Chapter 154: The God on the Screen
November 1973 — April 1974
There is a particular kind of silence that falls on India when something unprecedented happens. Not the silence of shock — India is too old and too vast and has absorbed too many things to be easily shocked. It is a different silence. The silence of a nation that has encountered something it did not know it was waiting for, and in the encountering, has understood that it was waiting.
This silence fell on the evening of the twelfth of November, 1973, at exactly nineteen hundred hours, when Doordarshan's Delhi relay station transmitted, for the first time, the opening frames of a programme called Ganesha.
What those frames contained was this:
A lotus blooming in slow motion in dark water. The petals unfurling one by one, each one catching the light in a way that no hand-drawn image had ever caught light before — the light itself moving, the colour shifting from pale white at the edges to the deep gold at the heart of the flower, alive in a way that still images could never be. The lotus filled the screen. The music began. Not the kind of music that announced a children's programme — not the tinny bright cheerfulness of the programmes that had preceded it. This was something else. A bansuri, low and searching, and beneath it a tabla that was barely a heartbeat, and beneath that a drone that seemed to come not from an instrument but from the earth itself, from whatever thing in the earth produced the sound of the sacred.
The lotus opened fully.
And sitting in the heart of the lotus, as though he had always been there, was Ganesha.
Across India, in front of television sets — in homes where families had gathered and in shops where neighbours had crowded and in the dhabas near the bazaars where the owner had turned the set toward the street so that the people outside could see, in railway waiting rooms and in government offices where the employees had not gone home and in the single room where three families sometimes shared a screen — across India, in all of these places simultaneously, people went still.
Not quiet. They were already quiet, the way people were always quiet in front of a television when something was beginning. This was different. This was the stillness of people who have seen something that exceeds their expectations so completely that the body does not immediately know what to do with it.
Ganesha on the screen was not the flat devotional image that Indians had seen in their homes and temples all their lives — the orange-coloured figure with the elephant head and the single tusk and the mouse at his feet, the image that was everywhere and therefore invisible, the image you looked at every morning at the altar and received into the mind without the mind being asked to work.
This Ganesha moved.
His eyes moved first — large and brown and full of the specific quality of eyes that were simultaneously ancient and amused, the eyes of someone who had heard every prayer that had ever been said and found each one both urgent and slightly funny in the way that eternity found the urgency of mortals both touching and comic. They looked out from the screen with a directness that was startling, because the images at the altar did not look back; they received the gaze, but this Ganesha was looking. At you. Specifically at you. At the person sitting in front of the television set in the small room in Kanpur or the large sitting room in Bombay or the dhaba in Madurai, at each specific person in their specific place, with the specific quality of a divine intelligence that had been attending to everything simultaneously since before time and had decided to attend to you in particular.
Then he smiled.
And when Ganesha smiled on that first evening of the twelfth of November, 1973, something happened across India that had never happened before in quite this way, because the thing that happened was not religious experience and was not merely aesthetic pleasure and was not simply entertainment but was a third thing that had no exact name — the thing that happened when the sacred became intimate, when the god who had existed at the proper distance of worship was suddenly as close as the screen in front of you, which was as close as your own face.
Several things were observed in the days following:
In Allahabad, a woman named Sunita Sharma, who had lived alone since her husband's death two years prior and who had been watching television at her neighbour's house, came home that night and sat in the dark for a long time. She could not explain to anyone what she had felt. She tried, once, to tell her sister: It was like seeing someone I had known my whole life but had never actually met. Her sister, who had also been watching, understood exactly.
In Madras, at the home of a retired schoolteacher named Govindarajan, his granddaughter Kavitha, who was six years old and who had been sitting on her grandfather's lap during the broadcast, pointed at the television when the programme ended and said: Thatha, is Pillayar going to come back tomorrow? Govindarajan had told her yes, every week, same time. Kavitha had considered this and then said: Good. I want to show him my drawing. She had already, in the hour since the programme ended, drawn Ganesha from memory in her school notebook — not the way the temple images looked, but the way he had looked on the screen, the eyes with that specific quality of looking back.
In Lucknow, a group of young men who had gathered at a tea stall to watch — the kind of young men for whom the public declaration of religious interest was not entirely socially comfortable, the kind who would say in company that religious television was for old people and women — sat in complete silence for the full thirty minutes and then, when the programme ended, remained sitting for another five minutes without speaking. The tea stall owner, an old man who had seen many things, refilled their glasses without being asked and said nothing, because some silences were not meant to be interrupted.
The show had been made in Bombay, at the Karan Cinema studio that occupied what had been a warehouse district near Mahalaxmi before the cinema company had taken over the buildings and converted them into something that nobody in Bombay had previously seen: a full animation studio of the kind that existed in Japan and America and nowhere in India. The conversion had taken fourteen months. The equipment had come from multiple sources — some from Japan, which had the most advanced animation production infrastructure in the world for the kind of work this required, some from Europe, some from suppliers that Karan Cinema's production team had identified through the network of contacts that Karan Shergill maintained across industries that most people would not have connected to the film business.
The people had come from everywhere. Indian animators — some of whom had trained in Bombay's existing studios, some of whom had come from art schools in Delhi and Calcutta and Madras, some of whom were completely self-taught in the specific way that Indians of that generation were self-taught in new things, which was through whatever books and materials they could find and the relentless application of intelligence to the gap between what they knew and what the work required. The combination of detailed key frames and carefully managed between-frames and the specific attention to the quality of motion that distinguished animation that felt alive from animation that felt mechanical.
The director was a thirty-two-year-old man from Pune named Arvind Kulkarni who had been making short animated films for seven years, mostly for advertising and occasionally for experimental screenings at film clubs, and who had received the call from Karan Cinema with the specific quality of disbelief that was appropriate when you received a call that was too large for your immediate comprehension. They wanted him to make an animated series for Doordarshan based on the stories of Ganesha. The budget was, by any Indian standard of 1972, enormous. The timeline was ambitious. The creative control was complete — more complete than he had ever had on anything.
He had gone to Bombay and met the people at Karan Cinema and had spent three days understanding what was being asked for, and at the end of those three days, he had said yes and had gone back to Pune to sit alone for a while and understand what he had agreed to.
What he had agreed to was this: to make something that would show Indian children — and Indian adults — the stories they had grown up with in a form so vivid and so immediate that those stories would be received not as inherited tradition but as lived experience. Not as the stories their grandparents told. As the stories that happened.
This was the difference. And it was everything.
The specific technology that made Ganesha look the way it looked was the result of a decision made early in the production process: to animate at a frame rate and a detail level that no Indian animation had previously approached, and to use a style that was specifically developed for this programme rather than borrowed wholesale from existing animation traditions.
The style was not Japanese — not quite. It had learned from Japanese animation the specific techniques around expressive character faces, around the use of stillness within motion, around the way that emotion was conveyed not only through action but through the quality of light and the composition of a frame at a moment of significance. But it was also deeply Indian in its visual language — the colour palette came from miniature painting traditions, from the specific reds and golds and deep blues that Indian visual culture had been using to depict the sacred for centuries. The character designs acknowledged the traditional iconography — Ganesha had his elephant head and his single tusk and his large belly and his four arms — but rendered them with a vitality and specificity that made them feel newly seen rather than received.
Arvind Kulkarni described his approach this way to a journalist who interviewed him in December 1973, after the show had been running for six weeks: The stories are old. The people who hear them are new. Every child who watches this programme is hearing these stories for the first time. Not the first time someone has told them — the first time they have seen them with their own eyes. I wanted what they saw to be worthy of what they were encountering.
What they were encountering, in the first episode, was the story of Ganesha's birth — not the simplified version that children received in abbreviated retellings, but the full story, with its complexity and its depth and its specific emotional truth. Parvati creating Ganesha from the clay of her own body, breathing life into him, the love that went into that creation visible in every frame — not told, shown, the way Parvati's face changed as she looked at what she had made, the specific expression of a mother looking at her child for the first time. Shiva's return. The confrontation. The terrible moment.
The moment Shiva's trident took Ganesha's head.
This had been the production's most discussed decision. Whether to show it. How to show it. Whether children could handle it. Whether it was appropriate.
