by Anand Sudha
The question of a “Hindu”, and by extension, according to the current government at least, Indian identity, is one that has seemingly been wrested from Indians by “outsider, invading” forces, with the only solution being to return to a pristine, untainted past, something which the government and their artistic toadies, as self-appointed custodians of “Hindu culture”, thumpingly proclaim are doing. Fortunately, there are still some artists and historians who resist this fascistic narrative, and Ashish Avikunthak is certainly one among them. Not shying away from the welter of contradictions that pull, reshape and rupture Hinduism into several fragments, each possessing a life, history and philosophy of its own in the eyes of its practitioners, his films are located at the crossroads of Hindu texts, rituals, philosophies and conflicts refracted through his, by his own admission, privileged, post-colonial lens. His latest film, which premiered at this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival, Meghnad Badh Kavya, or The Killing of Meghnad (2026), is in this vein, especially in its foregrounding of his source text for the film, an aspect which also marked his earlier work, Katho Upanishad (2011). An adaptation of a poem studied in schools in the state of West Bengal, this poem, written in an imported, “western” free-verse form, by the colonial era poet, Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, is itself an adaptation of an episode from the Bengali version of one of India’s most renowned, and now, highly-contested epics, The Ramayana, which itself has been reinterpreted, reshaped and reconfigured by different languages, cultures, eras, and even religions (many Islamic Ramayanas exist), restricted not just to India, but countries across South-East Asia. To grossly simplify, this episode involves the killing of the titular character by Lakshmana, who is the brother of Rama – the hero of Ramayana and exemplar of virtue – through the use of deceit and magic, with some generous help from the gods. Meghnad is the son of Ravana, the mighty king of Sri Lanka, who kidnapped Rama’s wife, Sita, as he was besotted by her beauty.
Despite India never being short on cinematic adaptations of The Ramayana, most condense it into a series of grandiose moments, exemplified by opulent sets, spectacular battles that double down as light shows, and oratorial, direct-address dialogues that function as moral instruction. Avikunthak, however, consigns all these to the margins, and instead revives the tradition of Indian epic narratives that is often forgotten, one that privileges stumbling blocks, questions and philosophical discussions over forward momentum of the plot. Through his muse, Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, Avikunthak has found the ideal, modernist lens to broach this dense, epic text that stretches across various spatio-temporal realms of heaven, earth, and hell, thrusting Hindu philosophical questions into the modern by developing his cinematic language around his diverse landscapes scattered across different locales and climates, and the gestures of his actors who recite the text rather than dramatize it. I emailed some questions to Avikunthak after the premiere of his film at IFFR 2026, and he was gracious enough to provide these thoughtful responses that mirror the philosophical depth of his films.
Anand Sudha: The Ramayana has been subjected to multiple iterations and reinterpretations in different languages and cultures across the years. What particularly attracted you to Michael Madhusudhan Dutt’s poem adaptation of the section involving the killing of Meghnad in the Ramayana?
Ashish Avikunthak: Meghnad Badh Kavya is an iconic text of the 19th century Bengal Renaissance which inaugurated literary modernity in India. It occupies a singular position in the cultural and intellectual history of the subcontinent, not simply as a landmark of Bengali literature, but as the site where Indian literary consciousness first begins sustained deliberation with the demands and possibilities of modernity. It is through this work that we, as Indians, first step into the modern era in a self-conscious, aesthetically articulated manner, yet the text remains deeply, inextricably rooted in our premodern traditions. This is not a contradiction but the very condition of its significance. It was this unique quality of being poised between worlds that inspired me to adapt it for film.
Despite its towering stature in Bengali literary culture, and despite the fact that Meghnad Badh Kavya has been canonized, taught in schools, memorized by generations, and held up as one of the foundational texts of modern Indian poetry, the masters of Bengali cinema—Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and others never brought this epic to the screen. This absence is striking, even puzzling, given how deeply invested these filmmakers were in questions of tradition, modernity, national identity, and the mythology of Bengal. Perhaps the text seemed too literary, too formally daunting, too resistant to the kinds of psychological realism or social critique that defined much of late-twentieth-century Indian cinema. Perhaps the problem was, how does one translate into cinema a poem whose power lies so much in its language, its metrical innovation, its dense allusiveness, its symphonic orchestration of sound and image through words alone?
