The Ramayana, the ancient epic that took India by storm when it first hit television screens in the 1980s, has been remade to speak to the country’s younger, forward-thinking audience.

With a nod to a progressively minded “new India”, the text’s traditional Sanskrit cocktail of kidnap and conflict between the Hindu gods now includes reflections on women’s issues and lessons on the environment, the producers of the big-budget television drama say.

“It has been 20 years since Ramayan was last televised,” Shailja Kejriwal, who commissioned the new series, said. “Half of India is under 25. The new Ramayan speaks to this new India.” It gives, for instance, more emphasis to the perspective of Sita, the tale’s heroine. “Too often the epic has been seen as patriarchal and militaristic,” Ms Kejriwal said.

On the screen since last month, the prime-time show has already put its maker, NDTV Imagine, ahead in the ratings battle waged between eight Hindi-language entertainment channels. But its latest incarnation still has some way to go before it matches the hysteria triggered by its predecessor.

First aired on Doordarshan, the Indian state broadcaster, in January 1987, it brought the country to a virtual standstill every Sunday for an hour, until its conclusion 19 months later, as viewers followed the hero Ram in his mission to save Sita, his wife, from the clutches of the demon king Ravan.

Some claim The Ramayana offers a bastion of stability as India is transformed from a country teetering on the verge of bankruptcy to a nuclear power and fast-emerging economic powerhouse. Anand Sagar, the director of the new drama, whose father Ramanand shot the original, says that the story is “a way of life, not a book or a lesson that needs to be taught. It is ingrained into the human psyche.”

Others note that a high-profile TV serialisation of the Hindu text before next year’s Indian elections could play to Hindu nationalist strengths. Lal Krishna Advani, the BJP politician who leads the Opposition in the Indian Parliament, recently praised The Ramayana as “a unique symbol of India’s national identity, spirit and integration”.

New sagas

Odysseus: The Greatest Hero of Them All (1986)
Television retelling of The Odyssey by Tony Robinson, written partly by Richard Curtis

Troy (2004)
Big-screen adaptation of The Iliad, featured Brad Pitt as Homer’s “Achilles of the goodly greaves”

Wagner’s Ring Cycle (1848-74)
Operatic adaptation of the ancient German Nibelungenlied, the story of the noble Siegfried, a magic ring and troublesome Valkyries

Beowulf (2007)
Celluloid version of Anglo-Saxon epic of warrior Beowulf and his skirmishes with nasty Grendel and Grendel’s nastier mother

Jason and the Argonauts
Apollonius of Rhodes’s story of the quest for the Golden Fleece, notable for early film example of fighting skeletons

Source: imdb.com

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