In the telling of Yash’s Ravana, Ramayana finds its footing
The Indian Express · Anas Arif ·
Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana is a safe telling of a revered mythological epic, whose silver lining lies in its understanding of its antagonist, Ravana.
Cinema is an inherently political medium. Its politics resides as much in the stories one chooses to tell as in the manner in which one chooses to tell them. And so, to take on a mythological epic as revered as the Ramayana in 2026 is, inevitably, a political undertaking. The intent may be devotional, but its implications are dictated by the moment it inhabits. Perhaps that is why one walks out with the curious feeling of having witnessed not so much a creative engagement with an epic as a rather straightforward exercise in storytelling. The Ramayana has lived many lives across centuries, its stories accommodating interpretations, contradictions and imaginations. To approach such a text without the appetite for creative risk feels like a missed opportunity. What remains is a safe, largely by-the-book retelling, content with the modest ambition of entertaining. Just because it doesn’t seek to offend, it relishes in its sincerity. Perhaps elsewhere that would have been the bare minimum. In 2026, it passes for the most one can ask. Nobody wins, but nobody loses either.
But credit where it is due: Nitesh Tiwari’s epic does find moments of genuine intrigue in the screenplay, (adapted by Shridhar Raghavan alongside Tiwari), particularly in its attempt to understand its antagonist, Ravana (Yash). The popular imagination has long preserved him as the asura who terrorised the three worlds, allowing his villainy to subsume almost every other dimension of his existence. Here, however, the epic chooses to begin with him. For a good first fifty minutes, we inhabit his world, are drawn into his past and taken right into the heart of his origin story. We encounter a child more enamoured of music than anything else; a son who makes a promise to his mother and traverses extraordinary lengths to honour it; a man deeply wounded by the oppression of his people, who takes up arms for their survival, for their dignity and for the land they have been denied. We also see him at his most vulnerable: broken, helpless, turning to the divine for deliverance.
There is something particularly interesting about Yash inhabiting an antagonist of such mythic proportions. Having fashioned an entire screen persona around Rocky Bhai, the rags-to-riches gangster from Prashanth Neel’s two-part crime saga KGF, Yash is no stranger to the grammar of larger-than-life masculinity, nor to the art of eliciting empathy for men who exist beyond the boundaries of conventional morality. He draws upon the vocabulary of power, swagger and machismo, only to puncture it with flashes of vulnerability and self-doubt. Say, like when Ravana ascends the throne of Lanka, one expects the familiar descent into vanity and absolute power (a transformation the epic eventually does embrace in its latter half). Instead, his first impulse is to promise his subjects a kingdom founded on equality. Tellingly, his rage also appears most combustible when he is publicly humiliated and made to confront the indignities of his former lowly existence.
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