My film functions as a twenty‑first‑century cinematic commentary on Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s reinterpretation of Krittibas’s Krittivasi Ramayana (15th‑century Bengali), which in turn is a commentary of Valmiki’s classical text (5th to 4th century BCE) which in turn responded to and consolidated a much older and diverse corpus of Ramayana narratives that existed within the fluid, polyphonic, and performative world of oral traditions. I understand my own adaptation as participating in this long chain of reinterpretations, each responding to and reshaping the versions that came before it.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that your filmmaking of the Ramayana is in stark contrast to the versions mounted by Indian filmmakers. A very interesting and radical aspect of your film lies in the foregrounding of the text. That decision not only brings the modernist angle of Dutt’s poetry, but also informs your audiovisual choices.
My film functions as a theoretical and critical response to the oldest and most enduring genre of Indian cinematic modernity: the mythological film. This genre, which traces its origins back to Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913), has played a foundational role in shaping popular cinema in India. From its inception, the mythological genre transformed religious narratives into mass entertainment, adapting stories from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas, and other sacred texts into visual spectacles designed to appeal to broad audiences. These films were didactic, devotional, and often spectacular, filled with elaborate sets, ornate costumes, and theatrical performances that emphasized opulence, moral clarity, and emotional intensity of the myths.
Over the decades, this tendency toward amplification and embellishment has only intensified. Now the mythological genre is less concerned with philosophical or theological depths. They rely heavily on artificial visual effects, computer-generated imagery, ornamental grandiosity, and a visual language borrowed from Hollywood blockbusters and television serials. The result is a cinema of accumulation, amplification, and sensory overload that problematically equates religiosity with spectacle and technical extravagance, and devotion with pageantry.
This kind of cinema, in my view, fundamentally destroys the contemplative ethos of Hindu religious texts. It reduces them to entertainment, flattens their philosophical complexity, and obscures the very qualities that make these narratives intellectually and spiritually profound: their capacity for paradox, their tolerance for ambiguity, their insistence that ultimate truths cannot be grasped through sensory experience or emotional intensity alone but require stillness, reflection, and a kind of inward listening that our culture of distraction and speed has made increasingly difficult.
My film seeks not to illustrate or adapt Dutt’s text in any conventional sense, but it is a cinematic commentary on the philosophical and religious core of the poem. The film creates a space where reflection, interiority, and emotional rumination are not simply represented but become the structural principle through which the narrative is experienced. I want to move away from the spectacle of the melodrama to inhabit durationality and the orality as primary aesthetic registers.
Meghnad Badh Kavya is a filmic practice in withholding. It resists every impulse toward dramatization or narrative momentum as Western cinema has come to define these terms. I wanted to create a cinematic environment where thought itself could unfold at its own pace, unmediated by the conventional dynamics of suspense, conflict, or emotional identification. The stillness of the camera mirrors the stillness required for philosophical understanding.
The subject matter is a moment of catastrophic violence, betrayal, and death. The death of Meghnad is a murder committed during sacred worship, a violation of ritual sanctity, an act of treachery that fractures the moral universe of the Ramayana and exposes the ethical ambiguities at its core. Yet despite the violence and intensity of this event, I refuse to treat Meghnad’s death as spectacle, as climax, or as moral resolution in any conventional cinematic sense. There are no grand battle sequences, no elaborate choreography of combat, no visual dramatization of the moment of death as a peak of emotional or narrative intensity. Instead, I attempt to create a space where orality, interiority, and emotional rumination are not simply represented but become the structural principle through which the narrative is experienced. The violence is not absent, but it is displaced, held at a distance, approached obliquely, felt as an absence or an aftermath rather than as a present spectacle.
In this sense, Meghnad Badh Kavya is an act of recovery. It is an attempt to reclaim something that has been obscured by popular cinematic imagination. My film is an act of resistance against the commodification of the sacred, against the reduction of religiosity to entertainment, against the assumption that cinema’s primary function is to stimulate, to excite, to overwhelm. Instead, I want to emphasize that cinema can be a medium for thought, for tranquility, for the kind of sustained attention that religious and philosophical texts have always demanded of their readers and listeners.
Your answer on the contemplative ethos of Hindu epics reminded me of what Mani Kaul said about the epic form, where the “narrative is usually very thin, very spread out, and at every stage it develops, it tries to have wider perspectives.” Your film embodies that aspect very well, almost to the extent where the discussions around the killing and the dilemmas of dharma it introduces become far more important than the killing itself. You show the actors reciting the text during these discussions, but the “action” sequences, which form the fulcrum of most films dealing with the subject, are passed over to an actor playing Dutt himself, who narrates the incident. What one calls an “interval” between key dramatic incidents becomes the main focus of your film. Does the act seem less consequential for you than the thought of the act, and the philosophical quandaries such thoughts seem to provoke?
Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Meghnad Badh Kavya is a pivotal work that stands at the threshold between this premodern religious universe and the emergence of Indian modernity. Its importance, for me, lies not merely in its formal brilliance or its audacious narrative inversions, but in the way it announces with remarkable boldness and clarity, what has been at the heart of both colonial and postcolonial Indian modernity: the recognition that we may become modern subjects, shaped by Western education, secular rationality, and historical consciousness, but we cannot sever ourselves from the deep religious and cultural substratum from which we emerge. This is not a question of nostalgic attachment or conservative refusal; it is, rather, an existential acknowledgment that modernity in India must be negotiated through tradition, not in spite of it. I believe that Dutt occupies a truly avant-garde position in this regard. He predates figures such as Tagore, Gandhi, Aurobindo, and Ambedkar. Each of whom would, in their own way, wrestle with the question of how to be both modern and Indian, yet he anticipates a foundational insight that would come to define the entire trajectory of Indian modernity. For Dutt, modernity is inevitable, inescapable, and in many ways desirable; but the existential soul of India, its affective core and imaginative vitality, continues to reside in its religious inheritance. This is not a matter of reconciliation or synthesis in any facile sense. It is, instead, a productive tension, a creative friction that generates new forms of thought, new modes of expression, and new structures of feeling.
Meghnad Badh Kavya embodies this dual movement with extraordinary precision and aesthetic power. First, it modernizes the epic form through psychological depth where the characters are no longer archetypal but internally divided, morally complex, and psychologically legible. Second, the formal experimentation with adoption of blank verse and the Miltonic epic model represents a radical break from traditional Sanskrit and Bengali prosody. Third, the text destabilizes the binary of dharma and adharma by humanizing Ravana’s court and interrogating Rama’s righteousness. In the process, Meghnad Badh Kavya simultaneously affirms the vitality, the necessity, and the ongoing relevance of the premodern narrative world. Dutt does not abandon the Ramayana; he reinhabits it from within, treating it not as a closed scripture but as a living archive like his premodern predecessors which can be rewritten, commented, contested, and reimagined without ceasing to be deeply, recognizably part of the tradition it critiques.
What makes Dutt’s intervention so prophetic is that he understood, perhaps earlier than anyone else in modern India, that the crisis of modernity was not only political or economic but also ontological. It was a crisis of selfhood, of identity, of how to live meaningfully in a world where the old certainties had been shaken but not entirely displaced. His solution was neither to retreat into orthodoxy nor to embrace Westernization wholesale, but to forge a new aesthetic and intellectual space where the claims of modernity and the claims of tradition could both be honored. In this universe one could write like Milton and still invoke the Gods of Hindu cosmology, where one could critique Rama and still write in the devotional register of Mangal Kavya.
In this sense, Meghnad Badh Kavya is not simply a retelling of the Ramayana. It is a commentary on what it means to inherit a tradition under conditions of historical rupture. It is a declaration that Indian modernity will be syncretic, hybrid, and irreducibly plural, not because of intellectual indecision, but because that is the only form of modernity adequate to the lived reality of colonial and postcolonial India. Dutt’s work thus becomes a kind of prototype, a template for the cultural logic that would animate much of twentieth-century Indian thought: the refusal to choose between tradition and modernity, and the insistence that genuine creativity lies precisely in the space between them.
Both tradition and modernity get reframed and reconfigured when viewed through the lens of the other. I was especially struck by how a “traditional” device of an author inserting himself into his text, a rather common practice in Hindu poetic and religious narratives, with even the supposedly first author of The Ramayana, Valmiki, doing so, appears so modern when you have an actor playing Dutt narrate the poem in dilapidated, colonial era buildings. Does Dutt do something similar in his poem, and was that one of the reasons for making Dutt a character in the film?
As I said earlier, I think of my film as commentary, a mode of engagement where I intentionally unsettle the original text by displacing its setting and disrupting its narrative universe. I use source material not as a blueprint to be followed but as a catalyst. My Meghnad Badh Kavya is not merely a retelling or adaptation of Dutt’s original epic in any conventional sense. Instead, I transmute Dutt’s text into a new narrative structure, that is shaped by my own cultural, linguistic, and political concerns that belong to the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. I am concerned about contemporary violence, nationhood, memory, and the weaponization of religiosity in contemporary India. This process creates a work that remains in constant tension with its source, and the friction of that dissonance becomes visible on screen, in every refusal to deliver what the audience might expect from a mythological narrative.
