|| Swapnil Joshi AT: from Gopala to Dwarakadheesh! - Page 3

Originally posted by: .Vrish.

Imo, the roles also played a...role 😆 Sarvadaman was good as a preacher, a lecturer, a narrator and an instructor, like when he'd sit and talk to the likes of Radha, Narada, Yogamaya, the devas and so on. But those are not the same qualities as that involved in someone who had great interpersonal skills, like Swapnil had. Which is why I thought that Swapnil was great as Krishna and should have solely played that role, but Saravadaman could have made cameo Vishnu appearances.

Incidentally, when RSK resumed after Ananda and Moti took over, was Swapnil unavailable? B'cos by then, he'd have grown some more and looked adequately adult enough to play Krishna, no?

I can't argue with that. It's always been a big beef with me that Swapnil didn't stay as Krishna for the entire show. You'll hear Lola and me lamenting this many a time. 😆 Like you said, by the time the show resumed, Swapnil too would have grown and could have carried off the adult Krishna perfectly. It beats me why they didn't just keep him, but maybe it's because they already had a contract with SDB and couldn't back out, or maybe it just never occurred to them since Swapnil was always meant for only the young adult Krishna role.

Lola and I had discussed this just a while back. We wish they'd at least have done a smoother transition between Swapnil and SDB. I don't know if you know this, but the original Varnavat and Dwaraka nirmaan episodes were filmed with Swapnil before the show took a hiatus, but when it resumed those episodes were reshot with SDB, so the transition between Swapnil and SDB looks so blotchy and abrupt, not at all smooth like all the other transitions between the younger Krishnas.

We feel like a smoother transition would have been to keep the original Varnavat and Dwaraka nirmaan epis intact, complete the Dwaraka nirmaan with Swapnil and show some initial scenes of the Mathuravaasis settling down in their new home, and then show a time jump in which Krishna "grows up" a little and the SDB could enter the show officially for the Rukmini haran track.

What had happened?

Why had the show stopped mid way

Originally posted by: FlauntPessimism

What had happened?

Why had the show stopped mid way

Lol I have a PhD in this subject derived from loooots of articles, interviews, and Twitter conversations, so please allow me to bore you with the details 😆 When Uttar Ramayan began, Ramanand Sagar got pulled into a looooot of court cases over what he did/didn't portray, and there was also a lot of political tension around airing "religious" content on a national channel. This was both financially draining and made it hard to get Shri Krishna on air even though RS had already begun working on it during Uttar Ramayan. So with the Dashavataar through VD's imprisonment pretty much ready in '89, they decided to start the show as straight-to-VHS and funded its continuation through preorders for the set (which was advertised as 26 volumes just because that's how many cassettes it took to cover Ramayan so they assumed they'd do the same). This went on from '90-92, with them sending subscribers an episode or two a month up until the phase in which Krishna is bound to the pillar and uproots the two trees. Then, by popular demand, Doordarshan lifted its ban on mythos and picked up the show in '93, but they put in on DD Metro/DD2 instead of DD National which reached only urban markets. This went on up until the Swapnil version of the Dwarika nirmaan track in '95, by which time the political environment and the channel's strategy changed so they decided to move it to DD National. BUT, since rural markets hadn't seen the show up to that point, there was demand to start it over from the beginning. By the time they reached the point where they had left off on DD Metro, RS had suffered health setbacks, Swapnil started his LL.B., and the junior Sagars had started working on a bunch of other shows which stretched the budget and led to them leaving the day to day execution of SK in wayyy lesser hands, hence the drop in quality (which keeps me from watching any of those later episodes to date). When the show hit 180 episodes (or something in that range), it hit DD's limit on how long they would air the same series, so it took another hiatus before it got kicked over to Zee TV for its final stretch (leading to another decline in the look and feel for those last 40-50 episodes).

Knowing all of this has given me a bit of appreciation for the tenacity and perseverance that went into getting this show on air and overcoming obstacles to keep it going as long as it did, covering as much ground as it did, but as Janu said above--there will always be that sadness over what SK could have been, had it continued with the same leadership, cast, crew, care, and aesthetic that it had until the original end of Swapnil's run.

