In a country where politics and religion are inseparable, even seemingly harmless entertainment that draws its content from religious texts can have a potent impact on the political landscape. Ramanand Sagar’s televised version of the Hindu epic, Ramayan – first aired by public broadcaster Doordarshan in January 1987 – had changed India’s still-nascent TV entertainment industry. Perhaps unwittingly, the TV series also acted as a catalyst for the BJP’s Hindutva politics; giving momentum to the then dormant Ram Janmabhumi movement by the time Sagar’s 78-episode series concluded in August 1988.

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Now, with the Coronavirus lockdown guaranteeing television channels a captive audience of nearly a billion Indians – as against the 650 million worldwide viewers that Sagar’s TV series alone clocked over the decades if Wikipedia is to be believed – the BJP-led Union government has decided, “on public demand”, to re-telecast Ramayan. The announcement by Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar about the government’s decision to have Doordarshan broadcast Ramayan twice daily – between 9-10 am and 9-10 pm – has been met with predictable applause from some quarters, possibly fuelled. A few hours later, the public was also informed that the televised version of another Hindu epic, Mahabharat, produced by B.R. Chopra for Doordarshan after the success of Sagar’s Ramayan, will also be aired twice daily.

For lakhs of Indians who joined the country’s burgeoning television audience between 1988 and the mid-1990s when privately-owned TV entertainment channels hadn’t yet swallowed Doordarshan’s monopoly on viewership, the full import of the government’s decision, with its undeniable political overtones, may be lost. For this section, other offerings from the DD stable – Alif Laila, Shaktiman, Surbhi, Captain Vyom, Chandrakanta, Malgudi Days, Turning Point, et al – may have a higher nostalgic value than Ramayan. Requests for re-telecast of these shows have flooded Twitter and other social networking sites.

For the generations born after the mid-1990s with the luxury to choose from multiple TV entertainment channels, the Centre’s decision may sound comical. Indeed, since Javadekar’s announcement millennials would have heard a fair share of stories from their parents or grandparents about the life-altering impact the Sunday broadcasts of Ramayan had on them – the religious high of seeing Lord Ram personified on screen by Arun Govil, the emotional upheaval over Deepika Chikhalia’s portrayal of Sita’s hardship during vanvas and the devotion for Dara Singh’s endearing (or amusing) Hanuman.
Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan Then

Undoubtedly, in Indian television’s history, Ramayan was a landmark. No television show before – or since – touched an 82 per cent captive viewership of the television audience; not even Mahabharat which had far superior direction and production value or any of Sagar’s later religious offerings such as Luv Kush and Krishna.

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It is pertinent to note that until Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan burst out on telescreens in January 1987; Doordarshan’s programming was, as a policy abiding by India’s secular ethos, religion-neutral. The political events in the years leading up to the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government changing this policy to allow the streaming of Ramayan need to be emphasized. In the 1984 general elections, contested in the backdrop of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the Congress party had won an unprecedented majority of 402 seats in the Lok Sabha and the BJP was reduced to just two seats. The Supreme Court’s Shah Bano verdict the following year and the Rajiv government’s efforts to overturn it under the pressure of the politically influential Islamic clergy triggered deafening accusations of Muslim appeasement by the Congress party. It is widely believed that in order to appease the Hindus in equal measure, it was Rajiv – not the BJP – who blew new life into the latent Ram Mandir movement by pressurizing then Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Bir Bahadur Singh to have the disputed Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhumi site in Ayodhya unlocked in 1986 so that Hindus could perform religious rites. The plan to allow Doordarshan to air Sagar’s Ramayan was set in motion later that year.

Television, back in 1980s India, still had a certain enigma about it. Few households owned one, programming wasn’t 24X7 and the few serials which were streamed lacked the grand spectacle that Sagar’s Ramayan arrived with. Although serials that preceded Ramayan had strong performances, excellent scripts and usually some form of social messaging, Sagar offered a new combination – a Hindu epic produced with ostentatious sets. Even for those who did not worship Lord Ram – and this does not mean just people of faiths other than Hinduism but a large number of Hindus from across the country too – Sagar’s Ramayan offered to the viewer an unprecedented experience.

It is from here on that a subtle political messaging crept into Ramayan. Professor of Media Studies at the New York University, Arvind Rajagopal writes in his book Politics After Television (Cambridge University Press, 2001), “The Ramayan serial overlapped with the most crucial phase of the Janmabhumi movement, when it changed from an ominous but still relatively obscure campaign into the dominant issue before the country… With such publicity given to its pre-eminent symbol, the god-king Ram, the Hindu nationalist BJP was emboldened to declare, the by the middle of 1989, that the Ayodhya movement had ‘reached a state and status in Indian public life when it was no more possible to ignore its effect in politics’.”

If Rajiv had believed that by merely opening the locks at Ayodhya, changing policy to allow the airing of Ramayan on DD and throwing his weight behind the Janmabhumi movement’s torchbearers for performing shilanyas at the disputed site, the Congress would win over the Hindus, he was clearly wrong. Rajiv’s political naiveté was exposed in the years leading up to the 1989 general elections and it is still unraveling three decades later. The potent cocktail of corruption allegations in the Bofors deal, V.P. Singh’s rebellion and the Hindutva sentiments triggered by the Janmabhumi movement in the Hindi heartland, helped the BJP up its 1984 Lok Sabha tally of two seats to 88 seats in 1989. Rajiv’s Congress lost power.

Sagar, even if unwittingly, made his contribution to this churning too. For starters, the reference material for Sagar’s Ramayan was not the original text of the Hindu epic by Valmiki but Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas. The Ramcharitmanas, as is well known, makes notable omissions from Valmiki’s Ramayan and presents a character sketch of Ram as the embodiment of virtues – the maryada puru