A palimpsest provides the closest analogy. In a palimpsest, the original text is partially scraped away to make room for new writing, but traces of the old text remain visible beneath the surface, ghostly and half-legible. Multiple layers of meaning continue to coexist even though only the topmost stratum is fully legible. The earlier inscriptions do not disappear entirely; they linger, they bleed through, they create interference patterns, unexpected resonances, moments where the old and new texts seem to speak to each other across centuries. This is how my film operates.
Within this framework, it became almost inevitable that Michael Madhusudan Dutt himself would appear in the film, as a presence, a voice, a spectral figure who mediates between the nineteenth century and the present. The actor Sagnik Mukherjee embodies this multilayered structure by playing both Dutt and Rama, and in an early sequence he even appears as Meghnad, allowing the film to collapse author, character, and commentary into a single personification. This doubling and redoubling reflect the very logic of the project: my film engages with its source not by reproducing it, but by inhabiting, refracting, and ultimately transforming it. This is a formal strategy that makes visible the central argument of the film: that there is no stable position from which to tell this story, no neutral vantage point, no clear separation between the creator and the created, between the one who writes and the one who is written.
This absence of clear separation manifests even in your choice of background music, which, though used sparingly, is strikingly familiar and unfamiliar to both Indian and Western ears. You use a cello playing a Hindustani Raag, which is extremely rare in Indian raga music, compared to more familiar Western instruments such as the violin that have been naturalized in our raga systems.
Since my early films, I have been interested in exploring Hindustani music through Western instruments, not as a fusion in the commercial sense, not as an attempt to make Indian music more palatable to global audiences, but as a serious aesthetic and musical inquiry into what happens when two radically different theory of music encounter each other. Specifically, I am interested in exploring when the microtonal subtleties and improvisational ethos of Hindustani classical music are transposed onto instruments that were designed for an entirely different harmonic and melodic universe. This is not about hybridity for its own sake. It is about discovering what new expressive possibilities might emerge when you utilize a Western instrument to do something it was never meant to do, and what depths of the Hindustani tradition might become audible when freed from the timbral associations of the sitar, sarod, or bansuri.
In Kalkimanthakatha (2025), I collaborated with Indian American composer Reena Esmail, who created a score for violin, viola, and cello based on a vocal composition by Astha Goswami in the raga Ahir Bhairav. Reena’s work was revelatory because she understood intuitively that this was not a matter of simply writing down the notes of a Hindustani composition and having Western-trained string players perform them with clean intonation and steady rhythm. Instead, she used the microtonal inflections, gliding ornaments, rhythmic elasticity, and the improvisational sensibility that define the raga tradition. In my subsequent films, I have continued to explore this musical dialogue, working with musicians who are themselves bridge figures, trained in both Western and Indian classical traditions, or deeply committed to learning one through the lens of the other.
For Meghnad Badh Kavya, I collaborated with New York–based cellist Jake Charkey, who studied with one of the foremost practitioners of Hindustani classical violin, Dr. N. Rajam, a legendary musician whose work has been foundational in establishing the violin as a serious solo instrument in Hindustani classical music. Jake’s training under Dr. Rajam gave him a deep understanding of the grammar of raga, not just the notes, but the way those notes are approached, bent, sustained, released, the way silence is used, the way improvisation unfolds as a disciplined exploration within the strict formal constraints of the raga and tala system.
I believe the cello is an extraordinary instrument for Hindustani music, both for Khayal, which is the more ornamented, emotionally expressive form that dominates contemporary concert performance, and for Dhrupad, which demands a purer, more austere tonal quality. Like the sarangi, the traditional bowed string instrument of North India, the cello’s hollow wooden body produces a haunting, almost ‘crying’ tonal quality that is rare among other instruments. There is a melancholy, a depth, a kind of wounded beauty in the sound of a cello that resonates profoundly with the emotional universe of Hindustani music, which so often dwells in longing, separation, devotion, and the ache of unfulfilled desire. The sarangi has been described as the instrument that most closely resembles the human voice in its capacity for emotional expression, and the cello, I would argue, shares this quality. The cello also shares the sarangi’s remarkable capacity for continuous pitch variation, allowing musicians to execute meend, which is the long, gliding notes that give Hindustani music its evocative, soulful, and often mournful timbre. In Hindustani music, the space between the notes is as important as the notes themselves. A note is not a fixed pitch but a trajectory, a journey, a process of arriving, lingering, departing. The meend is not ornamentation but essence. It is where the raga lives. And the cello, with its fretless fingerboard and the continuous contact between bow and string, is perfectly suited to this kind of pitch movement. It can bend, slide, oscillate, sustain, all with the kind of fluidity and control that Hindustani music demands.
