by Mark Tully
Over a glass of whisky I asked Dara Singh how the public reacted to him now that he was identified with the popular god Hanuman. He said, ‘I have added more fans. Religious people never see feature films, but they have seen Ramayan.’
‘Do people actually think of you as a god?’
‘So many innocent people have seen pictures of Hanuman that when they see you in that dress they really feel it. They touch your feet and they want blessings. In the name of God I give them blessings, but not as a person.’
In spite of his success, Dara Singh is still a modest man with a trace of that shyness which made him a reluctant actor. But when he relaxes he is excellent company. I asked him, ‘What about the élite? What do they think?’
‘Oh, the élite. They never mix with the innocent people who live in the villages – that is Indian culture. The élite are Western, and they don't meet the villagers.’
‘You are strictly speaking not a Hindu, because your family are Sikhs What do Sikhs think about Hanuman and the Ramayan?’
. ‘There was some trouble in Punjab when the Sikh extremists threatened villagers that they would be killed if they watched the Ramayan. They stopped for a bit, but after one or two weeks they were watching again.’
Earlier I had asked Deepika, who plays Sita, how the public reacted to her. She replied, ‘People definitely treat us differently – not like other film artistes. They feel that anyone from Ramayan is someone from outside. They look on us as a god or goddess. At functions, really grown-up people come and touch your feet.’
Deepika, in true film-star tradition, wouldn't reveal her age, but I would guess she was little more than twenty-two. Playing Sita was her first big break, but some film magazines have said she will never be able to play any other role because she will always be seen as the wife of Lord Ram. Sita said she had already had other offers of roles, but she was being choosy. ‘I'd of course like to be one of the most successful actresses in Bombay, but I'd like to be something different – not the typical heroine.’ Perhaps that's a wise ambition, since Deepika is a little too squarely built for the modern Bombay heroine.
I think the greatest success of Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan was Ravan – he was certainly my favourite character. His walrus moustache, his bloodshot eyes and his pot belly made him all too human – especially in comparison with the overdone divinity of Ram. When Ravan ranted against Ram in his magnificent bass voice, he was every inch a furious and frustrated ruler. He also inspired sympathy, especially in the scene where he refused to accept that his favourite son, Inderjit, had been killed in battle. Arvind Trivedi, who played Ravan, is a mild, middle-aged man who lives in a small flat in an unfashionable suburb of Bombay. His life has none of the glamour of the film star – in fact he is proud of not being one. He told me, ‘I have done more than 10,000 performances on the stage, because you see I have my own Gujarati-language theatre company in Bombay. That's how I make my living. Of course I had acted in films and television before, but I am basically a man of the theatre.’
Trivedi had worked with Ramanand Sagar before, and so he approached him for a part in the Ramayan – the small part of the boatman who ferried Ram across a river. He asked about this role twice. The second time, Ramanand Sagar said, ‘Let's see – there are other roles.’ But Trivedi decided not to mention the matter again – after all, he had his pride. Then, out of the blue, he was summoned to Umargaon from Ahmedabad, where he was filming. When he reached Bombay airport, there was a car waiting for him. ‘I was surprised’, he said to me, ‘they had sent a car for such a small part – just a boatman. But when I arrived at the studio I was told to make up for Ravan. When I got to the dressing-room, there were already ten fully got-up Ravans there. I was given a dialogue. It's not difficult for me to learn dialogue, because of my stage experience. I was the last man in, and when Ramanand Sagar saw me he shouted, “My Ravan is selected!” I said, “But let me say my lines.” Sagar refused to listen to them. He said, “I know your talent. I just wanted to see what you look like in this costume.”’
Trivedi had great sympathy for Ravan. He said, ‘Ravan is a hero – more than a hero, more powerful than a hero – but he didn't have any good guru and it is very difficult to digest power. Ram had Vashisht. Anyhow, you may not know that Ravan had a very good reason for stealing Sita. It was to revenge his sister, who had fallen in love with Ram and his brother and wanted to marry one of them. The brother cut off her ears and nose. Even a small man wouldn't suffer that, so how could I?’