Arvind Kulkarni's answer had been: the story is the story. If you remove the difficult part, you remove the meaning. The story of Ganesha's head is not a story about violence. It is a story about love and loss and restoration and the way the universe, when it takes something terrible from you, sometimes gives you something extraordinary in its place. If you do not show the loss, you cannot show the restoration. And the restoration is the point.
He had been right.
The scene in which Shiva realised what he had done — the scene of the divine father standing with the consequences of a terrible error — was animated with a stillness and a gravity that left the studio's test audience of forty adults unable to speak. Not because it was graphic. Because it was true. The expression on Shiva's face was the expression of a person who had done something that cannot be undone, and anyone who had ever done such a thing recognised it immediately.
And then the restoration. The elephant's head. The breath is returning. Ganesha's eyes are opening.
And Parvati's face.
Kulkarni had spent three weeks on Parvati's face in that moment. Three weeks of drawings, of testing, of understanding what the face of a mother whose child has been given back to her looked like when it could look like anything. He had arrived at something that, when the test audience saw it, produced in several of the women present the kind of weeping that comes not from sadness but from recognition — the kind of weeping that is a form of yes, yes, this is the thing, this is exactly the thing, I have never seen this put into a picture before, but this is it.
By the third week of November, the weekly broadcast of Ganesha had become the event of the week in a way that those who did not witness it subsequently found difficult to believe.
The comparison that people made — then and later — was to Chitrahaar, the Doordarshan programme of Hindi film songs that was the most-watched programme on Indian television in 1973. Chitrahaar was the event. Streets emptied for Chitrahaar. The chai stall closed when Chitrahaar was on because the chai stall owner was watching Chitrahaar. People arranged their Thursday evenings — Thursday was Chitrahaar's day — around the programme in the way that life was arranged around prayers and mealtimes and other fixed sacred points of the week.
What Ganesha produced was larger than Chitrahaar.
Not immediately — the first week, the audience was essentially the regular Doordarshan audience who happened to be watching when the programme came on. But the word moved through India in the way that word moved through India when something truly significant had happened — not through newspapers, which were too slow, and not through official channels, which were too formal, but through the specific fast channel of people telling other people what they had experienced and those people, when they encountered the thing themselves, finding that the telling had not been adequate to the experience. You could tell someone about Ganesha. You could not adequately convey it. The inadequacy of the telling was itself an invitation: you have to see it.
By the fourth week, the Doordarshan statistics — imprecise, because audience measurement in 1973 India was not the sophisticated instrument it would later become, but real — were showing something that the regional Doordarshan offices reported to Delhi with the quality of people who were not quite certain they were reading the numbers correctly. Viewership for the Ganesha time slot had increased, in three weeks, by a factor of between four and six, depending on the relay station. This meant that in some regions, the number of people watching at the appointed hour had multiplied six times in less than a month.
The physical evidence of this was everywhere.
In the bazaars, it was in the conversations. The thing people talked about on Saturdays — the morning after the Friday evening broadcast — was the previous night's episode. Not in the way that people talked about entertainment. In the way that people talked about experiences, they were still processing.
At a samosa stall in Varanasi, a woman named Ganga Prasad, who had been running the stall for fifteen years, said to her customers: Did you see it last night? The part where Ganesha wrote the Mahabharata? Did you see how his eyes looked when he was writing? Like he was seeing the whole thing as he wrote it, like he was watching a war while he put it in words? And her customers — because she had said this to twelve customers before lunch and would say it to twelve more before closing — would say: yes, yes, I saw, and then they would say the thing they had been thinking all morning, the thing the episode had left them with, and Ganga Prasad would listen and add her own thing and the conversation would go on over samosas and tea in the Saturday morning Varanasi light.
This was happening everywhere. At barber shops and at water taps and at the school gates where mothers waited for children. It was happening in offices on Monday mornings, the conversation picking up where it had been left on Saturday, because one viewing was not enough to exhaust what the episode had given you to think about.
The children.
The children were the thing that nobody had entirely predicted, and the thing that, in retrospect, should have been the most predicted.
In 1973, India had a specific relationship between children and religious narrative. The relationship was real and deep and present — every Indian child grew up with these stories, absorbed them from grandparents and parents and from the culture that was saturated with them, from the images at the household altar and the temple visits and the festivals. The stories were known. What was not known, what had never been available, was the stories in a form that matched the specific way children experienced stories when those stories were working on them at the deepest level.
Children did not receive the Mahabharata by sitting down and reading the Mahabharata. They received it in fragments, through the incomplete and filtered versions that adults provided — the simplified retellings, the selected episodes, the versions that had been edited for age appropriateness. The full story with its complexity, its moral ambiguity and its darkness alongside its transcendence was not something that reached children in the direct form.
What Ganesha and then Krishna and then Ramayan did was give children the stories at the level of emotional truth.
Not simplified. Not filtered for age appropriateness in a way that removed difficulty. The stories were the stories, presented with the craft to make their emotional reality accessible to a six-year-old sitting in front of a television screen.
A six-year-old could not read the Mahabharata. A six-year-old could watch Ganesha writing the Mahabharata and feel, in the quality of Ganesha's attention and the weight of the words being set down, that something enormous was being preserved — that this was the act of a great intelligence deciding that what was being told was worth keeping for every person who would ever live.
A six-year-old could not understand the theology of Krishna. A six-year-old could watch Krishna play the flute at the banks of the Yamuna and understand, from the quality of the music and the faces of the people who heard it, that the music was something you could not refuse, that it reached inside you and moved something that nothing else could move. Not understand this as a proposition. Feel it as a fact.
This was the transformation.
The transformation was not that children were taught religion. The transformation was that religion became something children had a personal relationship with, because they had seen the god, and the god had looked back.
The first episode of Krishna aired on the twenty-third of November, eleven days after Ganesha had begun. This was Karan Cinema's second Doordarshan programme, and its reception was different from Ganesha in specific ways that illuminated what each programme was and what it was giving the audience.
Ganesha was intimate. Ganesha was the deity of beginnings and of obstacles and of wisdom — the one you prayed to first, before everything else, the one who was present at every threshold of life and who received you there with the combination of seriousness and playfulness that was his specific divine quality. The intimacy of Ganesha — the way the programme felt like a conversation with someone who knew you — was right for who Ganesha was.
Krishna was something entirely different.
If Ganesha was intimate, Krishna was epic. Not epic in the sense of large and imposing — though it was large and imposing. Epic in the sense of the word's original meaning: a story that contained within it the full scope of what it meant to be human in relation to the divine, the full range of experience from the most joyful to the most devastating, told at the scale that such a story required.
The episode that aired on the twenty-third of November was the story of Krishna's birth. And from the first frame, Krishna declared what kind of programme it was going to be.
The prison of Kamsa. Not a soft, light-filled prison — a real prison, with real darkness, with the specific weight of stone and chains and the smell of damp and fear that stone and chains produced. Devaki and Vasudeva in chains, not in the vaguely heroic way of people who were chained but would obviously be fine, but in the real way — the exhaustion in their faces, the grief of a mother who had watched her children be killed, the specific quality of fear in Vasudeva's eyes as the night advanced and the birth approached. This was not comfortable to watch. It was not supposed to be comfortable to watch. The story was not comfortable.
And then the baby.
When Krishna appeared — not with thunder and light, which would have been the easy choice, the predictable choice — but in a silence that expanded from the screen into every room where the programme was being watched, a silence in which the only thing that moved was the child's eyes opening for the first time and the child's first breath and Devaki's face as she looked at what she had made and at the divine light that was her child and at the overwhelming, annihilating love that this produced —
In households across India, parents looked at their own children.
This was the specific power of the moment, reported by many different people in many different places in the days that followed: parents watching Krishna's birth looked at their own children — at the child sitting beside them on the mat, at the baby asleep in the next room, at the photograph of the child who had grown and left — and experienced, briefly and completely, the specific divine quality of love for a child, which was a love that was recognisable in Devaki's face because it was the same love, the same thing, the same overwhelming fact of it.
This was what the programme was doing. It was not illustrating theology. It was making the theological recognisable through the human. It was showing that the things the gods experienced — love, grief, joy, loss, the ache of separation, the fierce protectiveness of a parent, the disorientation of encountering something larger than yourself — were the same things that the people watching experienced, and that the recognition of this was itself a form of the sacred.
