The riveting Ramayana teaser dropped today, and Ranbir Kapoor looks the part. Imperial, restrained, emotionally loaded. But the casting raises a question Bollywood won’t ask aloud.
The male axis of Hindi cinema runs through the Indus, not the Gangetic plain. The Khans, Aamir (Afghan UP-origin), Salman (Hindu, Pathan), Shah Rukh (Delhi, Hindko-Deccani stock), are Musulman. Their anointed successors, Ranbir (Kapoor lineage from Peshawar) and Ranveer (Bhavnani, Sindhi), are Hindu but Indus-blooded all the same (Hindus of the Indus are 99.9% genetically identical to Pakistanis apparently). The geography of stardom in Bollywood is the geography of Partition.
A Kashmiri nationalist once told me, Srinagar-bred, Ivy-educated, who sang Pakistani ghazals with more feeling than most Lahoris, that Ranbir and Ranveer were being aggressively promoted to eclipse the Khans.
Of course the connective tissue of the Ranbir-Ranveer rivalry is Sonam Kapoor. She is third cousin to Ranbir through the Punjabi mafia, and second cousin to Ranveer through their Sindhi mothers. The Sindhi presence in Bollywood runs deeper than most realise; Karan Johar, Kareena Kapoor, Kiara Advani all carry it. The two men being positioned as Bollywood’s future are bound into a single pre-Partition Hindu kinship network. The contestation isn’t just cultural. It’s familial.
The man cast as Maryada Purushottam, the ideal Hindu man, the conscience-keeper of a civilisation, descends from Prithviraj Kapoor of Peshawar; a Hindu Pathan (his kinsman Anil Kapoor states on record that he is the son and grandson of a Pathan). Bollywood’s Ram comes from the other side of the Wagah.
Ranbir versus Ranveer is the wrong frame. The real question is what it means that Hindu epic cinema, âč4,000 crore, Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman, DNEG VFX, global IMAX release, chose a Kapoor. The answer is that Bollywood has always understood something the BJP perhaps never quite has: the cultural power of the Subcontinent flows from its Mleccha western rivers, not its sacred eastern ones.
P.S. A note on the phenomenal aesthetic. This has Game of Thrones and The Crown written all over it; the visual grammar is unmistakably Western prestige television, with a touch of Greek mythology in the costuming and scale. That is not a criticism. It is the evolution of Indian mythology into the global cinematic idiom, and Bollywood is almost certainly the first non-Western culture to make this translation successfully at this budget level.
This defies economics entirely. China’s film industry, backed by the second-largest economy on earth, has never come close to Bollywood’s global cultural footprint. India, by contrast, punches so far above its GDP that it forces a rethink of what drives soft power. It is not money. It is civilisational depth. The Ramayana has been retold across 300 versions in dozens of languages over three millennia. No amount of Chinese state investment can manufacture that inheritance.
BB used to say economics is everything. The Kapoors of Peshawar making Ramayan for a global IMAX audience suggests otherwise.
1)this will be compared with ramanand sagar’s work. although the new generation has no memory of it.
2)putting ramayana ‘s age as 5000 years ago will be questioned. the popular belief is that it is more ancient.
3) the rivers of Sindhu and saraswati are not mlechha. it is sacred and still invoked ever day here like asiknia, marudhwada, vitasta etc.
4) having helicopter sound for pushpaka vimana is quite hilarious.
5) for the BJP world any Hindu is good, better that this shows hinduness, of now Pakistan.
Side note: karishma kapoor has a christian Sindhi mother.
Ranbir Kapoor’s regalia seems inspired by the hackneyed post-Gupta sacred iconography. The silk brocade fabric and ornaments. Would have been interesting to see an unexpected, but more deeply imagined bronze age culture. It could have complimented the devotional sensitivities by grounding it more authentically.
no, I don’t think so. making these figures more ‘ human physically ‘ will not be pleasing the masses.
Like wise a , pale skinned, blue eyed blonde Jesus is accepted all the way up to Japan and attempts to portray the real Jesus as a dark haired, dark brown skinned Middle Easterner is bound to fail. Agreed, there are black Jesus icons in Ethiopia but…
the accepted image of the gandharan buddha, with curly hairs is also a similar case.
Hollywood films about Jesus like passion of the Christ and son of god have moved towards a decidedly brunette Jesus. They also seem to make a reasonable attempt to portray what the early roman empire in the levant might have been like. Pandering to the expectations of the intellectually lazy may be safe , but people know schlock when they see it. The 4000 cr budget is clearly aspiring for prestige.
more Spanish than Palestinian looking..
the curly hairs are the snails that sacrificed themselves to protect Lord Buddha from heat stroke?
also apparently the Buddha had blue eyes?
not that I know. however, the more east Asian images have a slightly Mongolian eyes.