For Meghnad Badh Kavya, Jake Charkey’s cello became the voice of grief, of mourning, of the slow, inexorable weight of tragedy. The score was sparse, austere, often barely present, more like a shadow or a texture than a conventional film score. It did not tell the audience what to feel. It created a sonic space within which feeling might arise, or might not, depending on the viewer’s openness, their attentiveness, their willingness to sit with discomfort and ambiguity. And in this sense, the music was also driven by the aesthetic logic of infra-realism—minimal, suggestive, emotionally austere, trusting the audience to complete the emotional world of the film through their own inner resonance, their own rasa, their own bhava.
I wanted to ask you about infra-realism since you mentioned it here. You film your actors in stylized poses and gestures, which might be normally referred to as “tableaux vivants” in the West. However, you have described infra-realism as a “radical departure from both realism and melodrama” that “suggests and gestures than dictates the relationships between the characters and their worlds.” Could you elaborate on this, and how you view infra-realism in relation to the gestures of actors in your film?
In the silent period, screen performance depended on heightened mimicry and exaggerated physical expressivity, exemplified by figures like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, whose bodies became virtuosic instruments of communication, compensating for the absence of synchronized sound through gesture, facial expression, and a visual grammar of emotion that was necessarily amplified, stylized, and legible. With the arrival of sound in the late 1920s, acting shifted into a melodramatic idiom supported by music, dance, and expressive vocal delivery that intensified emotional cues for the viewer. The sound technologies encouraged vocal excess, musical excess. In popular Indian cinema, this melodramatic tradition became foundational, shaping a performance style that was theatrical, operatic, where emotion is not subtle but declared, not internalized but externalized through song, dance, and dialogue that speaks directly to the audience’s heart. Later, Italian neorealism, enabled by portable cameras and sync-sound technologies that allowed filming on real locations with non-professional actors, generated a new paradigm of naturalist acting that eventually became the global standard for art cinema and profoundly influenced the Indian Parallel Cinema movement of the 1970s and 80s. Neorealism insisted that performance should not look like performance at all, that actors should move and speak as people actually do in life. This was revolutionary because it suggested that cinema’s power lay not in spectacle or stylization but in the documentary force of the real. These shifts illustrate that acting styles are historically produced rather than fixed or timeless. They are shaped by available technologies, cultural frameworks, economic and ideological conditions of film production, and by the audiences for whom these films are made.
I have consciously moved away from dramatic, melodramatic, and realist performance traditions in order to develop what I call infra-realism. If we imagine performance on a scale where realism sits at zero degrees, which is the neutral baseline consisting of a mimesis of ordinary behavior, then dramatic acting is at ten degrees, where emotion is heightened but still psychologically legible, and the exuberant, operatic excess of Hindi masala cinema at one hundred degrees, where every feeling is amplified to the point of euphoric spectacle, then infra-realism functions at minus one hundred degrees. It moves in the opposite direction, not toward more expression but toward less, not toward clarity but toward opacity, not toward the amplification of emotion but toward its deliberate withholding. This does not imply deadpan delivery in the sense of ironic detachment or affectless monotony. It is not the flatness of postmodern cool or the nihilistic exhaustion of certain strands of contemporary European art cinema. Rather, it is an emotionally austere register in which gestures are deliberately reduced, stylized, and emptied of conventional psychological cues. The actors in my films do not telegraph their inner states through facial expressions, vocal modulation, or body language in the way that realist or dramatic acting would require. They do not give the audience the comfort of knowing what a character is feeling at any given moment. Instead, they inhabit a mode of performance that is ritualized, almost mask-like in its refusal of transparency.
While my compositions may evoke the stillness of “tableaux vivants,” the purpose of gesture within infra-realism is entirely different. In a tableau vivant, the freeze is meant to crystallize a moment of dramatic significance, to turn narrative into image, to make visible the emotional or moral climax of a scene. But my actors do not freeze dramatic meaning. Instead, they inhabit poses that refuse narration and resist emotional legibility. Their gestures become minimal and suspended not to express inner states but to create a zone of indeterminacy, a space where meaning is not given but must be inferred, imagined, felt in the gaps and silences. In this reduced expressive field, the audience is invited to complete the emotional world of the film through their own rasa and bhava, the classical Indian aesthetic categories that describe the relationship between the object of art and the viewer’s subjective response. Rasa, often translated as “aesthetic flavor” or “emotional essence,” is not something that resides in the artwork itself but something that arises in the viewer when certain conditions are met. Bhava refers to the emotional states or moods suggested by the artwork, but these are not directly depicted but evoked, through suggestion rather than statement.