The Krishna episodes built through November and December in a sequence that was constructed with the specific attention to pacing that Arvind Kulkarni and his writers had worked on for two years before a frame was drawn. Not every episode at the highest pitch of intensity — that was impossible to sustain and would have destroyed the capacity to receive the intensity when it came. The episodes of Krishna's childhood — the butter stealing, the games with the gopis, the kaliya daman in the river — were lighter, were joyful, were the episodes that children watched with the specific physical joy that children showed when their whole bodies responded to something wonderful on a screen.
These were the episodes that produced what would later be called the Butter Effect.
The Butter Effect was a name given — by nobody in particular, and then by everyone — to the specific phenomenon observed by parents across India in the weeks following the episode in which Krishna steals butter from the household's clay pots, a scene that Kulkarni had animated with such detail and such delight — the small hands reaching into the pot, the enormous eyes checking the door, the pure uncomplicated pleasure of the successful theft, the moment of being caught and the performance of innocence — that children watching it responded with total identification.
Every parent in India who had a child between four and ten years old understood immediately that in the week following that episode, butter — and various other food items — would go missing from their households in ways that had not previously been occurring, and that when the small thief was caught they would produce exactly the expression that Krishna had produced on the screen, and that the parents were not entirely able to be angry about it because the whole thing was also, undeniably, hilarious.
What the Butter Effect produced was a specific quality of closeness between the programme and the families watching. The stories were no longer the stories you received from the outside. They were now the stories that were inside your household, inside the daily texture of your life, inside the behaviour of your children. Krishna had come home with the programme.
In a small house in Coimbatore, a mother named Saraswathi described it this way: Before the programme, the pictures at the altar were the pictures at the altar. After the programme, every time my son did something — every time he made that face, the big innocent eyes when he knew he'd been caught — I thought of Krishna. I started seeing him in my own child. That was something I had not expected.
She was not the only one.
Ramayan began in January 1974.
If Ganesha was intimate and Krishna was epic, Ramayan was something that preceded and contained both of those qualities — something that was the foundation beneath them. Ramayan was the story that India had been telling itself for three thousand years, the story that had permeated the culture so completely that its characters were not fictional — they were real people in the imagination of the culture, as real as anyone living, more real than most, because they had been present in the culture's dreams for longer than anyone alive could remember.
To animate the Ramayan was an act of extraordinary presumption. This was understood by everyone who made it. The risk was enormous: the audience knew this story. They knew it in the bones, in the way that stories you have heard since you could remember anything settled into the bones. Any departure from what they expected would be felt as a violation. Any reduction of the story's grandeur would be felt as a diminishment of something they loved.
Arvind Kulkarni described his approach to Ramayan in terms that were simpler than might have been expected from someone undertaking something so significant: I asked myself one question. If Ram was real — if he had actually existed and had actually done these things — what would it have looked like? Not what the story says it looked like. What it would actually, physically, have looked like. And then I tried to draw that.
What this produced, in the opening episode, was an Ayodhya that felt like a real city — a city with weight and density, with the specific smell you imagined you could almost detect through the screen, with light and shadow and the sound of life, with people who were going about the business of people, not merely serving as backdrop for the story's principals. Ayodhya in the opening minutes of Ramayan was the Ayodhya of someone who had spent years imagining what a city looked like when it was truly the greatest city in the world, and had then put every specific detail of that imagination on the screen.
And into this city, Ram.
The response to Ram — to the first appearance of Ram in the Ramayan animation — was one of the most discussed things about the programme, and one of the most difficult to describe precisely. People tried. They kept trying. The effort to describe it generated more words, in more forms, over more months, than almost anything else the programme produced.
What they were trying to describe was this: Ram looked like what Ram was supposed to look like. Not in the sense of conforming to iconographic convention, though he did that too. In a deeper sense. In the sense that when you saw him, you understood — not thought, understood — why he was the person the story was about. Why was this the face of dharma? Why the story had lasted three thousand years and would last three thousand more.
Ram's face in the Karan Cinema animation was the face of a person who had not yet been asked to carry what he would be asked to carry, who did not yet know the full weight of the road ahead, but in whose face the capacity for that carrying was already present — the specific quality of a person who will not break under the weight because they are made of the right material, and who does not know this about themselves because people made of the right material usually don't. He was twenty-five years old in the opening episode, and he looked it, and the twenty-five-year-old quality of him — the not-yet-fully-tested quality, the quality of promise about to become tested — was the quality that made every woman in the audience look at him and think: yes, this is what a good man looks like when he is still becoming what he is going to be.
And beside him, Sita.
Sita in the Ramayan animation was the most debated character, the most carefully constructed, and ultimately the one that the audience — especially the women in the audience — responded to with the most intensity. Not because she was the most powerful character in the story. Because she was the most human. Because her experience in the story — the love that was absolute and the loss that followed it and the strength that the loss required and the specific injustice of certain things that happened to her — was the experience that every woman who watched recognised in one way or another, and the recognition produced an emotion that was not simple and not comfortable and not the emotion you usually associated with divine epics, but which was the emotion the story had always been about, if you were willing to look at it honestly.
Kulkarni had been willing.
The episode in which Ram and Sita first saw each other — at the competition for Sita's hand, the lifting of Shiva's bow — was, in the judgment of everyone who saw it, the most beautiful thing that had appeared on Indian television in the medium's history to that point. Not because of the bow-lifting, which was spectacular in the way that spectacular things were spectacular. Because of the moment before the bow-lifting, when Ram and Sita were looking at each other across the assembly hall, and the animation communicated — in the way that the best animation communicated the inward, the subjective, the thing that was happening inside a person — what it was that each of them felt in that moment.
Ram: the recognition of something he had not prepared to encounter. Sita: the recognition of something she had not permitted herself to hope for.
Both: the specific quality of knowing, before you know how you know, that something has begun that will change everything.
In homes across India, older couples watched this scene and found it going somewhere in them. The young people who had married without choice watched it and felt something they could not name, something that was not envy of Sita and Ram but was the recognition that this — this specific quality of seeing and being seen — was a real thing, was something that could happen, that had happened to people, that might have happened to them or might yet happen to them or had happened to them once and they had not fully recognized it at the time.
In homes across India, young people who were approaching the age of marriage watched it and understood something about what they wanted that they had not had words for.
In homes across India, children watched it and took from it the understanding that love, when it was the right kind, was not something you performed or negotiated or organised — it was something you recognised, the way you recognised a person you had been looking for without knowing you were looking.
These were not thoughts. They were not the conclusions the episodes asked the audience to draw. They were things the audience arrived at through the experience of watching, the way you arrived at things through the experience of living — not through instruction but through encounter.
The specific mechanism by which Doordarshan television in 1973 India had its particular kind of power was something that nobody had designed, but that was the natural consequence of the conditions. The conditions were: scarce screens, dense populations, shared viewing experience, and the absence of any competing entertainment at the same time.
There were, in November 1973, approximately one million television sets in India. One million sounds like a large number. In a country of six hundred million, it was an extraordinarily small number. It meant, in practical terms, that the average television set was watched by between fifteen and forty people simultaneously — family, neighbours, the street, whoever was in reach of a screen and knew what was on.
This shared viewing was not incidental. It was the essential condition. When forty people watched something together, the experience of watching was not forty individual experiences that happened to occur at the same time. It was one collective experience that was shared simultaneously, and the sharing itself was part of the experience. When something moved you, and you looked up from the screen, you found the faces of the people around you also moved, and the sight of their being moved moved you further, and the being moved together was a thing distinct from and greater than the being moved alone.
This is why the reports from this period, when people described watching Ganesha or Krishna or Ramayan, so often focused not on what happened on the screen but on what happened in the room. On the face of the grandfather who had known these stories all his life and was now seeing them for the first time in this form. On the small child who had climbed into an adult's lap during a difficult scene and stayed there after the scene had passed. At the moment when the programme ended, and nobody moved for a while, the room containing the residue of the shared experience, everyone in it held the same feeling that nobody had words for yet.
