40 languages, 420 million dollars… Ramayana, Bollywood’s record budget

A record budget for a legendary epic on global television. The film Ramayana, announced as the most expensive in the history of Indian cinema, is released on Thursday in theaters around the world.

Directed by Nitesh Tiwari, the feature film tells in two parts one of the most famous legends of the Hindu religion, which the most enthusiastic are already comparing to the recent Odyssey by Anglo-American director Christopher Nolan. Its filming, carried out with the support of artificial intelligence (AI) to synchronize its dubbing in 40 languages, cost, according to the most informed Bollywood experts, some 420 million dollars.

Attributed to the Sanskrit poet Valmiki, the Ramayana traces the quest of Prince Rama, who set out to save his wife Sita from the clutches of the demon king Ravana, with his brother Lakshman and the monkey god Hanuman. This epic composed in the 5th century BCE has been reinterpreted over time throughout South and Southeast Asia. Rama remains one of the favorite heroes of Hindus today, who revere him as a reincarnation of the god Vishnu.

The prince's name is also associated with a very contemporary political controversy. In 1992, Hindu ultranationalist activists destroyed a mosque built in the 16th century in the northern city of Ayodhya, on what they considered to be Rama Palace.

The operation was the cause of long years of deadly violence in India, which caused the death of at least 2,000 people, mainly from the Muslim community. In 2019, the Indian Supreme Court validated the construction on the site of a temple to the glory of Rama, inaugurated with great fanfare by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2024 before the general elections which returned him to power.

A television phenomenon

Already adapted numerous times on numerous media, the Ramayana gave rise to a successful television series broadcast at the end of the 1980s by the public channel Doordarshan. At a time when visual representations of Rama remained rare, the serial was passionately followed by millions of Indians. To the point that some political experts attribute at least part of the success of Hindu nationalists to him. The political incarnation of the movement, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Narendra Modi, had only two MPs in the lower house of Parliament in 1984. Its representation increased to 85 MPs in 1989 and 120 in 1991, when the Ayodhya issue became of national importance in 1991.