Source? I’ve only seen this claimed by white nationalists, who frequently try to separate well-known or high-achieving Indians from the rest of our pack by claiming that they were actually the few “Nordic”-like exceptions among a degenerate population. They also claim he had blonde hair.
Konrad elst’s slide show and presentation arguing that buddha was very much a ‘hindu’, gives views of early orientalists who thought that buddha tries to give a pure ‘Aryan’ path away from the polluted Hindu way.
Oh really itâs not the 32 characteristics?
I mean the original epic was fully finished somewhere around the late Kushan to early Gupta period between 2nd to 5th century AD. The many authors that composed the text probably intended to the clothing to be reflective of their time period when it was written rather than original setting. Similar to Homer’s works that supposed to be set in the Greek bronze age, but the clothing, geography and weapons are homer’s contemporary dark age objects.
Ironically enough the very botched gupta/post-gupta look is more reflective of final authorial intent in addition to the fact that we literally have cotton fabrics and colored paintings from Ajanta caves depicting the type of clothes worn during the Gupta period. Hence an accurate depiction of kushan/gupta period is easier, while the iron age kosala kingdom didn’t leave any material to determine clothing and it would be mostly guessing.
Nonetheless, I don’t think the film makers even care to make it accurate to the post-gupta period even. They literally use the stereotypical crowns, clothing and architecture design found in old televison soap operas. Muti-million dollar VFX with cheap soap opera level everything else.
The cultural power of the Subcontinent flows from its Mleccha western rivers, not its sacred eastern ones.
Completely wrong.
If this were true, would not Lollywood from 250m strong Pakistan be the dominant movie industry of the subcontinent? Instead it is a pale shadow of even Mollywood from 40m strong Kerala both in terms of commercial and critical output (If any Malayali cinema recommendations needed, ask).
All those people mentioned are Indians, who were born and brought up in India. Their families might have lived in the Indus region when it was India but the moment it wasn’t, they left.
The magic isn’t in the INDUS, it is in INDIA.
The magic left the Indus region the day the “mlecchas” left.
Compare Karachi and Lahore from where Sindhi and Punjabi Hindus left to Mumbai and Delhi, the cities where they went to.
With all due respect to the Pakistani cities, they look like Tier II/Tier III cities compared to the Indian ones.
EDIT: “non-mlecchas” left
I wonder what that Kashmiri nationalist friend of yours thinks about the rise of Aditya Dhar, a fellow Kashmiri in Bollywood.
Recently saw Article 370 and Baramulla from Aditya Dhar’s stable. Really good genre pieces – an action thriller and a horror movie.
Both set in Kashmir and with extensive Kashmiri cast members.
With regards to China vis a vis India – The biggest impediment to Chinese soft power is lack of English and unfamiliarity with the white elite. Compared to Indians where the top x % (whatever that is) is very attuned to Anglo-American culture/mentality.
That is why Indians seem so much more prominent in USA/Canada compared to Chinese even though numbers are the same.
As India grows richer and this “Indo-Anglian” class grows India can just leverage the existing Anglo-American world order to spread soft power instead of doing it from scratch. Both Varanasi and Ramayana are doing extensive promotions in the west using American channels which Chinese never do, even though they have actually become very technically slick with their movies with good VFX etc (The Wandering Earth is an example).
As more big ticket Indian movies release in the future I expect this “global marketing” trend to continue.
Another reason is the assimilationist nature of the diasporas.
Indians retain their names and partake in Indian cultural stuff like music, dance etc. The Brit-Indian wave of the late 90s early 2000s was second/third generation Indians making pop using Indian music. Current Canadian Punjabi wave is also very integrated with both Canada and Punjab.
Chinese take on Anglo names and western cultural stuff like piano etc so they become more generic “Asian American” than Chinese. Also you never see them partaking in Chinese cultural stuff.
Also the animosity between the CCP and their home western countries does not help. Chinese diaspora actively go out to distance themselves from the CCP (and many are actually people who fled the CCP). No such problem with India where some of the biggest Indian nationalists live outside India and openly support Indian political parties.
Check out this year’s box office revenues.
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/
Dhurandhar 2 is the 10th highest grossing movie of the year and has made $26 million (as of now) in USA/Canada accounting for 17% of its total revenue.
The highest grossing movie of the year is the Chinese Pegasus 3 which has made only $1 million in USA/Canada accounting for 0.2% of its revenue.
Chinese diaspora in USA/Canada is on par with India but they are simply not interested in Chinese stuff.