The BBC recently celebrated its success in drawing ten million viewers to the final episode of the latest series of Doctor Who, but it was still a long way short of the figures achieved by Doordarshan, the Indian state television company, which in the late 1980s drew more than 100 million viewers to its mythological epic, the Ramayana.

This 78-part series was at the time the world`s most viewed religious serial, and between January 1987 and July 1988 it more or less brought India to a standstill for an hour each week. Everyone stopped what they were doing to sit in front of whatever television was available. In villages across south Asia, hundreds of people would gather around a single set to watch the gods and demons play out their destinies. In the noisiest and most bustling cities, trains, buses and cars came to a sudden halt, and a strange hush fell over the bazaars. In Delhi, government meetings had to be rescheduled after the entire cabinet failed to turn up for an urgent briefing.

The Ramayana, on which the series was closely based, is the first great work of Sanskrit poetry and, along with the Mahabharata, one of the two great Sanskrit epics of Indian literature. Dating in its current form from around the middle of the first millennium BC, it is traditionally credited to the sage Valmiki, who is said to have invented the sloka form (stanzas of two lines, each with 16 syllables) while writing it.

The epic follows the life of its hero, Prince Rama, whose magical powers and divine destiny were first revealed when he broke the bow of Shiva and won the hand of the beautiful Sita. Disaster falls when, thanks to the plotting of a wicked stepmother, the couple are exiled to the forest along with Rama`s faithful brother Lakshman, and Sita is then abducted by the demon Ravana. The story follows Rama`s quest to rescue his beloved from the clutches of Ravana with the help of an army of monkeys led by the simian god Hanuman and the monkey king Sugriva. The story reaches its climax with a full-scale assault on Ravana`s island fortress of Lanka by the forces of Rama and Hanuman, after which the separated couple are reunited and return in triumph to their capital of Ayodhya, so initiating the golden age of Ram Raja.

It is a fabulous tale of exile, struggle, loss and redemption, and over time it grew from a local oral saga about the heroic doings of the kings of Kosala in north India to a 24,000-sloka Sanskrit epic whose action spans the entire subcontinent. For more than two millennia, it has moved and inspired a diverse range of Indian writers and artists, and as the success of the television series dramatically demonstrated, it is still treasured as the common property of every Hindu — as well as that of many Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians — from the highly educated Brahmin rocket scientist to the most impoverished roadside shoeblack.

`The Mewar Ramayana`

The British Library has brought the Ramayana to London, mounting a remarkable exhibition that showcases 120 breathtaking miniatures from what is probably the most beautiful version of the story ever painted the 17th-century Ramayana commissioned by Rana Jagat Singh of Mewar (1628-52). This found a home in Britain thanks to the Scottish scholar Colonel James Tod (1782-1835), author of the Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, whose almost complete absorption into Rajasthani culture led one rival to complain that he was “too much of a Rajpoot himself to deal with Rajpoots”.

The Mewar Ramayana — a seven-volume work that was produced by at least three different scriptoria and once included more than 400 paintings — is arguably the masterpiece of Rajasthani painting, and is certainly one of the supreme monuments of 17th-century Indian art. This great manuscript, one of the most spectacular of the many unseen treasures in the British Library`s Indian collections, forms the core of the exhibition; yet the lavish show includes a huge range of other representations of the epic, demonstrating the way that the Ramayana has spread not only across India, but through the whole of south-east Asia, where it has worked its way into Buddhist and Chinese scripture and adapted itself to almost every known form of traditional media, from miniature and scroll painting to dance, drama, opera, shadow puppetry and, most recently, film and television.

As the exhibition shows through sound archive recordings and looped videos of the TV series, film posters and contemporary live performances of the epic in towns, villages and forest clearings across the subcontinent, the Ramayana — unlike the ancient epics of Europe, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf and the Ring saga, which are now the province mostly of academics and of literature classes — is very much a living epic. Bards still tour villages telling the story with the help of painted scrolls, while singers sing devotional hymns recalling the valour of Lord Rama or the faithfulness of his Sita. Even more remarkably, some castes of wandering storytellers still know the 24,000-verse epic in its entirety.

