With the establishment of a unified visual field by nationwide television, for the first time there emerged a single platform of representation across a society, me with profound social and cultural divisions. The technology was of course seen by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting as an instrument of national integration; the intent of the Ramayan broadcast was described more or less in these terms. There can seldom have been so great a failure of imagination in any attempt at social engineering. For the first time, the bewilderingly varying parts of Indian society were simultaneously exposed to one of its most familiar narrative traditions, and represented to themselves as behaving in unison across its considerable breadth. The proof of this extraordinary claim was that everybody watched the Ramayan, a claim reiterated and amplified in the press. If the Congress or the BJP understood the formation of a nationwide televisual audience as the realization of a collective consciousness, however, the dependence of this presumed consciousness on a particular apparatus was completely ignored. The Indian public was after all hardly a single entity, even if the technology for its unification, or for imagining its unity, appeared to be at hand. But the avowal that it was indeed a single entity was never before granted so much attention by so many people since the time of Independence as in the wake of the Ramayan broadcasts. Even this immense convergence of attention was not sufficient to render a deeply divided public whole.