Indian filmmaker and writer Ramanand Sagar, whose television series portraying Hindu gods battling demons captivated tens of millions and drew crowds of people who couldn’t afford TVs around shop windows on Sunday nights, has died, his family said. He was 87.
Sagar had been ill for the past two months and passed away at his home in suburban Bombay late on Monday, said his son, Prem Sagar.
The 2001 winner of one of India’s highest civilian honours, the Padma Sri, for his contribution to the arts, Sagar was born in 1917 in Pakistan and started his film career there before fleeing to India during the bloody partition of the subcontinent at independence from Britain in 1947.
In India, he made more than 50 Hindi-language films, including hits such as Insaniyat (Humanity) and Ghunghat (Veil).
But his biggest success came after he shifted his attention to television in the mid-1980s and kept millions of Indians glued to their screens each week with series based on Hindu epics, such as Ramayan and Sri Krishna.
The Ramayan series was India’s most popular show in the late 1980s, enthralling city dwellers and village denizens alike.
Sagar said he aimed to take the Hindu scriptures to the masses and explain the notion of karma, the belief that one does one’s duty and leaves the rest to the gods.
”We wanted the Ramayan … to be understood by even a cobbler,” Sagar said in a 1998 interview with The Associated Press.
His success sparked imitators, although none were as successful in portraying clashes between Hindu gods or the fight between good and evil — themes that eventually fell out of fashion as India’s television market expanded and viewers opted for soap operas and comedies about contemporary life.
Sagar also wrote short stories, plays and a novel about the horrors of the subcontinent’s partition.
He was awarded a doctorate of literature by the Hindi Literary Society in 1996.
Prem Sagar said his father had been working on a project about the Indian saint Sai Baba before illness confined him to his house.
Sagar is survived by his wife, a daughter and five sons. He would be cremated on Tuesday. — Sapa-AP