A schoolteacher named Madhusudan Rao, who taught in a government school in Nandyal in what was then Andhra Pradesh, kept a diary during this period. His entries are precise and worth reading in full, but one passage has been quoted often enough that it belongs here:
The evening of the third Krishna episode. We were seventeen people in my house — my wife and children, my brother's family, the family from next door, two old men from the colony who have no television and come every week. The episode was the one about Putana, the demoness who came to kill the infant Krishna but was destroyed by him. I had told this story to children many times. I thought I knew it completely. But watching it on the screen, in the animation that they have made — watching the demoness who had come to kill transformed in the moment of death into something purified, watching the face of the divine infant — I did not know where to look. I could not look at the screen. I looked at my daughter, who is four years old, and she was completely still, her eyes enormous, and I understood that she was receiving this story for the first time in its full meaning, and I had never seen a child receive this story in its full meaning before, and I found I was crying. Not from sadness. From something I don't have a word for. The seventeen of us in the room were all very quiet. When the programme ended, the two old men from the colony got up to leave, and one of them — a man of seventy who has farmed the same land his whole life and is not a man given to demonstrations of emotion — touched my daughter's head as he passed her and said, very quietly: Jai Shri Ram. And left without another word. My daughter looked up at me and asked, " What did he mean? And I said: he meant that today you met someone important. She considered this. Then she went back to her milk.
The children were the story within the story.
Not because the children's response was more important than the adult response. Because it was different in a way that mattered, and that difference said something about what the shows were doing.
Adults came to the shows with their existing relationship to the stories. They came with memories — of grandparents telling the stories, of hearing them at festivals, of the versions that had been told to them throughout their lives. They came with their beliefs, already formed, some firm and some loose and some almost forgotten. They came with the accumulated associations of years. When they watched Ramayan, they were watching it in relation to everything they already knew about Ramayan, and the watching was a conversation between the present experience and all that history.
Children came with nothing. Or rather, they came with the fragments — the names they had heard, the images from the altar, the incomplete retellings of grandparents. But they came without the structure, without the full architecture of the story, without the prior experience of the thing in its complete form. For children, the Ramayan was not a return. It was a first encounter.
This is what the adults in the room understood when they watched the children watching. They were watching someone have an experience for the first time that they themselves had had versions of across an entire lifetime — versions that were scattered and partial and filtered. They were watching the stories arrive in a child's mind in a complete and vivid form, with no prior experience to modulate the arrival.
The intensity was astonishing.
Children did not watch these programmes the way they watched other children's television. Other children's television was received with movement, with comment, with the fidgeting and commentary and physical restlessness that was children's standard relationship to passive entertainment. They watched. They also played. They also climbed on each other. They also asked questions constantly and left and came back and arranged themselves in positions that suggested their attention was partial.
They watched Ganesha, Krishna and Ramayan differently.
They were still.
The stillness of a child fully absorbed was something that any parent recognised — it was the stillness of a child reading a book that had them completely, or of a child listening to a story that had them completely. It was the stillness of attention so total that the body forgot to move.
Children were still for the full thirty minutes of each episode.
And then, afterwards, they were not still at all.
The playing that followed the episodes was the thing that, more than anything else, demonstrated what the shows were doing in the children who watched them.
Before Ganesha and Krishna and Ramayan, Indian children played at being film heroes — the actors they had seen in the cinema, the dialogues they had memorised, the action sequences they reproduced in alleyways. They played at being cricketers and soldiers and the characters from the comic books that circulated in schools.
After the shows, they played at being Ram, Sita and Hanuman. They played at being Krishna at the banks of the Yamuna. They played at being Ganesha, writing the Mahabharata with the enormous celestial pen that he had broken from his own tusk.
This was not, in itself, surprising. Children played with what they had seen. The significance was in the quality of the playing.
When children played at being film heroes, they played in the specific way of children performing something external — they were doing the actions, saying the words, recreating the performance. The playing had the quality of imitation.
When children played at being Ram or Krishna or Ganesha, they were not imitating. They were inhabiting. They were inside the stories in a way that had a completely different quality — they argued about what Ram would do in a given situation, not as a question of what the character did in the episode but as a moral question, a question about the right action. They argued about it the way they would argue about what they themselves should do. Because Ram had become — not a character to be imitated, but a person to be understood, whose choices were choices that had to be understood if you were going to understand what it meant to do the right thing.
A father in Mysore — a government official named Venkataramaiah, who had been keeping notes on his children's responses to the programmes — wrote this in December 1973: My son, who is eight, has been playing Ramayan with the children from the neighbouring houses. He has been playing Ram. Yesterday, there was a conflict about what Ram would have done in a situation they invented — some disagreement among the Vanars, I think. My son argued his position for a long time and then said: But Ram would do the right thing, even if it was hard. Even if nobody knew. Because that's who Ram is. And the other children thought about this. And they accepted it. Because they all knew that this was true. And I realised: he has not learned this as a lesson. He has understood it from the inside, from watching someone who did it.
The episode that produced the most response — in children and in adults, in letters to Doordarshan and in conversations at every level of society — was the sixth episode of Ramayan, broadcast on the third of February 1974.
It was the episode of Kaikeyi's boon.
The scene in which Ram received the news that he was to be exiled — not the exile itself, not the departure from Ayodhya, but the moment of reception — was twelve minutes of animation that were, by the consensus of everyone who saw them, the finest twelve minutes of animation that had been made in India, and among the finest that had been made anywhere.
Ram's face when he heard. That was what people talked about afterwards, what they tried to describe and could not quite describe, what they came back to again and again in the conversations that the episode generated.
Ram's face was not devastated. This was what made it extraordinary, and this was the decision that had required the most courage and the most craft. If Ram's face had been devastated — had shown the shock and the grief and the anger that the situation warranted — the scene would have been moving conventionally. It would have produced sympathy. It would have shown a hero experiencing a terrible injustice.
But Kulkarni understood what the moment was actually about. The moment was not about Ram's grief. It was about Ram's character. The moment was the moment in which everything that Ram was — everything that made him the person the story was about, the person who carried dharma in himself as a natural condition rather than as an achievement — was revealed in the simple fact of how he received the news.
Ram's face, in the animation, went through something that was not devastation and was not noble stoicism — which would have been equally false — but was the specific complex thing of a person who has received something that they did not deserve and that they know they did not deserve, who feels the full human response to this — the confusion, the grief, the bewilderment at a father's failure of love — and who then, not through effort or through the suppression of what they feel but through something deeper than either, arrives at acceptance.
Not passive acceptance. Not resignation. The acceptance of someone who has looked at what is in front of them and understood that the path forward, however painful, is the path that their nature requires them to take.
The twelve minutes of this scene were essentially silent. Not without sound — the music was present, very quietly — but without dialogue. Ram said almost nothing. What happened happened in his face.
In a schoolroom in Nagpur, the teacher — a woman named Indira Kelkar who had given her students an assignment to write about the episode — read their responses the following week and was so struck by what they had written that she typed them and sent them to the Doordarshan regional office. The responses were from children between the ages of ten and thirteen.
One boy, twelve years old, had written: When Ram heard the news, I thought he would cry. I was ready for him to cry. But he didn't cry. He listened, and then he was quiet for a long time. And then his face changed in a way I have seen my father's face change when something bad has happened that he cannot fix. And I understood that Ram was not a hero who didn't feel pain. He was a person who felt the pain and still knew what he had to do. I want to be like that. I don't know if I can be like that. But I want to be.
A girl, eleven years old: Sita's face when she heard. She looked at Ram, and she understood before he said anything. And then she said she would go with him. And the way she said it — it wasn't brave. It was like asking if something she hadn't even considered not doing. I told my mother about this, and my mother was quiet for a while. Then she said, " Yes. " That is what love is. That is the only answer there is.
The Ramayan exile sequence — the departure from Ayodhya, the people of the city watching Ram and Sita and Lakshmana go — was broadcast on the seventeenth of February, 1974.
What happened in India during the broadcast of this episode was something that Doordarshan's regional staff reported with a quality of bewilderment in their official communications, because it was something that had no clear precedent and that the forms available to them did not quite capture.
Streets emptied. Not in the way that streets emptied for Chitrahaar, which was the emptying of people going inside because they wanted to watch something. Streets emptied in the way they emptied for Diwali, or for a major cricket match, or for a solar eclipse — the specific emptying of a moment that everyone understood, without anyone having organised it, was a moment that required being present to something together.
People gathered around screens in numbers that exceeded the screens' usual audiences. In some locations, it was reported that people who did not have access to screens — who had missed the earlier episodes, who did not have the habit of watching — came to wherever screens were simply because they had heard, from someone who knew someone, that tonight was the night that Ram left Ayodhya, and that you should see it.
