Tanhaji director Om Raut is taking on Valmiki’s epic Ramayan, by splitting it into three parts for the silver screen, with Bahubali star Prabhas portraying the lead character. The first film has been titled Adipurush, with veteran acting star Saif Ali Khan joining the main cast as Lankesh (Raavan), the main antagonist for the film series. After the 1987 hit Television series which ran on DD national, we are finally getting a decent reboot of the Sanskrit poem. But we can’t help but wonder, when are the Adipurush protests going to begin? Don’t understand? Let us explain.
The Indian audience is famous for being as fickle as the Roman Mob during Caesar’s time, where even a single inaccuracy or change could make them go into a mouth-frothing rage. Jodha Akbar, Bajirao Mastani and The Legend of Bhagat Singh are a few historical movies which came out in the past couple of decades which were critically acclaimed by both critics and movie goers alike, but faced protests on various inaccuracies in the movies. Even the 1982 film Gandhi, was faced with protests regarding the fact that the titular character was played by a British man.
People forget that, no matter how faithful film makers stay to source material (history in this case), there will always be artistic liberties taken by actors and/or directors, which is their right. There will always be some minor ‘issues’, like an actor’s or a crew member’s nationality, religion or sex, which people can latch on to, simply to have reason to protest and prevent a film from being launched. What people tend to forget during their heated protests, is that the art-form they are watching is film and not a documentary (who take their own artistic liberties by the way).
Adipurush is a movie about the epic tale of Ram. This mythological tale has been passed down from generation to generation among Hindus for over two and a half millenia (although the recent years have been through Amar Chitra Katha comics). There have been countless remakes & editions and it has been written in at least 22 languages including Hindi, English, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Mandarin, Thai, Laotian and Tibetan among others. There will definitely be inaccuracies or changes happening in this movie, and with India being a predominately Hindu state, we can expect a massive uprising of strikes (simply because of the aforementioned facts alone) happening in different parts of the country.
Of course we could be wrong, and this could be just an over-reaction on our part. After all we are in the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, with people who are smart enough to understand that film makers do take some liberties to provide an immersive experience, for all types of people, who will come to watch their film. Hopefully as long as the movie sticks to the core plot, we won’t see a massive uprising, like the one we saw back in Kerala when Sunny Leone came to promote a product (We forgot what product she was promoting, that should give you an idea about her power).
With Prabhas, Om Raut and Saif Ali Khan participating in the film, who are all veterans in the ‘Indian epics department’, hopefully the mob (oh yeah that is definitely happening) won’t have much complains. But when it happens, you heard it here first folks!
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