An anthropologist friend of mine once met one such storyteller in a little village in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Despite being illiterate, this particular bard knew the Mahabharata which, with its 100,000 slokas, is longer even than the seven-book Ramayana; it is said to be roughly eight times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey put together, and four times the length of the Bible. My friend asked the bard how he could remember so huge a poem. The minstrel replied that, in his mind, each stanza was written on a pebble. The pile of pebbles lay before him always; all he had to do was remember the order in which they were arranged and “read” from one pebble after another. Astonishingly, he said this was not the only epic he knew.

Resilience of Rajasthan

India`s population may not be particularly literate (the literacy rate is just over 60%), but it is culturally erudite. As Anthony Lane noted in the New Yorker, in the aftermath of the attacks on the US, the people of New York again and again compared what had happened to them on 9/11 to films or TV “It was like Independence Day”; “It was like Die Hard”; “No, Die Hard 2.” In contrast, when the tsunami struck south Asia at the end of 2004, Indians were able to reach for a more sustaining narrative than disaster movies the apocalyptic calamities that fill ancient Indian literature. As the Sanskritist Wendy Doniger puts it, “Myths pick up the pieces where philosophy throws up its hands. The great myths may help survivors to think through this unthinkable catastrophe, to make sense by analogy.”

It is no accident that the Mewar Ramayana was composed in response to a catastrophe. In the late 16th century, as the Mughal emperors extended their control over Rajasthan, only the Ranas of Mewar managed to resist submitting to the authority of the Muslim rulers of Delhi. In the course of this resistance, their ancestral library, kept in the great fort of Chittor, was burned at the fall of that last redoubt to the Mughal war machine. Years later, when the Ranas re-established their capital at Udaipur, the Mewar Ramayana was commissioned by Rana Jagat Singh as part of the effort to rebuild his family`s library, and it may have been under his influence that the manuscript came to link the Mewar dynasty with Rama (from whom it claimed descent), while connecting the demon Ravana with the Mughals. So it is that we see Ravana taking a ceremonial bath in a Mughal imperial tent, and appearing at his palace window to give darshan of himself as Jahangir and Shah Jahan did from the balcony of their apartments in the Red Fort; below the massed demons of Lanka give a salute to their king just as Mughal courtiers do in Mughal manuscripts.

The boldly coloured, wonderfully lively miniatures of the Mewar Ramayana are the principal glory of this exhibition. Most have never before been illustrated or shown in public, and up to now have been known only to a handful of art historians. While t hey vary in quality, and few achieve the fineness of detail of high imperial Mughal art, the best of them — especially those by master miniaturist Sahib Din — are some of the most swirlingly energetic images ever produced by Indian artists.

Often the more urban or palace images are compartmentalised into two or three separate areas by architectural frames and blocks of primary colour. In contrast, the rural scenes tend to be whole-frame, with the artists showing a marked and very Indian love of the natural world dark-skinned elephants charge, trunks and tails curling with pleasure, over forested Rajasthani mountains; peacocks, white ibis and red-crowned hoopoes flit between mango orchards and banana plantations; deer nuzzle each other in the forest, as wild boar root around for nuts and berries. All Indian life is here haggling shopkeepers decorate their stalls for a festival; groups of meditating sages and wizened ascetics with their hair woven into beehive topknots and dreadlocks sit on the ghats of a sacred river performing their austerities; palace ladies lounge amid the fountains of their zenanas and sit gossiping in their quarters; boatmen row villagers over rivers swollen in full Monsoon-spate; dancers dance, drummers drum and lovers love.

Especially effective are the fabulous scenes of the advance of the monkey army on Lanka against a vivid red ground, the monkeys move forward in great waves like a succession of breakers on a Goan beach. A blue-skinned Rama, with garlands of jasmine around his shoulders sits, bow at the ready, on the back of Hanuman; Lakshman follows, sitting astride a saddle of mango leaves, a quiver of arrows at the ready, and sword and dagger flashing from his waistband. Yet the Mewar artists can do pathos and beauty as well as energy and movement Sita is invariably shown large-eyed and melancholic, as she sits mournful and pensive in her red Rajasthani gagra choli amid Ravana`s pleasure gardens, awaiting her lost lover.