The episode opened not with Ram and Sita and Lakshmana preparing to leave, but with Ayodhya waking up.
Ayodhya waking up on the morning of the departure — the specific ordinary life of a city waking up, the sounds of it, the smell of it implied in the visuals, the people going about their morning before they knew what the morning held — was three minutes of extraordinary animation that served one purpose: to make the city real. Real enough that when the departure came, the loss would be felt as a real loss. Not the loss of a story. The loss of something that had been there, in front of you, that you had believed in.
The scene of the people gathering on the road as Ram passed — the faces in the crowd — was the scene that was discussed in the days and weeks and months afterwards more than any other single scene in all three programmes. Hundreds of faces. Not generic crowd faces. Individual faces, each one animated with a specific expression, a specific quality of grief or love or something that was both at once. The old woman who was crying and did not seem to know she was crying. The young man who was holding his son on his shoulders so the boy could see, and who kept looking away from Ram and back to the road ahead because he was trying not to cry in front of his son and failing. The child who ran alongside the chariot for a few steps, who was not doing it from heroism or from narrative purpose but simply because the child could not bear to stop being near.
The child who ran alongside.
This image — which lasted perhaps ten seconds on the screen — became, in the weeks following, the image that people returned to most often when they described what the episode had done to them. Not because it was the most dramatic moment. Because it was the most human moment. Because every person who watched it understood immediately and completely what it was to be unable to stop following something even when following was impossible, when there was no practical point to the following, when the thing was going regardless — and to keep going anyway for those few steps because stopping felt like the worst thing.
In a neighbourhood in Patna, a man named Suresh Gupta who worked at a bank described watching the episode with his father, who was seventy-three years old and who had been reciting verses from the Ramayan since before Suresh was born: When the child ran alongside the chariot, my father — my father who has been telling these stories for forty years, who knows the Ramayan the way he knows his own name — my father put his face in his hands. I have never seen my father cry. I have seen him at funerals, and I have seen him in illness, and I have never seen him cry. And when I asked him later, he said: I have told the story of the departure from Ayodhya a hundred times. But I never saw it before. Hearing is not the same as seeing.
There were, naturally, objections.
There are always objections when something that has belonged to the interior life of a culture is made exterior. When the private is made public. When the sacred, which has lived in the imagination and in the inherited telling, is given a visible form that supersedes the personal imagination.
The objections came from several directions.
Some came from religious scholars and theologians who were concerned about the canonicity of the stories as presented — about specific decisions Kulkarni and his writers had made in the episodes, specific moments where the storytelling had chosen one version of an event over another, specific interpretive choices about characters and their motivations. These objections were specific and substantive and were engaged with seriously by the programmes' writers, some of whom published responses in Hindi and English literary magazines.
Some came from those who felt that the visual form was inappropriate for sacred material — that giving the gods a specific and definitive visual form, a form that would now become authoritative in the minds of the children who watched it, was a kind of theological overreach. That the gods belonged in the imagination where each person's relationship to them was personal and unrepeatable, and that fixing them in an animated form reduced that personal relationship to a shared image.
These objections were not without merit. Kulkarni himself, in an interview given in March 1974, acknowledged them directly: I thought about this constantly. Every time I decided how Ganesha looked, or how Ram moved, or how Sita's eyes were when she looked at Ram — I knew that for the children watching, this was going to become the image. Not one image among many. The image. And I had to decide whether that was acceptable, and I decided it was, because the alternative was no image at all, and no image means the stories remain in a register that children cannot access. I chose accessibility over the preservation of interpretive freedom. That choice can be criticised. I made it anyway.
Some objections came from those who saw the programmes as a commercialisation of the sacred, as a product made for profit from material that belonged to the people in a different sense — not as intellectual property but as cultural inheritance. That Karan Cinema, which was a private company, had no right to make these stories into television programmes and air them as their content.
These objections were harder to engage with, not because they were more substantive but because they were about something that was genuinely unresolved — the question of who owns the stories that belong to a culture, and whether the act of bringing them to an audience that could not otherwise have access to them in this form was a gift or a theft.
What was observable, regardless of the objections, was what the shows were doing.
And what they were doing was this: they were making the children of India personally acquainted with the best stories their culture possessed.
In April 1974, a researcher from the Delhi School of Economics named Priti Varma conducted a survey of schoolchildren in three cities — Delhi, Lucknow, and Patna — about their knowledge of and relationship to the stories from Ganesha, Krishna, and Ramayana. The survey was not rigorous by academic standards — it was a preliminary study, a first attempt to measure something that had not previously been measured. But its findings were of sufficient interest that Varma published them in a report that circulated through the academic community and eventually reached the Education Ministry.
The findings were these:
Children who had been watching the Doordarshan programmes since November demonstrated substantially greater familiarity with the narrative content of the three traditions than children who had not watched — not only familiarity with plot events but familiarity with character motivation, with moral reasoning, with the specific ethical situations the stories presented.
More significantly, children who had watched the programmes demonstrated a kind of moral reasoning about the stories' characters that was characteristic of engagement with literature — the ability to hold a character's actions in judgment without simply accepting or rejecting them, to understand why a character chose while also evaluating whether the choice was right. They could talk about Kaikeyi's boon in terms that showed they understood why Kaikeyi had asked for it, why Dasharatha had given it, why Ram had accepted it — they could hold all three of these perspectives simultaneously, which was the specific cognitive move that literature at its best taught.
Varma noted: What is being described by these children is not religious instruction. It is moral and narrative education of a kind that traditionally required direct mentorship from a skilled teacher. The programmes appear to be functioning as a form of literary education — producing in children the capacity for the kind of thinking about stories and the kind of reasoning about choices that we associate with an educated engagement with narrative.
This was not what anyone had set out to produce. Or perhaps it was exactly what had been set out, and the setting out had been done by someone who understood what these stories were, at their best, for.
The letters.
In 1973 and 1974, Doordarshan received letters. This was normal — any popular programme received letters, usually about technical issues or programming schedules or the occasional fan appreciation. Doordarshan had staff who handled letters, which is to say: staff who received and logged and filed them without doing anything in particular about them, which was the standard practice because the volume was manageable and the individual letters were not usually significant.
The letter volume following the start of the Karan Cinema programmes was not manageable in the existing way.
The Delhi regional office of Doordarshan received, in the four months between November 1973 and March 1974, approximately fourteen thousand letters related to the three programmes. The Bombay office received approximately nine thousand. The Madras office has approximately seven thousand. The Calcutta office has approximately six thousand.
Thirty-six thousand letters in four months.
The letters were from every kind of person. They were from children — written in the careful block letters of children, often decorated with drawings that showed characters from the episodes — and they were from grandparents who wrote in Urdu script and in Hindi and in English and in Tamil and Telugu, each letter carrying the specific voice of its writer. They were from housewives and from professors and from farmers and from soldiers and from truck drivers who had seen episodes playing at dhabas on the highway and from a temple priest in Madurai who wrote to say that since the programme had started, attendance at the morning prayers had increased, and that the increase was primarily of children who had not previously come on their own.
The letters were not all flattering. Some were critical of specific choices in the animation. Some were theological objections. Some were from parents who were concerned that their children were now unable to watch other programmes because nothing else met the standard they had set.
But the overwhelming quality of the letters was something that the Doordarshan staff who processed them — and who were themselves, like everyone in India, part of the audience — found difficult to categorise in the standard ways. The letters were expressing something that the existing vocabulary of audience feedback did not contain.
A fourteen-year-old girl from Jaipur wrote: I didn't understand why my mother cried during Ramayan. I thought it was just sad. Now I have watched the episodes, and I understand. She was not crying because it was sad. She was crying because it was true.
A retired army officer from Dehradun wrote: I have served in the army for thirty years, and I have read about dharma in many books and heard many lectures. No book or lecture has shown me dharma the way the young man's face shows it when he receives the news of his exile. I want my grandchildren to understand what I saw in that face. I do not have the words to explain it. I am grateful that the programmes have given them the experience.
A schoolgirl from Hyderabad, nine years old, wrote in a combination of Telugu and Hindi: I want to ask one question. Is Sita okay at the end? My mother won't tell me because she says she doesn't want to make me sad. But I would like to know. Ganesha and Krishna are happy in their stories, but I am worried about Sita. She seems very brave, and I want her to be okay.
