Photo: Sony Pictures/Everett Collection
A beloved hero in exile battles a multiheaded demon in this week’s major Asian blockbuster — but enough about Godzilla Minus Zero. The millennia-old Hindu epic the Ramayana is getting its most expensive treatment yet in the form of an enormous Bollywood movie, Ramayana: Rise of a Legend, the first in a planned duology of sprawling, CGI-laden blockbusters. It’s poised to have the widest global release of any Hindi film, and worldwide distributor Sony has been trying to nudge it toward audiences outside the South Asian diaspora, hosting a panel at Comic-Con and showing an English-language dub (which cuts 30 minutes of run time) to western press.
Much as Homer’s Odyssey shaped the DNA of western literature and filmmaking, the Ramayana is equally influential to about a sixth of the world’s people and how they tell and interpret stories. Explaining it to those outside the Indian diaspora feels a bit like introducing the concept of Jesus Christ to explain Christmas, but for those looking to catch up ahead of the movie’s release, here’s a primer on the original story, its latest adaptation, and the political baggage Rise of a Legend brings to theaters.
The Ramayana is named for Rama, the eldest of four princes of the kingdom of Ayodhya and one of several human avatars of Vishnu, the Hindu pantheon’s protector god. Vishnu’s subsequent avatars include the mischievous Krishna (a key figure in the other central Hindu epic, the Mahabharata) and the Buddha, though Rama is arguably the most revered figure in Hindu scripture. This is why Rise of a Legend’s release coincides with the major Hindu festival of Diwali, which marks the return of the heroic prince after 14 years in exile, when his people lit a path with oil lamps to guide him home; the tradition now takes the form of celebratory lamp lighting and fireworks.
Most of the Ramayana’s narrative takes place prior to Rama’s return in a sprawling tale of epic fantasy involving anthropomorphic animal heroes, abductions, demons, giants, and sorcery. It’s a grand tale of heroism and devotion that has led to several spectacular tellings, including the beloved Indo-Japanese anime movie from the early ’90s, Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama. For many millennials and Gen-Xers, other touchstones include colorful comic books by the imprint Amar Chitra Katha and a sprawling soap opera on national television in the late 1980s. (Its lead actor, Arun Govil, plays Rama’s father in Rise of a Legend.) In addition to these adaptations, the story remains inescapable in many parts of the world through live reenactments like the Ram-Leela in India and Nepal, the Ramakien in Thailand, and the Lakhon in Cambodia, where the epic is known as the Reamker.
Most of these modern interpretations are indebted to two major versions of the Ramayana: the original, dated to around the middle of the first millennium BCE and attributed to the sage poet Valmiki, and 16th-century CE poet Tulsidas’s reinterpretation the Ramcharitmanas, which adds elements that have been adopted in many retellings. The broad strokes, however, remain largely the same across recent adaptations: a scheme to get one of Rama’s half-brothers on the throne leads to his exile along with his wife, Sita, and his devoted brother Lakshmana. While living deep in the forest, Sita is kidnapped by the demon king Ravana, who, over the centuries, has come to be depicted with ten heads. He snatches her away to his kingdom of Lanka on a flying chariot, setting Rama, Lakshmana, and the allies they make along the way — including the loyal, apelike Hanuman — on a quest to save her.
Rise of a Legend (titled Ramayana: Part 1 in India) ends with Sita’s kidnapping, making for an anticlimactic conclusion for viewers less familiar with what’s to come.
The film has drawn mixed reviews from critics either praising its $400 million scale or deriding its uncanny CGI and clunky drama. But good luck to anyone who says a negative word about it online. The film was already a cultural flash point before hitting theaters, in part because of the political moment in which it’s being released.
For the past decade or so, India has experienced unrest under Prime Minister Narendra Modi; his ruling party, the BJP; and the paramilitary volunteer organization the RSS, to which Modi belongs. The RSS is a century-old faction whose membership once included Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin and whose Hindu-supremacist leanings (the political ideology Hindutva) draw overtly from Hitler’s Nazism. With over a billion followers, Hinduism remains one of the largest religions in the world; its traditions and lavish festivals (like Diwali) are celebrated peacefully by many. However, the Hindutva movement, which has taken hold both in India and among its diasporas, has grown increasingly fascistic, leading to numerous oppressive rulings that have challenged the citizenship of many Indian Muslims, stolen tribal lands, contorted caste history to deny opportunities, and, most recently, led to a purging of voter rolls, yielding large-scale protests.
While it would be easy enough to watch Rise of a Legend without this context in mind, it’s worth noting the degree to which the movie’s marketing includes phrases like “Our truth. Our history.” The story is one of grandiose myth, but Hindu nationalists have framed it as historical fact for their own ends, including the 1992 dismantling of a 16th-century mosque, the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, because it was thought to be built atop Rama’s alleged birthplace; a Hindu temple was eventually built where the demolished mosque once stood. That temple’s 2024 inauguration was attended by many Bollywood figures, including Ranbir Kapoor, who plays Rama in Rise of a Legend.
There has been religious backlash to the new movie too. Some have objected to Muslim composer A.R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire) allegedly using Islamic musical influences. Others have targeted actress Sai Pallavi, who plays Sita, for her looks and her politics; some have also pilloried Kapoor for an old interview in which he claimed to have enjoyed beef, a religious taboo that has led to religiously motivated lynchings in recent years.
That’s a lot of baggage to bring to a movie in which Rama’s violent reprisals, often fueled by magical arrows shot from bows gifted to him by the gods, are framed as his dharma, or divine duty. But there really is no separating Rise of a Legend’s release from this bleak moment in Indian politics, and when a story as influential and beloved as this one is being co-opted for a nationalist agenda, it’s worth paying attention. In an increasingly connected landscape where films from Asia make splashes in the west more often — S.S. Rajamouli based the climax of RRR on the Ramayana, and the trailer for his upcoming film, Varanasi, contains scenes from the epic — speaking a movie’s language is more than just a matter of linguistics.