‘But didn't Ravan realize he was going to be defeated because Ram had Hanuman on his side?’
‘Ravan is a brave man. Once he has spoken, he sticks to it – even if it is a mistake. He is conscious of what people will say if he shows weakness. He never says he has done the right thing by taking Sita. He says to himself, “I may have done the wrong thing, but I will not go back on my decision.” He knows Ram is stronger than him, but he thinks, “If I kill Ram I will be famous, and if I die by him I will also be famous.”’
Trivedi must be the first actor to have made Ravan universally popular. When it was clear that the end was near, groups of women descended on Umargaon to plead for Ravan's life. According to Trivedi, 2,000 people turned up at Heathrow Airport to welcome him when he arrived on a visit to Britain. In the holy city of Ujjain in central India, a woman asked him to bless her child. She said, ‘I have called him Lankesh, the lord of Lanka.’ Although Ravan had been dead for three months, Trivedi was still receiving fan mail – hundreds of letters a day. I was struck by one from a Christian woman from southern India:
My father who is 82 years of age was not watching TV. But after the episode in which he heard your voice he started watching Ramayan, and after Ravan's death he stopped. Your acting was excellent and we were happy that you were a brave man. As for Ram, your traitor brother had to tell him all the secrets to concur [sic] you. So I can say you are greater than Ram.
May our Lord Jesus and Mother Mary Bless you and keep you Healthy and Happy,
Yours affectionately,
Mrs Philomena K.
The film critic Aruna Vasudev, who has written a history of the Indian film industry, once told me, ‘You can no longer call India a secular country after the Ramayan has dinned home its Hindu message week after week.’ But all the evidence suggests that the Ramayan was enjoyed by believers of all the religions in India. Mrs Philomena was of course a Christian, and Christians are a rather passive minority. The same certainly cannot be said about the Muslims: their leaders vie to outdo each other in their militancy, yet they did not create a controversy about the Ramayan. In fact, the Ramayan is the only even remotely sensitive television series which has not created a serious row, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many Muslims enjoyed the series.
I asked Bashir Khan, the Muslim actor who played one of the generals of the monkey army, whether he had been criticized for playing a role in a Hindi epic. He said, ‘I did get some letters telling me that I had forgotten Allah, but most people approved. In fact my friends told me that they hadn't been interested in Ramayan until I played a role, and then they got interested.’
‘But didn't Hindus object to a Muslim playing a role in Ramayan?’
‘On the contrary, they are very pleased that a Muslim should accept playing the role of one of their lords.’
Ramanand Sagar has had many letters from Muslims, praising his production. One of them came from a lecturer in southern India, who wrote:
My Lord, please send me a recent photo of yours. I want to keep it in my house. You see how people cause bloodshed in the name of religion. The communal disturbances of Meerut, Delhi and other places are the mischief of politicians. To tell you, really common people have no time to think and quarrel in the name of religion. Ours is a prominently Muslim area… but on Sundays all Muslims, old, young and children, eagerly see Ramayan. My brother's wife is an illiterate lady. She is very orthodox. But she will never miss Ramayan. She wept like a child when Dasara
th [Ram's father] lamented the departure of Ram. Such is the impact of Ramayan on the minds of people, irrespective of religion… Your name will shine and shine like the morning star in horizon. God bless you. You live for hundreds of years as our sages lived and lift Hinduism to the top once again.
It must surely have been the gods of Hinduism who were responsible for the weekly miracle of Ramayan getting on the air. It was a production-line job, with one week allocated for each episode. During the first run of the series, each episode was shot from Monday to Thursday, edited on Friday and dispatched to Delhi perilously close to the transmission time of 9.30 on Sunday morning. For the last hour-long episode, which included a grand musical finale with Ramanand Sagar himself appearing as a heavenly figure, the cast shot for seventy-two hours continuously.
