On the not-so-distant edges of memory, Republic Day mornings in India followed a simple media rule: one screen, one ceremony.

There wasn’t much to choose from. The day didn’t begin with a flood of notifications or a dozen channels competing for attention. If a household switched on the television on January 26, it almost always opened to the same sight – the Republic Day Parade. The steady march past, the formal tone, the familiar commentary. Watching it wasn’t always a conscious choice. In many homes, it was simply what the morning contained.

That scarcity created something rare: a shared experience.

Through Doordarshan, a parade on one ceremonial road in Delhi travelled across the country, into villages and towns, tea stalls and living rooms, places where people gathered around a single television as if it were a window to the nation. Every year, the same images returned with the same texture, the slow pacing, the seriousness, the voice explaining what you were seeing. Repetition did what rituals do. It slipped into memory. It became part of how India recognised itself on that date.

Visuals of the first Republic Day.

The first colour broadcast of the Republic Day parade.

Doordarshan’s role in this is often overstated or misunderstood. It wasn’t that one channel shaped the nation’s imagination in some sweeping way. The claim is simpler. For a few generations, Doordarshan shaped how India saw Republic Day.

Even today, when clips circulate on private channels or social media, what people instinctively think of as “classic Republic Day visuals” – the framing, the tone, the sound – still carry the old Doordarshan imprint. The monopoly of attention is gone. But the visual memory remains.

Republic Day itself has always had two lives

There is the Delhi version – the grand parade, the national broadcast. And then there is the local Republic Day, lived in smaller, more familiar ways. In schools, the morning begins early: flag hoisting, the anthem, a speech, children shivering a little in the winter sun. In towns and district headquarters: scouts, NCC cadets, police bands, local processions. Public buildings wear a temporary ceremonial mood.

And there are small, affectionate details. In many parts of eastern India, for instance, schools distribute puri and buniya/boondi so generously that the day acquires a nickname: puri-buniya day.

These aren’t decorative details. They’re how the republic becomes real. A nation doesn’t enter people’s lives only through symbols, speeches, or grand displays. It enters through repeated habits — through shared mornings, food, assembly, small acts of participation.

Long before the Republic Day parade was something to watch, it was something to hear. The parade began in 1950. Television came later. For years, most Indians experienced the day through newspapers and radio. All India Radio carried a running commentary, turning a distant event into something you could attend in imagination. India heard itself as a public before it learned to watch itself as one.

Television changed that by adding a shared image. When Doordarshan began broadcasting the parade, especially from the 1960s onward, “live” meant more than a technical feature. It meant everyone watching at the same time. It created simultaneity – the feeling that millions of others were seeing exactly what you were seeing, at that very moment. The parade unfolded in living rooms across the country. In that sense, television made the republic portable.

It brought a capital spectacle into homes that might never visit Delhi. It also standardised how the day looked. Camera angles decided what mattered. The pacing set the mood. Commentary told you what to notice. Doordarshan didn’t invent the parade, but it shaped how the country experienced it.

The coverage was rarely frantic. It moved patiently. The ceremony was allowed to breathe. It didn’t chase spectacle. It treated the parade like a ritual that deserved time. That slowness created a quiet authority, and over years, that authority became familiarity.

Then there was the voice. Doordarshan’s commentators did more than describe events; they guided your gaze. Over decades, the soundscape itself became iconic. Jasdev Singh’s voice, heard year after year for 40 years, became inseparable from Republic Day. For many people, the day didn’t just look a certain way. It sounded a certain way.

You don’t need theory to make sense of this, but a couple of ideas help name what was happening. Benedict Anderson’s notion of the “imagined community” explains how a nation feels real in everyday life even when most citizens will never meet one another or experience the full territorial vastness of the country. Shared media moments do that work. Doordarshan reinforced this feeling by claiming shared attention and shared time. The Republic Day telecast created that simultaneity with unusual intensity, precisely because there were so few competing screens.

Jürgen Habermas’s idea of constitutional patriotism offers another lens. Republic Day is not just a spectacle; it is an annual reminder that India is bound together by a constitutional order. Twenty-six January marks the Constitution coming into force, the day the republic became operational and the first President was sworn in. The broadcast, then, did two things at once: it created community in Anderson’s sense, while the occasion invited a civic loyalty in Habermas’s sense – a patriotism rooted not in sentiment alone but in institutions, rights, and the republic itself.

At the same time, constitutional patriotism is never abstract. The Constitution applies within a territory, to a bounded political community. Even the most civic idea of belonging, therefore, quietly rests on the fact of a shared national home – a republic within which those promises and duties actually operate.

A moment of self-reflection

The President’s address on the eve of Republic Day fits into this mood. Most speeches fade quickly. Some linger. R Venkataraman’s words in the early 1990s about balancing liberties, or K R Narayanan’s stark image of aerated drinks for a few and muddy water for the many, still resonate because they remind the country that patriotism also means looking honestly at inequality. On such days, Republic Day becomes not about self-congratulation but self-reflection.

The Doordarshan telecast drew its power from a simple fact: there wasn’t much else to watch. It was hard to avoid and easy to share. Families, neighbours, tea shops – everyone tuned in. It created a common mood, like the old Sunday mornings of the Doordarshan era. Then the attention economy exploded. Satellite TV multiplied options. The internet multiplied them further. Republic Day didn’t disappear, but the common screen did. T

The parade now competes with notifications, messages, breakfast plans, and the luxury of sleeping in. And yet, the old imprint hasn’t vanished. India may no longer watch one Republic Day on one screen. But every January 26, beneath the noise and abundance of the present, that old shared image returns, like a memory of when the nation once gathered around the same window and watched itself pass by.