Can the Ramayana Survive Its Own Spectacle? - An RC Inspired by IIM Indore

Nitesh Tiwari's Ramayana is due to open abroad on 6 November 2026, with India targeting Diwali two days later, and its budget has been reported at Rs 4,000 crore, with a second part promised for Diwali 2027. Ranbir Kapoor plays Rama, Yash plays Ravana, and the visual effects company DNEG is among its producers. Audiences have yet to judge the finished film, so no verdict on it is possible. What can be asked is what such scale makes possible for an epic, and what it might hide.

The scale is new, but the problem is old. The Ramayana has never belonged to a single medium. It has passed through Sanskrit verse, Tamil and Awadhi retellings, an Old Javanese poem, Thai court drama, temple painting and the Ramlila, the performance tradition that UNESCO recognised as intangible heritage in 2008. Each medium made the story intelligible to a new audience, and none exhausted it. The epic endures less because of the events it recounts than because of the moral world those events invite audiences to enter, with its demands of duty, costs of loyalty, limits of power and conflict between private desire and public obligation.

Cinema seems ideally suited to such a story. It can turn a forest into an exile's wilderness, an army into an approaching catastrophe and a duel into an image of cosmic struggle. Yet abundance brings a peculiar danger. What the camera makes instantly visible can crowd out what requires reflection. A battle can demonstrate the magnitude of evil without explaining its moral character, and a divine figure can inspire awe without illuminating the obligations that give divinity its meaning for human beings. The image may communicate grandeur while leaving the argument untouched.

What the camera makes instantly visible can crowd out what requires reflection.

The opposite view deserves serious consideration. Every generation meets inherited stories through the imaginative resources available to it, and cinema can make abstract conflicts emotionally immediate. A carefully staged gesture, a face held in silence or the devastation left after a battle may communicate more than pages of explanation. Spectacle, at its best, is not decoration but interpretation, since it gives an idea a body.

The real distinction therefore lies not between old storytelling and new technology but between spectacle that serves meaning and spectacle that replaces it. An adaptation need not reproduce every inherited detail to remain faithful. It must preserve the story's capacity to make an audience think beyond what it sees. Fidelity is less a matter of copying the past than of carrying its unresolved questions into the present. Faithfulness of this kind is harder to measure than loyalty to a script, which is why it is so often mistaken for reverence or expense.

An earlier telling complicates even this tidy test. Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan ran on Doordarshan for 78 episodes between 1987 and 1988, with painted costumes and simple camera tricks, yet a country stopped for it on Sunday mornings, and nobody can say with certainty what held that audience. It may have been the story, the devotion of the viewers, or the simple fact of watching together in a land with very few channels. If a modest screen could do so much, the measure of an epic's survival may lie somewhere the screen cannot show, and the test that remains is the quietest one, whether the story keeps working in the mind once the screen goes dark.