Ramayana - The immortal tale’s journey to the screen

Some stories are not merely told; they are revered and carried from one generation to the next like a sacred flame. The Ramayana is the greatest of them. It has been sung by grandmothers at bedtime, recited in temple courtyards, staged in village squares, painted and performed with puppets, and etched into the memory of a civilisation and beyond for thousands of years. To bring such a story to the screen is not an act of ambition alone. It is an act of faith. And its screen history is, in many ways, the history of India's popular imagination itself.

Dadasaheb Phalke, who made India's first feature, Raja Harishchandra, in 1913, turned to the epic with Lanka Dahan (1917), which dramatized Hanuman's fiery visit to Lanka. Phalke’s trick photography conjured leaping monkeys and burning citadels, and the film was a remarkable commercial success. Legend has it that audiences, used to seeking darshan in temples, offered flowers and coins to the screen. From the very first reel, the Ramayana was not merely watched. It was revered.

With the arrival of sound, the epic found its voice. Vijay Bhatt’s Bharat Milap (1942) and Ram Rajya (1943), the latter with Prem Adib and Shobhana Samarth as Rama and Sita, wove devotion and melody together; Ram Rajya is said to be the only film Mahatma Gandhi ever watched. By the 1950s and 1960s, colour and spectacle entered the picture. Babubhai Mistry, the master of Hindi mythological effects, delivered Sampoorna Ramayan (1961), while N. T. Rama Rao donned the mantle of Rama in films such as Lava Kusa (1963), so convincingly that audiences blurred actor and deity. Tamil and Kannada cinema offered their own versions, each with distinct music, dialect, and regional flavour. 

No screen version has left a deeper mark than Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan, which premiered on Doordarshan on 25 January 1987 and ran for 78 episodes into 1988. On Sunday mornings, streets emptied across India. Viewership shares of over 80 per cent are commonly cited when the series was telecast. Families bathed before viewing, garlanded their television sets and watched in reverent silence. Arun Govil’s gentle Rama, Deepika Chikhalia’s Sita, Sunil Lahri’s Lakshmana and Dara Singh’s mighty Hanuman became the faces through which a generation imagined the divine, an iconography still echoed in calendars, posters and films. The finest animated Ramayana is arguably Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama, an Indo-Japanese collaboration led by Yugo Sako and Ram Mohan, with Koichi Sasaki. Completed in the early 1990s and released in Japan in 1993, it married the fluid craft of Japanese animation to Indian temple art, with sweeping landscapes and a tender, human Rama. A later animated effort came from Deepa Sahi and Ketan Mehta’s Maya Studios: Ramayana: The Epic, released by Warner Brothers in 2010. Chetan Desai directed, and the voice cast read like a roll call of stars: Manoj Vajpayee, Juhi Chawla, Ashutosh Rana, Mukesh Rishi, Kabir Bedi, Nandana Sen, Gulshan Grover and Randeep Hooda. 

It is against this long history that Namit Malhotra’s Ramayana arrives, the most expensive and technically ambitious screen adaptation yet. Ramayana: Part One opened in theatres on 5 November 2026, just ahead of Diwali, in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada, with an English version for global audiences. In the hands of Nitesh Tiwari, the director of Dangal and Chhichhore, Prime Focus Studios and the multiple Oscar-winning effects house DNEG, the story of Rama has found a form worthy of its majesty. Ranbir Kapoor plays Rama, Sai Pallavi is Sita, and Yash, a pan-Indian star, takes on Ravana. Sunny Deol is Hanuman, and Ravie Dubey plays Lakshmana. Shot for IMAX, the film carries a score by multiple Oscar winners Hans Zimmer and A. R. Rahman, an extraordinary pairing of Hollywood and Indian musical sensibilities.

To adapt the Ramayana to the silver screen is to carry an enormous responsibility. Millions of people hold their own vision of Ayodhya’s golden palaces, of the quiet exile in the forest, of Lanka’s dark splendour, and of the unshakeable bond between devotion and duty. Each viewer arrives with an inner picture, painted over a lifetime of listening and believing. Malhotra’s Ramayana is a work of art, shaped with devotion and perfected with taste. Every frame feels considered. Every detail seems offered rather than displayed, as though the artists behind it understood that they were not simply making a film but tending to something sacred. Where the word “spectacular” begins to feel like an understatement, this film begins its journey. What sets this retelling apart is that its grandeur never feels hollow. The vast landscapes, the colours, and the breathtaking sweep of the imagery all serve the story rather than overshadow it. Beauty here is not decoration. It is a form of reverence. Behind every great work stands a community of dreamers, designers, artists, technicians, and storytellers who laboured for years, and this one is no exception.

The makers of Ramayana have framed it as an attempt to give Indian myth the scale unprecedented in Indian cinema. There has been nothing like this before. Indian cinema has long dreamed of telling its own mythology on a global scale that matches its significance, and here that dream is given its fullest expression. Craft, imagination, technology and Hollywood’s distribution and marketing come together with remarkable grace, creating a world that feels both ancient and astonishingly new. It shows that tradition and modernity are not rivals, that a story thousands of years old can speak in the most contemporary cinematic language and still sound unmistakably like itself. The film honours its heritage even as it reaches boldly toward the future of filmmaking.

Namit Malhotra deserves particular admiration for the conviction at the heart of this endeavour. It takes courage to aim this high, and wisdom to remember that the story is always greater than those who tell it. Under his stewardship, a team of immense talent has risen to the occasion with discipline, imagination, and love. The result carries the unmistakable warmth of work made not merely for an audience, but for a heritage. 

For every Indian, this is more than a film. It is a homecoming. It is a shared memory reawakened, a reminder of the values that shaped our forefathers and the stories that still shape us. Whether one grew up with the Ramayana as a daily ritual or encountered it through animation, television, comics, or the retellings of elders, there is something here that feels like returning to a place one has always known. From Phalke’s hand-cranked wonders to Nitesh Tiwari’s IMAX frames, each generation has reached for the newest technology to retell the oldest of tales. The tools change, the actors change, even the emphases change, but the hunger remains the same: to see Rama’s exile, Sita’s courage, Hanuman’s devotion and Ravana’s tragic brilliance live again. Perhaps that is the real genius of the Ramayana: long after the final frame fades, what lingers is not only the grandeur but the feeling: a gentle pride, a sense of belonging, a renewed closeness to the ideals the epic has always upheld. These are gifts that only the finest storytelling can give. 

Bhuvan Lall is an entrepreneur, investor, filmmaker, and author. He can be reached at [email protected].

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