In classical Indian aesthetics, the greatest art is that which creates the conditions for rasa to arise without forcing it, without dictating exactly what the viewer should feel. This requires restraint, indirection, the strategic withholding of information. Infra-realism operates according to this logic. It transforms gesture from an instrument of expression into an instrument of suggestion, something that opens an affective space where relationships and emotions are not dictated but sensed and imagined by the viewer. The actors do not tell you what to feel. They create a field of possibility within which you might feel something, or you might not, depending on what you bring to the film, what associations you carry, what silences and absences resonate with your own experience. This makes the viewing experience more active, more demanding, more uncertain. It refuses the passivity of conventional spectatorship, where the film does all the work of generating and managing emotion, and instead asks the viewer to participate in the construction of meaning, to become a co-creator of the film’s affective texture.
In this sense, infra-realism is not a style but a strategy. It is a way of resisting the tyranny of emotional clarity. It proposes instead that there is power in ambiguity, in restraint, in the refusal to reduce human experience to legible emotional categories. And it insists that this refusal is not coldness or indifference but a different kind of engagement, one that trusts the audience enough to leave space for their own imagination, their own memory, their own capacity to sense what is unspoken and feel what is not shown.
The relations between actors and the camera are compounded by your use of diverse landscapes, which almost emerge as “actors” in the film. Indian religious texts often look towards nature and landscape for signs and imbue them with a sense of foreboding. If we consider the other famous Hindu epic, The Mahabharata, the birth of one of the characters, Duryodhana, was marked by stormy skies and jackals howling. Did you think of the sounds of the landscape along those lines? The winds are particularly impactful, which brought to mind one of DW Griffith’s famous statements on cinema filming the wind…
The decision to film in natural landscapes like Ladakh, the Spiti Valley, Kutch, and the tropical forests of eastern India, was not motivated by picturesque or ethnographic concerns, but by a desire to anchor the mythological narrative in geographies that carry their own weight, their own silence, their own metaphysical density. These are not locations chosen for their exotic beauty or their cinematic grandeur; they are chosen because they embody, in their very topography, a certain kind of temporal stillness and spatial vastness that resists narrative assimilation. In this process, space itself is conceptualized as ākāśa, which is often translated inadequately as “ether” or “space.” Ākāśa refers in classical Indian thought to the subtle, all-pervading medium that is both the ground and the condition of all sensory experience. It is not empty space in the modern, geometrical sense, but a kind of receptive openness, a luminous void that allows sound, light, and presence to emerge and dissolve. Through the invocation of ākāśa in the film, the narrative of Dutt’s epic becomes imbued with a sense of spaciousness, stillness, and metaphysical expansiveness that fundamentally transforms the topographical geography of these locations.
What begins as a recognizable place, like a mountain valley, a desert plain, a forest clearing is transformed into a field of inner orality. In my film the landscape becomes a prominent protagonist, in the sense that the spatial and temporal qualities of the natural world become inseparable from the emotional and philosophical content of the film. The film thus makes a claim that is both aesthetic and metaphysical: that true interiority cannot be represented through close-ups, voice-overs, or subjective camera movements alone. It must be spatialized, rendered through the encounter between body and landscape, between human scale and cosmic scale, between the particularity of individual suffering and the impersonality of the natural world. In this way, Meghnad Badh Kavya becomes an experiential meditation on interiority and perception. It is a film that does not ask the viewer to identify with characters or to follow a plot, but to inhabit, with patience and attentiveness. The film resists the affective immediacy and narrative momentum that define much of contemporary cinema, and in doing so, it offers a counter-model: one rooted in the durational, the spatial, and the philosophical traditions of Indian aesthetics and metaphysics.
And now if we reverse the gaze to the colonial one, Rama’s descent into hell seems closer to Dante, though you could say that there are some echoes of this in The Mahabharatha itself, where one of the protagonists, Yudhishtra, has a brief vision of hell. If I am correct, this appears to be Dutt’s addition to the text, and another signifier of his Western influences.
This entire episode is Dutt’s insertion into the Ramayana tradition, and it is directly inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid, particularly Book VI, where Aeneas descends into the Underworld guided by the Sibyl to meet his father, Anchises, and receive prophetic knowledge about the future of Rome. Maya here becomes the psychopomp, the liminal figure who mediates between the world of the living and the realm of the dead, between dharma and its shadow, between victory and its cost.
