Can Prabhas's Adipurush recreate the cultural frenzy of Ramanand Sagar’s days?

The first time I saw the trailer of Adipurush, it was on the big screen. The social media outrage that followed the premature landing of the film on the surface of the internet was yet to begin. This was possibly one of the few theatrical trailers that were rolled out, before being pulled back. I was lucky in part to have seen the campy, underwhelming CGI before it was rightfully perhaps, called out by audiences.

What was interesting about this first, in Indian cinema history, where reactions to a trailer forced it back to the edits table, is that the stakes seem to have risen in a certain sense for Om Raut’s ambitious film. Adipurush arrives decades after Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana caught the imagination of a country that didn’t quite know what to expect. A lot has changed in since, from mediums to technology, from modes of reception to channels for criticism. To which effect not only must Adipurush contend with a tricky media landscape, but also face up to the inevitability of being compared to the Ramanand Sagar era.

Sagar’s Ramayana coalesced with a unique socio-political moment in our history. Access to television as a form of entertainment was still scarce, allowing just about anything to echo that elusive, dreamy quality. Mythology thus naturally translated on an emerging platform that most Indians looked at with wonder and bemusement. Sagar’s methods, rudimentary and awkward in the rear-view mirror, were audacious and innovative for a relatively young tv industry. Sure Bollywood had exacted epics before – Mughal-E-Azam predated Sagar’s foray into national television by a couple of decades at least. And yet a new slight of hand was required for an episodic marvel that managed to capture, both a godly aura and a national cultural obsession.

Moments as iconic as Sagar’s Ramayana, also resulted in a shift in the way movies were shot, scale conceived. Film execs from Mumbai took to Sagar’s model of moving out of Mumbai to Umbergaon, where Sagar erected a minor universe of his own. Here many shows and films cut from the cloth of Indian mythology were shot, but rarely matched the heady days of the Director’s own work. A lot of things helped Sagar’s formative attempt become the moment that it eventually did; political narratives, the advent of a new technology, Doordarshan’s experiments with vision and vitality and a young nation, on the looking for sociological mentoring. Ramayana, alongside B R Chopra’s Mahabharata became a form of moral education. Mythology became part of a the national curriculum.

More than three decades later Adipurush has to contend with a different landscape. The mediums of entertainment have been split. Mythological shows have been on cable television for a while – countless iterations of them – but rarely has anything conjured the kind of fervour that Sagar’s giddy days of creating a mythological verse of his own did (Luv aur Kush, Shri Krishnaa etc). Part of the reason is internet’s easy accessibility, and how it has split the consumer.  Not just routes, but also devices come in varieties. People consume content in different ways making any cultural moment subject to the entropy of mediums as much as word of mouth. It was easier to build the latter, when eyes outnumbered the screens. Now, it is the other way round.

To add to that, since Sagar’s magnum opus, no one has attempted to recreate the sacred text at this scale, for the theatres. Sure there have been allusions, commendable efforts to dissect the text for its complexities (Mani Ratman’s Raavan for example) no one has recreated material so obviously rich, with as much directness. You can understand the sense of anxiety and pressure that comes with capturing a story sacred to many, and possibly untouchable to most. It’s a lesson the people behind the film have already learned the hard way.

Will Adipurush do for Indian mythology and theatrical releases what Mahabharata and Ramayana did for television? It’s unlikely. Perhaps the reasons these epics served the tv format better was the long gestation periods, the opportunity to explore and excavate the complexity of the texts over a long period of time. In a film capsule, that complex battle between good and evil might appear too plain and rushed. Maybe the spectacle can compensate for that narrative sophistication but looking at the re-done visuals, that seems unlikely too. If nothing else, though, Prabhas’ Adipurush will at the least set a bar, however high or low, for filmmakers to query and cross. At least it brushes the dust off a unique moment in Indian history that despite its allure and obviousness has failed to repeat itself.

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