Ramayan is a highly successful Indian television series created, written, and directed by Ramanand Sagar

Ramanand Sagar

Ramanand Sagar was an Indian film director. He is most famous for making the extremely popular Ramayan television series, a television adaptation of the ancient Indian epic of the same name, starring Arun Govil as Lord Ram and Deepika Chikhalia as Sita.Sagar was born at Asal Guru-Ke near Lahore...

. The 78-episode series originally aired weekly on Doordarshan

DoorDarshan

Doordarshan is an Indian public service broadcaster, a division of Prasar Bharati. It is one of the largest broadcasting organizations in India in terms of the infrastructure of studios and transmitters. Recently, it has also started Digital Terrestrial Transmitters. On September 15, 2009,...

 from January 25, 1987, to July 31, 1988, on Sundays at 9:30 a.m. IST

Indian Standard Time

Indian Standard Time is the time observed throughout India and Sri Lanka, with a time offset of UTC+05:30. India does not observe daylight saving time or other seasonal adjustments, although DST was used briefly during the Sino–Indian War of 1962 and the Indo–Pakistani Wars of 1965 and 1971...

.

It is a television adaptation of the ancient India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n religious

Hinduism

Hinduism is the predominant and indigenous religious tradition of the Indian Subcontinent. Hinduism is known to its followers as , amongst many other expressions...

 epic

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

 of the same name and is primarily based on Valmiki

Valmiki

Valmiki is celebrated as the poet harbinger in Sanskrit literature. He is the author of the epic Ramayana, based on the attribution in the text of the epic itself. He is revered as the Adi Kavi, which means First Poet, for he discovered the first śloka i.e...

's Ramayan and Tulsidas

Tulsidas

Tulsidas , was a Hindu poet-saint, reformer and philosopher renowned for his devotion for the god Rama...

' Ramcharitmanas. It is also partly derived from portions of Kamban's Ramavataram and other works.

In 1986, following the moderate success of his television series Vikram aur Betaal

Vikram Aur Betaal

Vikram Aur Betaal was a children's television programme aired on DD National. The series contained stories from Indian mythology that aim at teaching kids lessons of life while entertaining them...

 and while he was in the midst of producing Dada-Dadi Ki Kahaniyan

Dada-Dadi Ki Kahaniyan

Dada-Dadi Ki Kahaniyan was a 1980s television show broadcast by DD National, the flagship channel of the public television broadcaster of India and the most widely available terrestrial television channel in India....

, Ramanand Sagar approached executives at Doordarshan about the possibility of producing a serialized version of the Ramayana, of which Sagar was a lifelong devotee.