This letter was the one that the Doordarshan regional director in Hyderabad, a man named Chaudhary who had been in government service for twenty years and had not previously been moved by a piece of correspondence, placed on his desk where he could see it every morning for the remainder of the year. He could not have said exactly why. Something about the directness of the child's concern. Something about her seems very brave, and I want her to be okay, which was the simplest possible expression of the response that the most sophisticated storytelling was designed to produce — the caring about the person as a person, the wanting for them what you would want for someone you loved.
In Gorakhpur, on a Thursday evening in March 1974, in a house on Moti Lal Nehru Road, the Shergill family watched the Ramayan episode of the week.
This was not remarkable in itself — the Shergill family had been watching the episodes since November, as most of India had, and the Thursday viewing had become as fixed a point in the household's week as the morning tea and the evening meal. What was different about this particular Thursday was that Karan was home, which was not always the case — his schedule moved him between Gorakhpur and Bombay and Delhi and various other places with a frequency that meant his presence at the dinner table, let alone in front of the television on a Thursday evening, was not guaranteed.
He was home.
He had been in Gorakhpur for three days after the S-35 prototype engine run, and in three days he would go to Delhi for the Prime Minister's meeting, but on this Thursday he was here, in the sitting room of the house on Moti Lal Nehru Road, watching the Ramayan episode that was the Ashoka Vatika episode — the episode in which Hanuman found Sita in Lanka.
The episode was thirty-two minutes.
Leela Devi watched it from the chair beside the window, in the posture she adopted for the programmes — slightly forward, hands folded in her lap, with the stillness of a woman who had grown up with these stories and was now seeing them and was not separating the two experiences but holding them together. She had grown up in Gorakhpur. She had heard these stories from her mother, who had heard them from her mother. The stories went back through the women of her family in an unbroken line to times before anyone could remember when they had begun.
She watched Sita in the Ashoka Vatika. Sita alone, in the garden of the enemy king, surrounded by rakshasas, refusing. Refusing to despair. Refusing to stop believing in Ram's coming. The specific quality of the waiting — not passive, not resigned, but an active holding-on, the refusal to let go of the thing you trusted even when there was no visible evidence to justify the trust.
When the episode ended, Leela Devi was quiet for a while.
Sakshi, who had been watching from the sofa, looked at her.
"Amma ji," Sakshi said quietly.
Leela Devi looked at her. Her eyes were bright — not tearful, just bright, the specific luminosity of eyes that have been in the presence of something significant.
"When I was young," Leela Devi said, "my mother used to tell this part. The Ashoka Vatika part. She used to say, " This is the part where you learn what a woman is made of. Not when things are easy. When things are the hardest they have ever been, and the only thing you have is the belief that you trusted, and you have to decide whether to keep holding it."
She looked at the television screen, which was now showing something else.
"I always heard this," she said. "I never saw it before."
Then she looked at Karan.
He was looking at the television. He had the quality, when he watched these programmes, of a man receiving something — not analysing it, not assessing it from the outside, but receiving it in the way that you received something that was also yours, something that belonged to you as much as it belonged to anyone.
"You made this," Leela Devi said to him. Not as an accusation. Not as praise, exactly. As a statement of something she needed to say out loud to fully understand it. "You made this possible."
He looked at her.
"The studio made it," he said. "Arvind and his team made it."
"You started it," she said. "You understood that it needed to exist."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "India needed to see its own stories. Really see them. The way Doordarshan reaches — if you can put something true on that screen, it reaches everyone. Not just the people who can go to the cinema or buy books. Everyone."
"Yes," Leela Devi said. "Yes, that's right."
She looked at the screen.
"The child in the story," she said. "The one who runs alongside the chariot. My mother told me about that child. She said, " This is the child who is in all of us, who runs because we cannot bear to stop following what we love. I always understood this as a — as a thing that was said. As a metaphor." She paused. "Now I have seen the child run. And I understand it differently."
Karan watched her.
"Differently how?" he said.
"Not as a metaphor," she said. "As a fact." She turned back to the screen. "The child runs because the child loves. And the love is bigger than the reason to stop. That is the whole point. The love is bigger than the reason to stop."
She was quiet after this.
The sitting room was quiet.
Outside, Gorakhpur was doing what it did on Thursday evenings — the specific sound of a city that had largely been watching the same programme and was now emerging from it into the night, the conversations starting as the episodes ended, the processing beginning.
Karan sat in the room with his family and looked at the television screen that was showing something ordinary now, something that was fine but was not what the previous thirty-two minutes had been, and he thought about what his mother had said.
The love is bigger than the reason to stop.
He thought about the conversations that had led to the programmes' existence. The specific argument he had made to the Doordarshan programming committee in 1972, that they should give a time slot to animated religious stories made by a private studio, an argument that had been met with scepticism because animation was expensive and religious content was politically complicated and who knew if people would watch. He had made the argument with the specific certainty he had about things he understood clearly, and the argument had eventually prevailed, and Kulkarni had gone to work.
He had not known what Kulkarni would make. He had known that the stories needed to be made, and that the platform — Doordarshan reaching into a hundred million households, the shared screen in every chai shop and dhaba and waiting room — was the platform for it. He had known the conditions. He had not known the result.
The result was thirty-six thousand letters in four months.
The result was a child in Mysore arguing that Ram would do the right thing even if no one was watching, because that's who Ram was.
The result was a retired army officer in Dehradun writing that he had not understood dharma from thirty years of service and many books and lectures, but had understood it from watching a young man's face.
The result was Leela Devi, who had known these stories her whole life, saying: I never saw it before.
He looked at the television.
In April 1974, on Doordarshan, the Ramayan was continuing toward its conclusion. The Lanka battle was approaching. Ravana was approaching. The episode in which Ram and Ravana finally stood before each other — the episode that everyone knew was coming, that the whole story had been building toward, that everyone watching had been waiting for since January — was weeks away.
Schools across India had already begun reporting that children were absent from classes on the day after the Lanka battle episode because they had been unable to sleep — not from fright, but from the thing that happened after you had seen something too large to settle quickly, that stayed in you and needed time to settle.
The Lanka battle episode would air in May.
By then, sixteen million television sets were expected to be in use across India — the Shergill Jawan had shipped its first hundred thousand units in March, and the number was rising weekly. By the time the Lanka battle aired, more screens would be showing it than had been showing the departure from Ayodhya in February, and more people would be watching, and the story would reach further into India's houses and its streets and its waiting rooms and its dhabas than any previous broadcast in the medium's history.
The child who ran alongside the chariot would run alongside for a larger audience.
The love that was bigger than the reason to stop would be received by more people who would understand it, in that moment, not as a metaphor but as a fact.
This was not the largest thing that was happening in India in April 1974. There were aircraft flying and tanks being designed and oil being drilled and semiconductors being manufactured and an atomic device being prepared in the Rajasthan desert. There were things that were strategically more significant, that were changing India's position in the world in ways that were measurable in kilotons and kilonewtons and barrels per day.
But in the houses where the television screens glowed on Thursday evenings, in the shared watching that was one of the specific things television did that nothing else could do, in the thirty-seven thousand letters and the children who ran alongside imaginary chariots in alleyways and the grandparents who saw for the first time the story they had been telling all their lives — something was happening that was also significant, in a different register.
India was watching its own stories.
Really watching them. Seeing them. Letting them arrive in the full force of their telling, in a form that reached the bones.
This was not a small thing.
It was, in its way, one of the most intimate things that the country had done — giving itself back to itself, in the language it understood best, on the screen that reached the furthest, at the moment when it could reach the most.
The shows would run for years.
The children who watched them would carry what they had seen for the rest of their lives — not as religious instruction, not as cultural programming, but as something more specific and more lasting: the memory of having met someone who mattered, and of having understood, from that meeting, something about what it was possible to be.
Ganesha had looked at them from the screen and smiled.
And they had smiled back.
Production Note — Karan Cinema Doordarshan Programmes, 1973–1974
Ganesha — First episode aired 12 November 1973, Friday evenings 19:00–19:30 Krishna — First episode aired 23 November 1973, Friday evenings 19:30–20:00 Ramayan — First episode aired 11 January 1974, Friday evenings 20:00–20:30
Director: Arvind KulkarniStudio: Karan Cinema Animation Division, BombayNetwork: Doordarshan (All India Radio Television)
Viewership estimates: Week 1 (Ganesha): approximately 800,000 viewers. Week 12 (combined programmes): estimated 18–22 million viewers. April 1974 (combined): estimated 35–40 million viewers.
