The broadcast
Ramayan began on Doordarshan, India's state broadcaster, in January 1987, running weekly on Sunday mornings, and it became the most watched programme in Indian television's history to that point. The reported audience figures are very large and imprecise; what is not in doubt is the social effect, which was widely documented at the time — streets and markets emptying during transmission, sets garlanded and treated as shrines, viewers bathing before watching, and the actors receiving the reverence given to the figures they played.
Its production values were modest and its idiom was that of the Rāmlīlā and the calendar print rather than of cinema, which is part of why it worked.
Its sources and its version
Sagar drew principally on Tulsīdās, with material from Vālmīki and other versions, and the result standardized a particular telling for an audience that had previously known regional ones. Details that had varied by region — the appearance of the characters, the sequence of episodes, which incidents were included — were fixed in a single version seen simultaneously across the country.
The serial's Uttar Kāṇḍ, covering the banishment, was made and broadcast separately and is far less widely remembered than the main run.
What it changed
The scholarly literature on Ramayan is substantial and treats it as a turning point in several respects: the arrival of religious programming on state television, the creation of a genuinely national visual vocabulary for the epic, and the political context of the late 1980s, in which the Ayodhyā question was becoming central to national politics. The relation between the broadcast and that politics has been much argued about and is not settled.
What is straightforwardly true is that more people encountered the Rāmāyaṇa through this serial in two years than through any other medium in the story's history.
What it looked like
The production was inexpensive and unembarrassed about it — painted backdrops, visible wires, freeze-frames with a halo effect, long held close-ups on the actors' faces. Its visual idiom came straight from the calendar print and from Rāmlīlā rather than from cinema, which is precisely why audiences accepted it as devotional rather than dramatic.
The actors were treated accordingly. Arun Govil, who played Rāma, was garlanded in public and asked for blessings, and found it difficult to take other roles afterwards.
The context
The serial ran from January 1987 into 1988, on a single state channel, at a fixed Sunday morning hour, in a country where television ownership was expanding rapidly and choice was minimal. Those conditions cannot recur, and no subsequent version has approached its reach.
It also ran during the years in which the Ayodhyā question moved to the centre of national politics. The relationship between the broadcast and that politics has been argued over extensively by scholars and is not settled; what is not disputed is that the two coincided.
Further reading
- Blackburn, Stuart H. Inside the Drama-House: Rama Stories and Shadow Puppets in South India. University of California Press, 1996
- Bose, Mandakranta. The Ramayana Revisited. Oxford University Press, 2004
- Nagar, Shanti Lal. Genesis and Evolution of the Rama Katha in Indian Art, Thought, Literature and Culture. B.R. Publishing, 2005
- Sattar, Arshia. Lost Loves: Exploring Rama's Anguish. Penguin, 2011
- Whaling, Frank. The Rise of the Religious Significance of Rama. Motilal Banarsidass, 1980
See also
- Rāmcaritmānas — The Rāmcaritmānas is Tulsīdās's retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa in Awadhi, begun at Ayodhyā in 1574, and the most widely recited work of North Indian devotional literature.
- Tulsīdās — Tulsīdās was the sixteenth-century poet-saint who composed the Rāmcaritmānas, the Awadhi Rāmāyaṇa that became the central devotional text of the Hindi-speaking north.
- Rāmlīlā — Rāmlīlā is the annual public staging of the Rāmāyaṇa across northern India, played over days or weeks in streets and open grounds, and ending with the burning of Rāvaṇa's effigy.
- Rāma — Rāma is the prince of Ayodhyā at the centre of the Rāmāyaṇa, exiled for fourteen years by his father's promise, and worshipped across the Hindu world as an incarnation of Viṣṇu and the model of righteous conduct.
- Hanumān — Hanumān is the vānara minister of Sugrīva in the Rāmāyaṇa who leaps the ocean to find Sītā in Laṅkā and burns the city, and who became in later devotion the model of service and one of the most widely worshipped deities in India.
- Rāmāyaṇa — The Rāmāyaṇa is the Sanskrit epic attributed to Vālmīki, in seven books, telling how Rāma of Ayodhyā is exiled for fourteen years, loses his wife Sītā to the rākṣasa king Rāvaṇa, and wins her back by war.
- The Rāmāyaṇa in dance and mask-drama — The Rāmāyaṇa is the central repertoire of classical and folk performance across South and Southeast Asia — Kathakali, Kūṭiyāṭṭam, khon, wayang, lkhon khol, kecak — and in most of these forms it is the story that defines the tradition.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.