Cinema, Television and the Informal Curriculum Through Which Indians Learn Their Politics

Formal civics education in Indian schools tends to be thin, procedural and quickly forgotten; most citizens' working understanding of authority, community obligation and the state's proper role is absorbed elsewhere, and screen fiction has been doing a substantial share of that work for decades. This is not a novel observation, but its implications are worth taking more seriously than academic media studies, often confined to specialist journals, has managed to convey to a broader public. Cinema and television in India function, whether or not they intend to, as an informal curriculum shaping political imagination well beyond whatever the formal curriculum manages.

Ramayan and the Reshaping of Religious-Political Imagination

The clearest and most consequential case remains Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan, telecast on Doordarshan from 1987 to 1988, which achieved viewership figures, by some estimates exceeding eighty percent of televisions in use during its Sunday morning broadcast slot, that no subsequent Indian television programme has matched. Streets emptied, public functions were rescheduled, and the serial became, for a large national audience with limited access to Sanskrit textual traditions, the primary and often only version of the Ramayana story they encountered, standardising a narrative that had previously existed in numerous regional and sectarian variations, including Tulsidas's Awadhi Ramcharitmanas, Kamban's Tamil version, and Jain and Buddhist retellings that framed Rama's story quite differently.

Scholars including Arvind Rajagopal, in his study of the serial's political afterlife, have argued that this standardisation coincided with, and arguably assisted, the mobilisation around the Ramjanmabhoomi movement and the Babri Masjid dispute that intensified through the late 1980s and culminated in the mosque's demolition in December 1992. The serial did not cause this political movement on its own, and it would be reductive to claim a simple causal chain from a television programme to a specific act of political violence years later. But Rajagopal's more careful argument, that state-run television inadvertently created a newly unified, emotionally invested national audience for a particular telling of Hindu religious narrative just as Hindu nationalist political mobilisation was gathering organisational strength, remains a serious and well-evidenced claim about how screen fiction can reshape the terrain on which subsequent political argument occurs, independent of anyone's original intent in producing the programme.

Popular Cinema's Longer Engagement With the State

Hindi cinema's engagement with political authority runs on a longer and more explicit track than television's largely inadvertent influence. The angry young man persona Amitabh Bachchan embodied through the 1970s, in films like Zanjeer and Deewaar, both scripted by Salim-Javed, gave enormous popular audiences a vocabulary for expressing disillusionment with state institutions perceived as corrupt or captured by the powerful, a disillusionment that tracked closely with the political mood of the Emergency period and its aftermath, even where the films avoided direct political commentary that state censorship of the period would not have permitted. More recent Hindi cinema, including films like Article 15, which dramatised caste atrocity and police complicity, or the Kashmir Files, whose selective historical framing of the Kashmiri Pandit exodus drew both substantial popular endorsement and serious criticism from historians for its handling of context and casualty figures, shows the same medium being used for explicitly contested political argument, with audiences increasingly aware that a film's box office success is itself read as a political signal by commentators across the spectrum.

Streaming Platforms and the Fragmentation of Shared Audience

What has changed substantially in the past decade is the fragmentation of the audience that made phenomena like the Ramayan telecast measurable and, in a rough sense, singular. Streaming platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and homegrown services have produced Indian political drama, from Sacred Games to Tandav, the latter drawing an obscenity and blasphemy complaint serious enough to prompt police cases in multiple states in 2021 over scenes depicting Hindu deities, that reaches audiences segmented by subscription, language and algorithmic recommendation rather than the single national broadcast slot Doordarshan once commanded. This fragmentation makes the kind of national-scale influence Rajagopal traced for the 1987 Ramayan broadcast much harder to replicate or even measure, since no single streaming programme now commands anything close to the near-universal simultaneous viewership Doordarshan achieved in a media environment where it held an effective monopoly.

This should not be read as evidence that screen fiction's political influence has diminished, only that it has become more diffuse and more difficult to trace through any single text. Instead of one programme shaping a large shared audience's political imagination in a documented, analysable way, dozens of programmes now shape smaller, more ideologically pre-sorted audiences whose members may increasingly encounter screen fiction that confirms existing political disposition rather than a shared national narrative that different political actors then contest from within a common reference point. Whether this fragmentation makes screen fiction's political influence more dangerous, because less subject to shared public scrutiny and debate, or simply less totalising than the Doordarshan era's captive national audience allowed, remains a genuinely open question that media scholarship has not yet settled.

Taking the Informal Curriculum Seriously

The practical upshot is that any serious account of how Indians form their political understanding has to include screen fiction as a primary source, not a peripheral one, alongside formal education, journalism and direct political mobilisation. This is uncomfortable for civic educators and policymakers who would prefer political literacy to be built through channels more amenable to deliberate design and correction, a school syllabus can be revised through committee, a blockbuster film's political framing cannot be. But the discomfort does not make the observation less accurate. From a state broadcaster's telecast of an epic to a streaming platform's political thriller, the Indian public has been receiving its most emotionally durable political lessons from fiction rather than from any civics classroom, and any account of Indian political culture that omits this informal curriculum will have left out one of its most powerful teachers.