This is the second time in my films that I have attempted to represent the underworld. The first time was in my film Katho Upanishad (2011), where Nachiketa, the young seeker, arrives at the abode of Yama, the god of death, and receives one of the most profound Vedantic teachings on the nature of the self and the strategy for transcending the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. In that film, Yama’s realm is not depicted as a place of torture or punishment in the Christian sense, but as a space of stillness, contemplation, and discourse. Both representations of the underworld in my films share the visual and aesthetic choice: they are shot not in dark, subterranean spaces or barren, desolate wastelands, but in verdant, lush, overwhelmingly alive forests. These are places where nature’s efflorescence is most visibly and sensuously present. This choice is deliberate and carries significant philosophical weight.
In Indian cosmology, the underworld is not simply a place of negation, absence, or death. It is part of the cosmic order, a realm that exists in dynamic relation to the world of the living, and it is often imagined as possessing its own beauty, its own vitality, its own forms of life. By filming these scenes in dense, tropical forests, I am suggesting that death and life are not opposites but continuities, that the underworld is not outside nature but deeply within it, that what we call hell, or the realm of the dead is not a void but a space of transformation, decay, regeneration, and return. The forest becomes a figure for this cyclical understanding of existence. By placing Maya and Rama within this verdant, living space, I am suggesting that the journey through the underworld is not a descent into horror but an entry into a different mode of being, one that requires the shedding of illusion, the confrontation with loss, and the acceptance of impermanence as the ground of all existence.
Since you mentioned Maya here, I was wondering if there’s a particular definition you subscribe to, considering the evolution of the term across different philosophical schools of Hinduism. Maya is personified as a demi-goddess here, and Lakshmana avails of her help to kill Meghnad. How did you think of envisioning that concept in your film?
Maya is one of the most multifaceted and philosophically generative concepts within Indian religiosity and philosophy, a term whose meanings shift and proliferate across different traditions, historical periods, sectarian affiliations, and metaphysical frameworks. It is a poly-religious concept in the fullest sense, found not only in Hinduism but also in Buddhism and Jainism. And within each of these religious traditions, it carries distinct theological, epistemological, and soteriological implications. Even within the sectarian and philosophical schools internal to each of these religiosities, Maya assumes varying meanings: sometimes illusion, sometimes creative power, sometimes cosmic deception, sometimes divine play, sometimes the very fabric of phenomenal existence itself.
Theologically speaking, Maya has evolved over centuries as a concept that names what humans perceive and experience as the real world, but which is, in fact, a deceptive illusion. It is a veil that obscures the true nature of reality and binds consciousness to a limited, distorted, and ultimately unsatisfying mode of existence. In its most abstract and metaphysical form, Maya is earliest theorized in the Vedantic texts as the limited, purely physical, and mental reality in which our everyday consciousness has become entangled. It is the world of multiplicity, differentiation, name, and form, and temporal becoming that prevents the true self from recognizing its essential identity with the ultimate reality. Maya, in this framework, is not simply falsehood but a kind of ontological mistake. It is a misapprehension of the nature of being itself, a projection of duality and separateness onto what is fundamentally non-dual and undivided.
In later texts, particularly in the devotional, Tantric, and Shakta traditions that flourished in medieval India, this philosophical abstraction is energized, feminized, and transformed into something far more dynamic and personal. Maya ceases to be merely an epistemological problem or a metaphysical principle and becomes associated with the Mother Goddess cult, where she is understood as the cosmic feminine power who is both the creative force that brings the universe into being and the illusory veil that conceals ultimate truth. In this framework, Maya is not something to be transcended or negated but something to be worshipped, honored, and recognized as the divine play of the Goddess herself. She is at once illusion and reality, bondage and liberation, concealment, and revelation. This shift represents a profound theological reorientation, from the austere monism of Advaita Vedanta, which sees Maya as something to be seen through and dissolved, to the devotional and Tantric traditions, which see Maya as the very body and power of the divine feminine.
Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Meghnad Badh Kavya draws deeply on this latter tradition. The figure of Maya in Dutt’s epic is his own invention. She does not appear in Valmiki’s Ramayana in this form. Her presence in the poem reflects Dutt’s engagement with the rich corpus of late medieval Bengali devotional genre called the Mangal Kavya that were in wide circulation in Bengal during the period when he was writing. These texts celebrated the power, majesty, and salvific agency of the Mother Goddess in her various forms—Durga, Kali, Chandi. Dutt draws on this devotional and literary tradition to reimagine Maya as a shapeshifting, powerful, feminized entity who plays a pivotal role in the unfolding of his narrative. He also refers to her as Mahamaya—the Great Goddess.
