Mythological TV drama in question

 

Here's a question about our mythological TV dramas: do you want to watch a version of epic proportions or do you want to see them cut down to (human) size? In the earlier Sagar ‘Ramayana’ and Chopra ‘Mahabharata’, everything began king-size and just got bigger and bigger and bigger until the battle scenes, the special effects burst out of the screen and arrows whizzed past your ducking head. The Gods remained above it all in their celestial abode – albeit with human qualities – once-removed from us.

The current productions of Ramayana (NDTV Imagine) and Sri Krishna (Colors) try for more realism, even when they are flying high with the Gods and other heavenly gizmos. Ramayana brings a sense of intimacy to the epic: characters do not declaim as children reciting poetry in a classroom, but speak to each other. When Sita addresses Rama, it’s a wife speaking to her husband in a contemporary setting — familial and familiar. The camera eases into close-ups so that we feel included. Still, this has the feel of a domesticated epic.

Even more so is Sri Krishna, where Krishna and Balram are like any two naughty young pranksters. There’s nothing celestial about Krishna barring his heavenly powers.

He’s the cutest kid on the box — sorry, Anandi (Balika Vadhu). With the rolling gait of a little potentate, he’s comfy and cute – and funny. That’s why all the grown ups around him are perpetually smiling (either that or they heard some bad news?). Then there’s Kansa and his current ‘delusion’ that li’l Krishna is in a murderous mood, which results in much hilarity. Kansa inhabits a huge castle, surrounded by soldiers and a wife dripping more jewels than tears. But remove the castle, the costumes and this could be a modern fable — Kansa is a kind of Joker villain from the Batman movies and Krishna the kid from ‘Home Alone’. Well...

In Mahabharata, the characters are so much larger than life they’ll burst out of their skins any moment.

They’re all muscle, steel girder bodies, bronzed like in Russell Crowe’s ‘Gladiator’.

The camera does the rest: it looks up at them. Here the close-up dwells on each character to set them apart so they are isolated studies in themselves, so it ends up as a cross between a historical drama and theatre