From what I saw, however, the production line started and stopped in the most erratic manner. I arrived on my second morning at the studios expecting to see Ramanand Sagar directing Ram in a continuation of the ‘return to Ayodhya’ sequence. There was no sign of life inside the studios or on the outside set. The door of Ram's small room was firmly padlocked. Eventually I was told that Ram had been allowed to go back to Bombay, since Ramanand Sagar had not managed to write the script for the day's shooting. That meant I missed my interview with Ram. I finally located the director sitting cross-legged under a banyan tree in front of a garlanded picture of the goddess Durga. Beside him stood a Brahmin reciting Sanskrit mantras for the first of the nine days of the festival of the goddess of destruction. A temple bell for summoning the goddess hung on a rope from a branch. Actors, technicians, cooks and cleaners stood in a semicircle around Ramanand Sagar. Although Durga was the consort of Shiva, the markings on the forehead of the Brahmin showed that he belonged to a sect which worshipped Vishnu. In Christianity that would be rather like asking a Protestant pastor to celebrate the Mass, but devotees of Shiva and Vishnu do not allow their differences to come between them. In this respect Hinduism is a generous and broadminded religion, as it is indeed in its attitude to other faiths.
Ramanand Sagar is a great believer in the efficacy of religious ceremonies. After the puja, or worship, he said to me, ‘When you are in Delhi, you are living in certain snobby circles who are not with the people. They feel ashamed of going to a temple. They think you look archaic if you do that. There is nothing wrong with going to a temple.’
‘But when you go to a temple or do puja like you have done today, and your prayers are not answered, don't you lose faith? There seems to be so much pessimism, gloom and depression in India these days. What are your gods doing about that?’
‘I was at one stage depressed. I have now become optimistic that there is a future, otherwise the gods would not have made me make Ramayan and have made it produce such an impact. It's not a film success, it's devotion – in the same way that devotees of Mahatma Gandhi used to touch the rails after the train he was travelling in had passed.’
‘But what difference is all this devotion going to make?’
‘Well, the new generation will be devoted to the gods instead of all the irreligion you see nowadays.’
Ramanand Sagar's religious enthusiasm did not go down well with Bhaskar Ghose, the director-general of Doordarshan – Indian television. Ghose is a member of the élite Indian Administrative Service, but he is a civil servant with a difference. He is a talented theatre actor and director himself, and he took a personal interest in Ramayan. The first four episodes arrived well in advance of transmission. When Ghose saw them, he was horrified. He told me, ‘There was far too much ritual and not nearly enough story. He had used the worst extras he could get, because he was doing it on the cheap. The infant Ram looked half-starved. Some of the dance sequences were ridiculous. When I told Sagar this, he was not amused. He said, “No one has ever spoken to me like this.” But he did cut some of the ritual and dances, and marginally improved his extras.’
Ghose had his next row with Ramanand Sagar when it became clear that the story was not going to be completed in the fifty-two episodes Doordarshan had contracted for. By now the director knew he was on to a winner and had every reason for wanting to stretch the Ramayan as far as he could. ‘He really had me by the short hairs,’ Ghose admitted. ‘He sent me each episode just two days before transmission, and so I couldn't control the pace.’
The director-general threatened to double the charge for broadcasting the programmes if Sagar didn't let him have them one month in advance, but Sagar's contract enabled him to get round that. Eventually Ghose granted an extension of twenty-six episodes on the understanding that the story would be complete by then. When it came to a further extension, to cover Sita's second exile, Ramanand Sagar went directly to the minister, who overruled the director-general and sanctioned yet another twenty-six weeks' worth of the epic.
In spite of the defeats he had suffered, Ghose had the honesty to admit to a sneaking admiration for Ramanand Sagar. ‘By the end,’ he told me, ‘I came to rather like the old bean. His great success was that he presented the thing as a Ram Lila. If you see people when they are at a Ram Lila, no matter how rustic the performance is, they are rapt. You are really involved in the enactment – it's a kind of expiation of everything inside you. It doesn't matter how many times you see it. It's like reciting a mantra – the more times you say, “Ram nam satya hai” – “Ram's name is truth” – the more you are spiritually uplifted. In the villages, you can't say that the Ram Lila is entertainment, because entertainment is much more sophisticated than that nowadays. It's part of a ritual.’