The finest image of all, however, is the wonderfully comic image of the demon army trying to wake Ravana`s brother, the giant Kumbhakarna as the portly, moustachioed figure of the colossus lies horizontally across the length of the miniature in his red underpants, mouth open to emit loud snores, Lilliputian demons swarm around him, poking him with tridents and knocking him with hammers and clubs. A band of singing women is brought forward to try to rouse him; another demon brings a braying ass; two elephants are manoeuvred to trumpet into one ear, while a dog-headed demon barks into the other. To one side lie the great pitchers of wine and heaps of meat — dead humans and monkeys — intended for the giant`s breakfast when he awakes. The composition is set against a yellow ochre ground that highlights the brown bulk of the giant.

Around the central exhibit of the Mewar Ramayana is an array of supporting material that shows the spread of the epic from oral narrative to painted text, as well as from local dynastic history to pan-Asian epic stone images of Hanuman from Vijayanagara, papier-mache masks of Sita from the Bengali Durga Puja, dance costumes and Kathakali headdresses from Kerala, Thanjavur ivories, Company prints, Malay shadow puppets, Kalighat woodcuts, Nayaka bronzes, Andhra textiles, Javanese paintings and Burmese embroidery.

Tulsidas`s equation

Although Rama was clearly identified as both the perfect man and an avatar of Vishnu by the end of the first millennium BC, there is little indication of a cult that explicitly worshiped Rama as a god until many centuries later, and there are surprisingly few images of Lord Rama extant compared to the voluminous iconography in painting, sculpture and metalwork associated with another Vishnu avatar, Lord Krishna. This began to change in the 17th century, when Tulsidas equated Rama with Brahman, the supreme deity of Vedanta philosophy, but as late as the mid-19th century there was no notion that the epic was exclusively the preserve of Hindus.

Even before the Mewar Ramayana was painted, Hamida Banu Begum, the mother of the Mughal emperor Akbar, is known to have commissioned her own illustrated copy of the epic and asked for it to be brought to her on her deathbed. Sahib Din, the artist who seems to have coordinated the project of the Mewar Ramayana and who painted many of the most spectacular miniatures in the exhibition, was also a Muslim. As late as the 1830s, one of the first orders issued by the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II on ascending the throne of Delhi was to change the route of the annual Ram Lila procession — the highlight of the annual Dussehra festivities, marking the return of Rama and Sita to their city of Ayodhya and the victory of light over darkness — so that the Mughal court could enjoy the spectacle from the parapets of the Red Fort. Likewise the finest textiles illustrating the Ramayana in the show were commissioned not by Hindu rulers, but by the Muslim sultanates of Indonesia. Even today in Delhi, as in the other great Indian Muslim cities (Lucknow, Hyderabad, Agra), Muslims join their Hindu neighbours to enjoy the same festivities. It is therefore especially sad that in the late 1980s the cult of Lord Rama was hijacked by India`s resurgent Hindu fundamentalists to become the major source of division and communal violence in contemporary Indian politics.

The argument revolved around the question of whether Mir Baqi, a general of the Mughal emperor Babur (1483-1530), had built his mosque at Ayodhya over a temple commemorating the birthplace of Lord Rama. Although there was no clear archaeological evidence to confirm either the existence of the temple or even the identification of the modern town of Ayodhya with its legendary predecessor, rightwing Hindu organisations began holding rallies at the site, campaigning for the rebuilding of the temple and the destruction of the mosque.

Finally, during the 1992 rally, a crowd of 200,000 militants, whipped into a frenzy by the political leaders of the rightwing Bharatiya Janata party, stormed the barricades. Shouting “Death to the Muslims!” the militants attacked the mosque with sledgehammers. One after another, like symbols of India`s fragile traditions of tolerance, democracy and secularism, the three domes were smashed to rubble. Over the next month, violent unrest swept India mobs went on the rampage and Muslims were burned alive in their homes, scalded by acid bombs or knifed in the streets. By the time the army was brought in, at least 1,400 people had been slaughtered in Mumbai alone.

The British Library Ramayana goes some way to recovering the great epic from the hands of the fundamentalists. For this great masterpiece of Hindu art, much of it devoutly painted by Muslim artists, recalls a time when relations between Hindus and Muslims were less fraught and polarised, and when the great story of Lord Rama brought communities together, rather than violently separating them.

It also reveals the quality of material in the library`s Indian collections. Certainly, this is one of the most imaginatively mounted and vivid shows of Indian art seen in the British capital for many years. It is also a wonderful farewell flourish by its curator, Jerry Losty, the legendary keeper of the library`s Indian art who retired last year after 34 years, and whose final curtain call this show represents.

—Dawn/Guardian News Service