Letters received by Doordarshan regional offices, November 1973 – March 1974: approximately 36,000.
School observation reports from 14 states, April 1974: children demonstrating substantially greater engagement in narrative and moral reasoning with Puranic traditions than comparable cohorts from previous years.
First Shergill Jawan television sets (550 rupees) reaching homes: March 1974 onwards. Estimated new viewers added monthly: 150,000–200,000.
The specific geography of how the programmes moved through India was itself a story.
Doordarshan in 1973 did not reach all of India simultaneously. The television infrastructure — the transmitters and relay stations that converted the broadcast signal into the picture on the screen — was distributed unevenly, dense in the cities, sparse in the countryside, absent in many districts entirely. The relay station in Delhi covered the northern cities. Bombay's relay reached much of Maharashtra. Madras served the south. Calcutta reached Bengal and parts of Bihar. But between the cities, in the vast agricultural interior where most Indians actually lived, the signal faded and the screens went dark.
This meant that the programmes arrived in different places at different times, by different channels. Where the broadcast could not reach, the word traveled instead. The word that traveled was specific and consistent across distances and languages, which was itself a remarkable thing: the word was not a description of what the programmes contained but a description of what watching them did to you.
Not: it's a programme about Ganesha. But: you have to see it.
Not: they're showing Ramayan on television. But: when the child runs alongside the chariot — you have to see it.
The experience was the message. The telling of the experience was the advertisement. And because the experience was genuine — because people were describing something real that had actually happened to them — the telling worked in a way that advertising did not, because advertising could be disbelieved and this could not.
A schoolteacher named Jaya Krishnan in Palakkad district in Kerala did not have access to a television in November 1973. Palakkad's relay coverage was incomplete — her village received a signal that was sometimes adequate and sometimes not, and the nearest reliable television was in the town centre, a twenty-minute walk, at the tea shop owned by a man named Rajan who kept the set on until ten every night. She had heard about the programmes from a colleague who had traveled to Coimbatore and seen the first episodes. She had walked to Rajan's tea shop the following Friday and watched the fifth episode of Ganesha.
She walked back in the dark.
She did not talk to her husband about what she had seen. This was unusual — she talked to her husband about everything. She sat in the kitchen and made the dinner and was quiet, and her husband, who knew her well enough to recognize the specific quality of the quiet, did not ask. He waited.
After dinner she said: I need to tell you something. He said: yes. She said: I have been telling the children at school about Ganesha for twelve years. I thought I knew the story. I didn't know the story. I knew facts about it. But I didn't know what it was.
Her husband waited.
She said: Watching that programme — seeing the birth, seeing Parvati's face — I understood something I had been teaching without understanding. The story is not about the miracle of the elephant head. The story is about what a mother does when she loses a child. And about what happens after that. The head is what Shiva gave back. But what Parvati did first — the creating, the loving — that is the story.
She was quiet again.
Then: I want to take the children from school to watch it. All of them. I want them to see it.
She negotiated with Rajan to open the tea shop on Friday evenings for educational purposes. Rajan was a practical man and pointed out that Friday evenings were already his busiest viewing time. She negotiated a time — the hour before the usual viewing began. Rajan agreed.
For the next eight weeks, on Friday evenings, forty schoolchildren from Jaya Krishnan's school walked twenty minutes to Rajan's tea shop and watched Ganesha. Then, as the word spread and other parents came, and then as Krishna began, the forty children became seventy, and Rajan moved the television outside onto the street to accommodate them, and the Friday evening gathering at Rajan's tea shop became the Friday evening gathering that the whole neighbourhood expected and attended.
This is how the programmes spread where the broadcast signal did not reach.
Through schoolteachers who made journeys and came back changed.
Through fathers who drove motorcycles to the nearest town and watched an episode and drove back and described it so that their wives drove to the next town and watched the same episode and came back and described it differently.
Through the specific mechanism of people who had been somewhere and seen something and could not rest until they had told everyone around them about it.
The programmes moved through India like a tide — not fast, not uniform, not tidy at the edges, but moving. Always moving. Into the gaps in the signal. Into the villages that had no screens. Into the houses that had no electricity but whose children walked to the schoolteacher's house on Friday evenings.
What happened to the children of the southern cities was specific to the south in ways that were shaped by the south's particular cultural relationship to the stories.
In Tamil Nadu, the Ramayana was not only a Sanskrit tradition. The Tamil Ramayana — the Kamba Ramayanam — was a thousand years old, was in the bones of Tamil culture in a way that was specific to the Tamil language and the Tamil sensibility, was recited by poets and sung at temples and was as much a part of the landscape of Tamil intellectual life as the classical literature itself. Tamil children grew up with the Kamba Ramayanam as well as the Valmiki original, with the stories in their Tamil form rather than or alongside their Sanskrit form.
The Ramayan animation was based primarily on the Valmiki text, which was the shared source. But Arvind Kulkarni and his writers had read the Kamba Ramayanam, and specific choices in the visual storytelling — particular moments, particular ways of framing certain scenes — showed the influence of Kamban's Tamil interpretation. This was not accidental. It was deliberate: an attempt to make the programme feel simultaneously universal and locally rooted, to give different audiences the specific recognitions that would make the story feel like theirs.
In Madurai, a poet named Krishnaswamy Iyer who was in his seventies, who had spent his life in the Tamil literary tradition, who had written commentaries on Kamban and who had strong views about the correct interpretation of almost everything — this man watched the second Ramayan episode with his granddaughter Padma, who was seven, and found himself, during the scene of Ram's departure from the forest with Sita and Lakshmana, reciting under his breath the verses from Kamban that corresponded to what was on the screen. Not thinking about reciting them. Reciting them. The words coming automatically, the way words came that lived in you below the level of conscious recall.
Padma had heard him. She had looked up. What are you saying, Thatha? He had told her: the same story. These words are the same story. In Tamil, written a thousand years ago. She had looked at the screen and then back at him. It's the same story? Yes. But it's on the television. Yes. Has it always been on the television? No, only now. She had thought about this. Was it on the television when you were young? No. Did you see it somewhere else? No. So how did you learn the words? My grandmother told me. And her grandmother told her. And before that, someone told her grandmother. Going back. How far back? As far as people can remember, and further.
Padma had thought about this for a long time — about the line of people stretching back into a time before memory, each one telling the next, the words moving forward through time from person to person, grandmother to grandchild, until they had arrived at her grandfather reciting them in front of the television in Madurai in 1974.
That's very long, she had said.
Yes, he had said.
And now it's on the television.
Yes.
Now everyone can see it at the same time.
He had looked at her. She was seven years old and she had just described, more precisely than most analyses he had read, the specific transformation that the medium of television represented for the transmission of cultural tradition. The shift from the linear chain of individual transmission — grandmother to grandchild, teacher to student, generation by generation — to the simultaneous broadcast that allowed the whole culture to receive the story at once, in the same moment, together.
Yes, he had said. Everyone can see it at the same time.
She had nodded, satisfied, and turned back to the screen.
The episode that aired on the fourteenth of March 1974 — the same day as the Shergill Electronics product launch at the Gorakhpur mall, the launch of the television sets that would add ten thousand new screens to India every week — was the episode of Hanuman's burning tail.
The tail of Hanuman set on fire by Ravana's soldiers, as an insult, as a punishment. And Hanuman — who is strength and devotion and intelligence and the specific quality of someone who serves completely and therefore has the power of complete service — Hanuman who does not resist the burning but who takes the burning and uses it, who carries the fire through Lanka and lights it and uses the same fire meant to demean him to demonstrate the thing that demeaning could not reach.
The animation of Hanuman's burning tail had required a specific technical achievement. Fire in animation was one of the hardest things to animate correctly — fire moved according to its own logic, had a specific quality of unpredictability within pattern, and looked wrong if the unpredictability was missing. Arvind Kulkarni's team had spent three months developing the technique for this sequence. The result was fire that moved with the specific quality of fire — that caught the light and threw it, that had the orange at its base and the yellow at its peak and the blue at its heart, that guttered and roared and was alive.
Hanuman carrying this fire through Lanka — leaping from rooftop to rooftop, the burning tail trailing, the city catching light behind him — was six minutes of animation that had been, in the studio's judgment, the single most technically demanding sequence they had produced.
