The Magic Window, how the lives of the urban poor have been influenced by television’s loud mix of soaps, songs and ads. She finds children thinking Sunsilk and Fair & lovely can change their looks for good, and mothers believing that two-minute noodles will improve their children’s performance in school. The Mahabharata brought — for the first time in a big way — the market to the homes of TV owners, a phenomenon which became all the more pervasive with the arrival of the cable culture in the country a couple of years afterits final episode on June 24, 1990.
It is, therefore, no surprise that Doordarshan netted Rs 65 crore from the Mahabharata as advertising revenue. Such was the demand that its advertising rates were raised three times during its telecast — from Rs 65,000 for 10 seconds in October 1988 to Rs 100,000 for 10 seconds in May 1989. “In comparison,” says Ninan, “the rate for the Ramayana never exceeded Rs 70,000.”
1988, once again
The telecast of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata coincided with the Rama Janmabhoomi movement, which culminated in the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992. Arvind Rajagopal, the author of the book, Politics after Television, tells us how the Janmabhoomi campaign resonated with some of the Ramayana’s concerns in harking back to the mythical Rama Rajya. While studying the interface between three seemingly disparate elements — economic liberalisation, the rise of Hindutva and the role of the media — he finds a common link: Just as the market treats society as a single, homogeneous entity, the forces of Hindutva see the Indian people as a vast mass waiting to rediscover their common culture and identity. The catalyst in the process was television, beginning with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
This brings us to the question: Had the Ayodhya movement taken a different courseif the Mahabharata was launched before the RamayanaIJRajagopal suggests that had this been the case the “ethical rather than the identity component of Hindu culture might have been foregrounded”. This, he writes, was because there “are few rakshasas (demons) in the Mahabharata”, and the focus here was on an intra-family war at Kurukshetra.
No doubt, the telecast of the Ramayana had channelised Hindu anger, but to say that the movement wouldn’t have happened without it would be premature. The Ramayana, in fact, only galvanised the mass already dejected with the Nehruvian secular oder. It had symbolic relevance: For instance, when the shila yatras were carried out, karsevaks would actually dress like Rama and lakshman of the epic show. The rath yatra, too, resembled the kind of chariot we saw on television.
If we look closely, we find that the two epics played a complementary role: One provided a renewed sense of unity among Hindus, while the other gave them justification not to accept any unjust order, something the Pandavas faced and Krishna exhorted them not to take it lying down.
Devdutt Pattanaik has an interesting take on the issue. “In the Ramayana, Rama follows the rules but in the Mahabharata, Krishna breaks the rules,” he says, adding: “In the Ramayana, the villain breaks rules. Neither Surpanaka nor Ravan respects the laws of marriage. In contrast, in the Mahabharata, the villain does not break a single rule. Not even when a woman was being disrobed in public, as technically Duryodhan has not broken a single rule in the gambling hall. A rule-following Rama can combat a rule-breaking Ravan. But would he succeed against a rule-following villain like DuryodhanIJ”
Taking his argument further, Pattanaik says that corruption we were witnessing today is also not about breaking the rules. “In India, every politician follows the rules, and every bureaucrat follows the rules. Despite this, land is grabbed but no one is arrested or punished. Rapes take place but rapists are released on technicalities,” he says. So, the Mahabharata can be looked in the context of the post-Bofors scenario and how it helped the country see the scam through Krishna’s eyes — just as the Ramayana helped Indians galvanise in the wake of the Shah Bano case.
Twenty-five years down the line, we are again witnessing the return of the two epics on television — on a bigger scale and through better promotions. Does it suggest anything, especially when today’s political scenario — muddied with one scam after another — reminds us of the late 1980s when the Bofors was the talk of the town. TV critic Shailaja Bajpai finds the timing interesting. “Another Ramayana... from the only team that seems capable of repeating itself three times: The Sagars... Who else to turn to in these troubled, treacherous timesIJ Perhaps they can achieve what team Anna set out to: To remind us that there is something called righteous behaviour and good governance.”
But the issue remains: Will the return of the epics herald the resurgence of the BJP, as was the case in the 1980sIJ The jury is still out, but one thing is certain — the next few months are going to be interesting and eventful.