You will find Om Puri as Duryodhana one day, reformed Ashoka the next and haughty Aurangzeb the third. The cast too is recycled across episodes. The show pays careful attention to small details such as costumes – and caste marks – even on flimsy sets that have obviously been recycled from one time period to another. The production quality for Bharat Ek Khoj is exceptional. Historical shows these days have lavish budgets, even if it is just to show Hrithik Roshan fighting off a crocodile in Mohenjo Daro. Image credit: Doordarshan/Sahayadri Films. Om Puri, who also plays multiple complex roles in the show, lent his distinct gravelly voice as the third link of the show, in an impartial voiceover that gives context to viewers during enactments of historical events. Benegal wanted to emphasise India’s strong traditions of lore by using folk artistes to narrate parts of history that still live in stories. “We were on Sunday at 11am, so it didn’t matter very much if the show ended at 12pm or 12.30pm,” Benegal pointed out.Īs a tribute to the book, the show features Roshan Seth playing Nehru as a sutradhar, a narrative constant in the gentle flow of history, and expounding from the empty set of the episode at the beginning of or during the show. The lengths varied from the scheduled 60 minutes to sometimes 80 or 90 minutes if the subject matter called for it.
And on November 14, 1988, Nehru’s birthday, the first episode was screened. Benegal had a team of 35 historians, each specialists in their fields, to vet the script and cull exaggerations. With the show, we were looking to discover the adhesive factor that holds us together.” “We have our fault lines even today of caste and religion, but that does not prevent us from being Indian.
“We have immense diversity in our country and coming from outside, people wonder how we live together as a nation,” Benegal said. Made for Doordarshan audiences in the early days of government programming, the monumental dramatisation of Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India directed by Shyam Benegal remains the most ambitious adaptation of Indian history to ever appear on screen.īenegal first read Nehru’s philosophical and social history of India as a child in middle school, when it was gifted to him, and these and other books had stayed with him.
#TV SERIAL BHARAT EK KHOJ SERIES#
Now imagine a television serial in which not just one brief period centred on the heroics of a single character is shown, but which covers the entire sweep of Indian history, from the Indus Valley civilisation to the freedom struggle.Įvery Sunday at 11am between 19, families across India could switch on their televisions to see India’s history take shape on Bharat Ek Khoj, a hefty 53-episode series that ranked for television viewers at the time with Buniyaad and Ramayana. Even though directors and producers seem endlessly fascinated with history, as the litter of shows on Maharana Pratap and the queen of Jhansi suggests, these films and shows bear very little relation to actual historical fact. Indian cinema and television, and not just their Hindi iterations, have an odd relationship with history.
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