In front of television screens across India, children watched it with the specific physical response that children showed when their whole bodies became involved in what they were watching — sitting forward, gripping the mat or each other, making the small involuntary sounds of vicarious physical experience. Not fear — Hanuman was not in danger, everyone watching knew Hanuman was not in danger, Hanuman could not be destroyed by fire. But the visceral quality of it, the enormousness of it, the sense of power used in service of what was right — this produced in the children's bodies the response that huge and good things produced.
After the episode, the playing in the streets of every city and town and village where the episode had been seen was fire. Not real fire — the parents were firm about this — but imaginary fire. Children who became Hanuman and trailed their imaginary burning tails through alleyways and backyards and rooftops, setting light to the structures of the enemy. The children did not think of this as playing at war. They thought of it as being Hanuman. Being the one who takes what is meant to destroy and turns it into the instrument of good.
A ten-year-old in Bhopal named Ranjit spent the Saturday after the episode trying to explain to his grandmother what Hanuman had done. His grandmother was eighty and had grown up with the story and knew it better than Ranjit could explain it. But she let him explain. She let him tell it back to her — not because she needed to hear it but because she understood, from the quality of his urgency, that he needed to tell it, needed to put it into words to fully possess it, and that the telling to a listener was the mechanism by which what he had seen became his.
When he finished, she was quiet for a moment.
Then she said: Do you know why Hanuman could do this?
He thought. Because he was strong? Because Rama's name protected him? Because—
No, she said. Because he knew who he was. He knew what he was for. When you know who you are and what you are for, you cannot be destroyed by the things that are meant to destroy you. That's what the burning tail means.
He looked at her.
She said: Your grandfather — who died before you were born — he used to say this. He used to say: know what you are for. If you know what you are for, the rest will manage itself.
He was ten years old and he did not fully understand what she was saying, but he understood that she was saying something important and that the saying of it was connected to the episode he had just watched, and that the episode had given her a way to say something she had wanted him to know.
He carried this for the rest of his life. Not the theology. Not the specific words. The feeling of his grandmother looking at him across the room while the television screen still showed the glow of Hanuman's fire, and saying: know what you are for.
The Rama-Ravana encounter.
The episode did not air until May — outside the period this chapter covers, technically, but its anticipation was so completely woven into the texture of the preceding months that it belonged here, in the thing that was already happening.
By April 1974, the entire country that had access to a screen knew that the Lanka battle was coming. The story was the story — everyone who had grown up with it knew how it ended. The ending was not the suspense. The suspense was what seeing it would do. What the animation would make of the confrontation between Rama and Ravana, between order and disorder, between the person who had sacrificed everything to do what was right and the person who had everything and refused every invitation to return what was not his.
The letters to Doordarshan in March and April 1974 were full of this anticipation. Children wrote asking when the Lanka battle would happen. Adults wrote suggesting how it should be animated. One old man from Jodhpur wrote — in a careful, faded hand, on paper that had been folded many times — that he was seventy-eight years old and had hoped to see the Ramayan performed at the big festival in the town square before he died, but that the festival had not come, and that he was grateful the television had come instead, and that he hoped he would still be alive when the Lanka battle aired.
He was.
The episode aired on the third of May, 1974.
On the fourth of May — across India, in conversations that happened in every language, in every city, in the streets and the offices and the households — people tried to describe what they had seen.
They were largely unsuccessful.
The adequate description of the Lanka battle episode — of what it did to the people who watched it — exceeded the available vocabulary in any language, including the languages that had been developing vocabulary for three thousand years to describe this story. The experience was too immediate, too visceral, too personal. The story had been, for three thousand years, a story about what happened. The episode made it a story about what it felt like to be there.
To be there when the god and the demon finally faced each other.
To be there in the specific silence between them — the silence that the animation gave full weight and full duration, not hurrying toward the confrontation but letting the moment of its approach expand until the people watching felt the approach in themselves, felt it as a physical thing, the specific quality of imminence.
To be there when Ram raised his bow.
A journalist named Anjali Mehta who was writing a piece on the programmes for a Hindi-language magazine sat in her sitting room in Bombay and watched the episode with her ten-year-old son Vivek and her eighty-year-old mother who had walked from Gujarat as a refugee in 1947 and who had known the Ramayan all her life.
When the episode ended, the three of them sat in the room.
Anjali's son Vivek said, very quietly: Is it over? Is Sita okay?
Yes, Anjali said. Sita is okay. Ravana is defeated.
Vivek thought about this. Then: Why did it take so long? If Ram could do that — why did it take so long to get there?
Anjali started to answer, but her mother spoke first.
The old woman, who was eighty years old and who had seen things in her life that she did not speak about, looked at her grandson and said: Because the right thing takes as long as it takes. You cannot arrive at the right conclusion before you have walked the full road. Ram walked every step of the road. He did not skip any of it. That is why he could do what he did at the end. Because he had done everything that came before.
Vivek looked at his great-grandmother.
Every step? he said.
Every step.
He thought about this.
Even the sad parts?
Especially the sad parts.
He was quiet for a long time.
Okay, he said finally.
Then he went to bed.
Anjali wrote this conversation in her notebook. She tried to include it in the article she was writing. Her editor said it was too long, too personal, belonged in a different piece. She kept it in her notebook.
Twenty years later, she read it at Vivek's wedding, because Vivek had asked her to. Because he remembered the night, and the question he had asked, and what his great-grandmother had said, and he wanted his new wife to know about the evening when he had understood something important.
Every step. Even the sad parts. Especially the sad parts.
That was what the programme gave. Not just the story. Not just the spectacle. The specific thing that great stories gave when they were told with the care the story deserved: the experience of living through something completely, so that what you understood at the end was understanding you had earned, not understanding you had been given.
In April 1974, Arvind Kulkarni gave an interview to a film magazine in Bombay. The interviewer was young and wanted to talk about animation technique, about the Japanese influences, about the production process. Kulkarni answered these questions patiently and precisely.
Then the interviewer asked: What do you think the programmes have done? To the country. To the people who watch.
Kulkarni was quiet for a moment.
He said: I think they have introduced a generation of children to something that is theirs. That has always been theirs. That their grandparents know and that they didn't fully know yet. I think they have made the handshake that happens between generations — the handshake where the older people give the younger people the things that matter — I think they have made that handshake visible. Not private. Visible, shared, simultaneous. Thirty million people received something from their own inheritance, on the same night, together.
He paused.
I don't know what that produces in the long run, he said. I can't calculate it. But I think it produces people who know who they are. Not who they're told to be. Who they actually are. Because they have met the people who made them who they are. Not the biological people. The stories. The characters. The people in the stories who made the choices that the culture decided to keep and pass down, generation by generation, for three thousand years. The choices that are still being kept because they are still true.
He looked at the interviewer.
The choices that are still true, he said. That's what endures. Not the miracle. Not the spectacle. The choices. And now thirty million children have seen the choices being made. They have seen what it looks like to do the right thing when the right thing is the hardest thing. They have seen what it looks like to love someone completely. They have seen what it looks like to know who you are and what you are for and to be that thing even when everything is working to prevent you from being it.
He was quiet.
You cannot put a number on what that does, he said. But you can, if you are paying attention, watch what happens to a country that gives its children this. You can watch what they build. What they refuse. What they insist on. Twenty years from now, thirty years from now — you can look at what the children who watched this became. And you will see, if you are looking, that some of what they became came from these Friday evenings in front of a screen when they were six or seven or ten years old, and a god looked at them from the screen, and they looked back, and something passed between them.
He stopped.
The interviewer wrote it all down.
Then the interviewer asked: Did you cry? When you watched it yourself?
Kulkarni looked at him.
Not while we were making it, he said. Making it was too technical. Every frame was a decision, every decision was a problem to solve. When you're making it you're too close to it.
But the night the first episode aired — the first Ganesha episode, November 12th — I watched it at home, alone, because my family was in Pune and I was in Bombay, and I watched it the way the audience was watching it. Not as the director. As a person in India in 1973.
And when Ganesha opened his eyes after his head was restored, and when his mother's face — when Parvati looked at her son who had been given back —
He stopped.
Yes, he said. I cried.
Not because it was sad, he said. Because it was true.
End of Chapter 154 — Final