Santosh Jha

Going by the thundering success of #Ramayana , I won’t be surprised if all the earlier names from Valmiki onwards will be forgotten and only Namit Malhotra’s will remain .. Actually all this noise about why it’s being called Namit Malhotra’s “Ramayana” is just an unimaginably stupid outrage . The same people would have screamed if the roles were reversed , that is if a man named Namit Malhotra had written the original epic thousands of years ago and a man named Valmiki made the film today. The ownership question is actually both a distraction and a abstraction The real reason #Ramayana has survived for centuries isn’t because of its extraordinary plot points. It’s because the core conflicts in it are so realatably human and play out in almost every family from then to now Jealous wives. Sibling rivalry. Blind loyalty to a parent or authority figure. Betrayals within the household. The destruction caused by ego, status, and the need to be seen. These aren’t mythological aberrations .. They are daily life. That relatability is what keeps people emotionally invested, not the fact that someone can fly or lift a mountain. This is exactly why The Godfather became a cultural phenomenon. Nobody watches Francis Ford Coppola’s film for the technical details of underworld operations . They watch it because it shows the same family dynamics .. loyalty, betrayal, the cost of power, the corruption of ideals within a closed system that people can and do recognise from their own lives. We don’t call it “Mario Puzo’s novel that Coppola happened to film.” The same logic applies here. Cinema has always worked this way with inherited stories. We say Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, not Shakespeare’s. We say Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, not Tolkien’s. We say Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, not Shakespeare’s Macbeth. We say Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. In India, people say Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas or Bhansali’s Padmaavat, even though the source material is far older.. The name attached to the film is the name of the person who made the material into a specific experience that exists in a particular time, with particular choices, technology, and above all a particular point of view. Everything is constantly interpreted and adapted and so Calling it Namit Malhotra’s Ramayana doesn’t erase Valmiki. It simply acknowledges the person who took the trouble of taking the ancient material and turning it into a film that exists right now at this moment for all of us like every major adaptation in literature or cinema did the same. The outrage around the name is less about respect for the original and more about the refusal to accept that a actual living person is making it One who understands this, and is clear about whose version it is, isn’t diminishing the Ramayana , but is doing what an adaption has always done , which is to reflect the people who did it.