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Early Indian television’s actual foray into mythology

A centuries’ old collection of mythical and magical tales popular from Middle Eastern to Southern Asia and beyond, a Seljuq (medieval Turko-Persian) Sufi sage’s legend and an ancient collection of stories from Indian subcontinent scripted in Sanskrit language many centuries ago; what do they all have in common? All of these in some way or the other represent the realm of folklore and myths but also in the few years between the end of 1980s and mid 1990s all these tales had been rendered into television shows on Doordarshan, opening doors to a world of myth, magic and folklore to India’s Hindi audiences.

Myth and folklore both represent oral literature- that which was a significantly long time ago transmitted orally. The most important feature of any piece of oral literature, whether folklore or myth, is that it travels through time through telling and retelling, thus making narrativity its most important asset.

Hayden White, the eminent historian suggests “narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to… the impulse to moralise reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality we can imagine.” This morality whether conveyed didactically (morally preaching) or in an open-ended fashion, influences storytelling and becomes what White would call a “central organising principle”. Myths and folklore with their ambiguous origins and claims of authenticity in their retelling are more vulnerable to reorientation of their central organising principle. Thus identifying this principle in a particular rendition and interpreting it becomes an important exercise in the study of myth also known as mythology.

Vikram Aur Betal and Alif Laila

TV shows Vikram  Aur Betal (1988) and Alif Laila (1993) were similar in more ways than one. For one they were both produced by the TV show Ramayana fame Sagar Productions. This led to many similarities in not only their aesthetics but also how their narratives were constructed technically as well as morally. Vikram Aur Betal (Vikram and the ghost) and Alif Laila were based on two pre-modern collections of stories, Betal Pachisi (25 stories of Betal) and Alf Layla (also known as One Thousand and One Nights and Arabian Nights) respectively. Betal Pachisi was compiled in Sanskrit by a 13th century poet Somdev Bhatt and the backdrop of the stories was mainly based in Indian subcontinent. Alf Layla’s precise origins are obfuscated but the stories compiled in it are based mostly in medieval Middle Eastern Asia or the Arab world.

Both relied on framed narratives where one main story led to secondary, albeit more important stories. The characters of both the collections inhabited an ordinary world shared extraordinarily by demons, angels, fairies and monsters. Magic and magical elements were the accelerators of the stories as extraordinary predicaments as well as their solutions were often presented in form of magical motifs. While Vikram Aur Betal conveyed its moralistic message in the main story of the framed narrative, Alif Laila did so in secondary stories. Besides the structure of Vikram Aur Betal was far simpler as was the attention to its aesthetical details with secondary stories not lasting more than one episode while in Alif Laila secondary stories lasted longer with often tertiary stories introduced within them and more than one subplots constructed and resolved within each tale.

Mullah Nasruddin

Mullah Nasruddin (1990) directed by renowned theatre and television director Amal Allana was different in every way from both of the above. The mis-en-scene was far more realistic and periodically authentic and the plot and storyline were complex and not as didactic in nature, as one would expect from someone like Allana specialising in artistic yet authentic representation of reality. Moreover the show unlike other two was not based on a collection of different stories but rather on the adventures of a single character, the Sufi sage Khwaja Nasruddin Hodja who with his witty and humorous tricks and antics would escape and help others escape from persecution and cruel tyranny of a corrupt and exploitative feudalistic structure and a despotic and eccentric ruler. The narrative was not a framed one either. Instead audiences witness how legendary tales of Nasruddin come about as the story unfolds whilst he himself also bears witness to the narration of legends about himself from common people who are unaware about his identity, thus bearing resemblances to a meta-narrative.

The show was based on Dastan-e-Nasruddin, a collection of folklore stories on Khwaja Nasruddin . As with the other two shows, problems abound in this show too but they are realistic; based on poverty, corruption, exploitation and persecution and do not bear any relation to magic or mystique. The odds are insurmountable as common, impoverished masses are at the receiving end of a brutal and insensitive regime. The misery and pathos is evoked effectively through the mis-en-scene contrasting the poverty of masses with the vulgar prosperity of the ruling class.

The solutions too are not found in magic and fantasy. Instead situations are resolved through Nasruddin’s tricks and antics by using what can be called absurd humour; funny but mostly unrealistic. These comical situations provide resolutions to these seemingly insurmountable problems in ways which cannot be believed easily and provide a stark contrast of comic relief against feelings of despair and helplessness.

Moral of the Story

As is somewhat evident from the description of Mullah Nasruddin the central organising principle of the narrative revolves around power and the corruption it breeds. The situations of helplessness created for the characters evoke pathos and sympathy for people reeling under the excesses of a corrupt regime where humour is used strategically to help audiences come to terms with the scenario. Since these problems retain relevance irrespective of time and space, the show can also be interpreted allegorically, an important aspect of mythology. Alif Laila on the other hand was overtly didactic. The central emphasis was upon a theocratic orthodox philosophy and a traditional way of life drawing largely from Islamic teachings where all evil was represented in forms of Satan, black magic and other demonic vilifications. Meanwhile the antithesis to these evils was represented in forms of angels and miracles rewarding those who stood by their religious-moralistic convictions and beliefs.

Vikram Aur Betal featuring simplistic versions of socio-economic and political problems of an ancient Indian society was more of a socio-political narrative. The ordinary and often extraordinary social and political issues invariably revolved around the central issue of justice which would be resolved in the main story where at the end of each instalment Betal would ask Vikram to judge the virtue of justice done in the secondary story. Referring to the legend of king Vikramaditya’s infallible sense of justice, using his voice as the voice of reason the moral of the stories is impressed upon the audiences.

Mythology being the interpretive and allegorical study of myths, these shows as renditions of popular myths and legends were in fact in some senses more mythological than their predecessors, those based on religious epics such as Ramayana and Mahabharata. The primary reason for this assertion is that the heroes or subjects of these shows were not iconised as the gods and goddesses of the epic-based shows and therefore allowed themselves for more interpretative and allegorical scrutiny. The fact that the issues portrayed in these shows provided audiences with relatable premises about everyday lives of people, even though plots were resolved through magic or absurd humour gave these shows the ideal mix of authenticity and fantasy that myths and legends are made of.

As the epic-based television shows of late 1980s and early 90s, such as the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Sri Krishna became popular and came to be associated with the popular religion-based mobilisations of rightwing parties, the meaning of mythology in the popular imagination became the retelling of religious tales with little to no scope of any critical engagement or enquiry into their meanings and symbolism. Imagine if only the shows based on myths and folklore that were not loaded with a similar kind of political and social significance and taboos and were open to actual mythological analysis had informed our perspective on the true meaning of mythology, the popular culture might have not only been informed with the more correct understanding of the discipline but also been more open and tolerant to different interpretations and understanding of the world of symbols and symbolism.

A version of this article has been previously published in Umbra, a periodical brought out by the Lightcube Film Society.

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