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, โน4,000 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.