It was not on artistic, or even religious, grounds that the minister of information and broadcasting, H. K. L. Bhagat, agreed to an extension of Ramayan. He took a political decision, realizing how unpopular he and the government would be if Sagar let it be known that he had refused to extend the programme. At the same time, the minister was determined to get as much mileage as he could out of the Ramayan's success. The Indian government is facing what economists call an ‘internal debt crisis’, which, to put it more simply, means that it's chronically short of rupees. So, one way that Mr Bhagat could win points for himself was by raising more money from the Ramayan. This he did by sharply increasing the transmission charges.
The other main concern of Mr Bhagat – as of all politicians – was to win votes. Here a unique opportunity presented itself. At the height of the Ramayan fever, the Congress Party faced a series of by-elections. Rajiv Gandhi's reputation as a vote-winner was at a low ebb following a series of electoral reverses, so the prime minister's reputation as well as the party's was on the line. The most important by-election was in Allahabad, the home city of Motilal Nehru, the founder of the ruling dynasty. Allahabad had been represented by the prime minister's close friend the film superstar Amitabh Bacchan, but the opposition had linked Bacchan's brother's name with alleged scandals over international defence contracts. Although the opposition could prove nothing, Bacchan ended his brief political career so as not to be an embarrassment to Rajiv Gandhi.
The stakes in Allahabad had been upped by the opposition nominating Rajiv Gandhi's former defence and finance minister, V. P. Singh, as their candidate. He had resigned from the government and had then been expelled from the Congress Party because he didn't believe that the alleged defence scandals were being seriously investigated. V. P. Singh – who, incidentally, came from near Allahabad – had by the time of the by-election emerged as the potential prime minister most widely acceptable to the fractured opposition. He had to be stopped at all costs, thought Mr Bhagat and other senior Congress leaders. So Arun Govil, the Ram of the Ramayan, was wheeled out to speak on behalf of the party. But the magic of the Ramayan did not work: the Congress candidate was trounced. Film stars are normally very successful in Indian politics, but perhaps Ram's wife Sita had been right when she said to me, ‘People definitely treat us differently – not like other film artistes.’
The advertising agents and their clients made no attempt to hide their motives for suppo
rting Ramanand Sagar's divine extravaganza: they saw it as a heaven-sent opportunity to sell their products. Television in India is intended to be primarily a ‘tool of development’, but the government has allowed the medium to become almost exclusively middle-class, promoting a consumer society whose products most Indians can't afford to consume. The Ramayan was preceded by fifteen minutes of advertising. Lovely ladies washed their hair with expensive shampoo, young lovers cavorted hazardously on scooters, macho males advertised the latest suiting materials and smiling children guzzled instant noodles. Not only were the products beyond the range of most Indians, they were also for the most part alien to their lifestyle – the noodle-eating nuclear family instead of the traditional joint family; the woman immodestly flaunting her glossy shampooed hair; the suits so much less comfortable than the loose cotton clothes still worn in Indian villages.
The advertisers make no secret of the fact that they use television to target the middle classes. Colgate-Palmolive was one of the companies which sponsored the Ramayan. Its advertising account is handled by Santosh Ballal, of the agency Rediffusion. He told me that 80 per cent of the multinational's products in India were sold to the middle classes. Advertising agencies are not worried about the dangers of creating a demand for products that most people can't afford – of undermining traditions which still hold the lives of the poor together. ‘We create the lifestyles, we create the aspirations. Whether the viewer achieves the aspirations is his problem, not mine,’ says Ballal. It might be argued that a government and a party which claims to be socialist should care about the impact of advertisements – especially the advertisements before a programme so popular as the Ramayan.