PUNE. INDIA, October 29 , 2014( by Amruta Lakhe, Indian express): On April 1, 1955, at 8.45 am sharp, presenter Purushottam Joshi of All India Radio (AIR), Pune, announced the start of a new program — Geet Ramayan. It was the morning after Ram Navami celebrations, with the festive mood still palpable. The weekly program, a retelling of the Ramayana in verses, was written by GD Madgulkar and the music was composed by Sudhir Phadke. “Madgulkar and Phadke didn’t know it then, but with that first song, a tradition was born,” says Shridhar Phadke. Since 2005, he has been carrying his father’s legacy forward by performing the songs across the country. People would tie garlands to the radio and pray before the program would begin. “This weekly ritual was followed for the entire year that the programme was aired,” says Shridhar.
“At that time, the Ramayana only belonged to scholars. But with Geet Ramayan, it reached the smallest shops and houses,” says Shridhar. The collaboration was a first-of-its-kind project on the Indian radio. Madgulkar’s writing was simple and lucid. Yet, it retained the complexities of the epic. The show’s popularity did not wane after it went off air in 1956. “After 1956, recordings circulated in the form of LPs, cassettes and later as CDs. Phadke and Madgulkar performed the songs all over the country in a two-hour-long Geet Ramayan program. In later years, the songs were translated and sung in Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Telugu, Sanskrit and Kannada, among other languages. A compilation of the songs was published in over nine languages, including Braille.
Today, Shridhar and Anand are taking steps to familiarise the youth with Geet Ramayan. Earlier this year, Madgulkar’s family launched an app to download the songs, apart from select documentation of Geet Ramayan, available on its website.