Originally posted by: MagadhSundari

Lol I have a PhD in this subject derived from loooots of articles, interviews, and Twitter conversations, so please allow me to bore you with the details 😆 When Uttar Ramayan began, Ramanand Sagar got pulled into a looooot of court cases over what he did/didn't portray, and there was also a lot of political tension around airing "religious" content on a national channel. This was both financially draining and made it hard to get Shri Krishna on air even though RS had already begun working on it during Uttar Ramayan. So with the Dashavataar through VD's imprisonment pretty much ready in '89, they decided to start the show as straight-to-VHS and funded its continuation through preorders for the set (which was advertised as 26 volumes just because that's how many cassettes it took to cover Ramayan so they assumed they'd do the same). This went on from '90-92, with them sending subscribers an episode or two a month up until the phase in which Krishna is bound to the pillar and uproots the two trees. Then, by popular demand, Doordarshan lifted its ban on mythos and picked up the show in '93, but they put in on DD Metro/DD2 instead of DD National which reached only urban markets. This went on up until the Swapnil version of the Dwarika nirmaan track in '95, by which time the political environment and the channel's strategy changed so they decided to move it to DD National. BUT, since rural markets hadn't seen the show up to that point, there was demand to start it over from the beginning. By the time they reached the point where they had left off on DD Metro, RS had suffered health setbacks, Swapnil started his LL.B., and the junior Sagars had started working on a bunch of other shows which stretched the budget and led to them leaving the day to day execution of SK in wayyy lesser hands, hence the drop in quality (which keeps me from watching any of those later episodes to date). When the show hit 180 episodes (or something in that range), it hit DD's limit on how long they would air the same series, so it took another hiatus before it got kicked over to Zee TV for its final stretch (leading to another decline in the look and feel for those last 40-50 episodes).

Knowing all of this has given me a bit of appreciation for the tenacity and perseverance that went into getting this show on air and overcoming obstacles to keep it going as long as it did, covering as much ground as it did, but as Janu said above--there will always be that sadness over what SK could have been, had it continued with the same leadership, cast, crew, care, and aesthetic that it had until the original end of Swapnil's run.

Thanks for the complete history. I left India in 1992, and so had no idea of what went on on TV since then. That was around the time that other channels, like Star, were coming to TVs.

One thing: you mention 180 episode? I thought that this serial had exactly 100 episodes, as this playlist seems to suggest: there ain't 2 episodes per video, even though the playlist has 156 videos

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-NRrjK61OD38i9X7KO5qrFKrWvpHubM5

Another question: what were the political issues involved in bringing this serial to TV? Already the cat was out of the bag when first RSR and later BRC made it on DD: you had Arun Govil and Dara Singh campaign for Sunil Shastri against VP Singh for the (then) Allahabad LS constituency, in the midst of the Bofors controversy, and in 1989, you had Deepika and Arvind Trivedi actually win LS seats in Gujarat for the BJP. 1991, after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, you had Narasimha Rao become the PM and be there until 1996, then have a bunch of PMs until Vajpayee clinched it in 1998. So where were the political pressures coming from to not put this show on TV?

And I completely agree w/ you: I'd have preferred Swapnil to play Krishna to the end, and just use SDB as Vishnu, whenever needed

^^ Nope, that playlist is both missing episodes and counting by DVD volumes... the show ran for 221 episodes (of which each one was a half hour) when you include the handful of deleted episodes from the beginning of the series.

I don't think the politics preventing the show from airing on DD were against RS personally, though the lawsuits that consumed a lot of the RSR earnings were. It was general opposition to a national channel giving airtime to serials based on religious texts. This article posted on the Sagar World blog touches on it: https://www.instagram.com/p/B_mf4apAoKk/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

oops double post!

RSR, BRC MB and SK came during a time period in India when people were either completely religious or completely atheist. There wasn't a lot of in-between. So we had either the super involved fans of the shows, or the people who protested against anything religious being shown on national TV, claiming it wasn't secular.

I feel like if RS existed as a director today, he'd have had a bigger budget and less exterior burdens to deal with, but then again, his fanbase may not have fully appreciated his vision.

I used to think that RS had the advantage of a captive viewership. Both RSR and BRCM happened on DD, and at the time, there weren't alternate channels: Star TV was just arriving at the scene. So people could either watch that, or not watch at all. With something more recent, say ASR, NDTV Imagine wasn't in the basic package if one was just hooking up a TV and wanted the cheapest deal: one had to specifically request it. I therefore thought that RSR had an inherent advantage.

However, these days, during the lockdown, my YouTube channel has quite a number of visitors, and every night when I open it to watch this serial before sleeping, I usually see ~10 comments. A majority of them clearly prefer RSR to ASR. While I preferred differently - b'cos I liked the serial pulling stories from other places like Kamban, Krittivas and so on, I can now see that people do prefer the likes of Arun Govil, Deepika, Sunil Lahiri and so on over Gurmeet, Debina, Ankit, et al

Also, does anyone recall the TRPs of SK when it moved back to DD national and to Zee TV? Like both RSR and BRCM were blockbusters, but was the same thing true about this serial when it ran on DD2, DD1 and then ZeeTV?

SK was definitely a blockbuster during its run in DD1 but it never hit the craze Ramayana or even Uttar Ramayana and BRC Mahabharata commanded

One more question - was SK telecast on weekends, like Sunday mornings, or was it on weekdays?