In my film, I underscore the shapeshifting, protean nature of Maya by having her played by two separate actors. This is designed to emphasize that Maya is not a stable, unified identity but a principle of transformation, multiplicity, and ontological ambiguity. The first time we see her, she appears with Indra, the king of the gods, in a context that establishes her cosmic authority and her role as an agent of divine will. The second time we encounter her is after the murder of Meghnad, when she leads Rama through the labyrinthine, hallucinatory journey of the underworld to finally meet his dead father, Dasharatha.
Finally, Rama is a charged figure in India right now, to say the least. Looking at Dutt’s text and the Bangla Ramayana, characters constantly ask Rama questions that undermine him as a righteous figure. Do you therefore see the current reincarnation of Rama as a modern, fascistic phenomenon? How do you reconcile the multiple Ramas we have seen across various texts and the hypermasculine Rama of the now?
At its heart lies a question that feels increasingly urgent in our present moment: what happens when divine power intervenes in human conflict, not to uphold justice, but to manipulate its outcome? What does it mean when the gods themselves become partisan actors, tilting the scales not in favor of righteousness, but in service of a predetermined victory? This is not merely a theological inquiry but a political one, and it cuts to the core of how we understand power, legitimacy, and moral authority in both mythological and contemporary contexts. It asks us to reconsider the very foundations upon which we construct our notions of dharma, duty, and ethical action. Is it simply the ideology of the victorious, a retrospective justification for violence committed by those who win? And if that is the case, then how do we distinguish between justice and power, between what is right and what is simply enforced? In a time when religiosity is being weaponized to shore up nationalist ideology, when ancient epics are invoked not as open texts subject to interpretation but as closed scriptures that authorize contemporary violence, exclusion, and the erasure of dissent, I felt compelled to return to the source. To destabilize the voice of certainties, to open up the fissures, to make visible the contradictions and moral ambiguities that have always been there but are now being systematically suppressed.
Meghnad Badh Kavya is my attempt to excavate the contradictions, the silences, and the uncomfortable truths that lie buried beneath our most sacred narratives. I want to ask what happens when we refuse the easy binaries of good and evil, hero and villain, dharma and adharma, and instead allow the story to become messy, contested, and morally ambiguous. What makes this adaptation particularly urgent, I believe, is that it arrives at a moment when questions of tradition, modernity, identity, and cultural memory are being renegotiated once again in India, but now under radically different conditions than those that shaped Dutt’s nineteenth-century Bengal. This time, the negotiation is happening in the context of globalization, neoliberalism, the rise of religious nationalism as a state-sanctioned ideology, the weaponization of history and religion in the service of majoritarian politics, and the digital transformation of public discourse, which has created new forms of surveillance, propaganda, and mob violence that operate at speeds and scales unimaginable even a generation ago. The terms of the debate have changed, but the underlying question remains the same: what does it mean to be Indian? What does it mean to inherit a tradition? What does it mean to belong to a culture whose foundational narratives are now being mobilized as instruments of exclusion and domination?
My larger filmmaking practice is located at a moment when the meaning of Indianness, of religious heritage and narrative is being fiercely contested in streets, in the courts, in viral WhatsApp messages, in lynch mobs, in the demolition of mosques, in the rewriting of textbooks, in the banning of films and books and scholars who dare to suggest that the Hinduism might be something other than a univocal endorsement of Hindu supremacy. The archive of Hindu religiosity today is not simply a group of literary or devotional books. They are political texts mobilized in debates about national identity, secularism, communal harmony, citizenship, and the very definition of who belongs and who does not. These books have been conscripted into the service of a politics that demands purity, singularity, obedience. Hindutva politics cannot tolerate ambiguity, dissent, or the acknowledgment that the tradition itself is multiple, contradictory, always in flux. And it is precisely this demand for a singular, authoritative, uncontested Ramayana that my film refuses. By returning to Dutt’s Meghnad Badh Kavya, I am making an argument about the kind of relationship we should have with our religious inheritance.
My film is not an act of preservation. It is an act of intervention, of resistance, of making the past newly legible, newly urgent, newly capable of illuminating the dilemmas and dangers of the present. It is a refusal to let the Ramayana be owned by those who would turn it into a monument, a weapon, a wall. It is an insistence that the epic still belongs to all of us, that it is still open, still contested, still capable of surprising us, still capable of forcing us to confront questions we would rather not ask.
Anand Sudha has a PhD in Applied Physics and dabbles in film criticism from time to time. His work has been published in InReview, Animus and Film Companion, among other outlets.
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