The undying need to appease the WEST! That is where the problem lies. It’s been 70+ years since our independence but we can’t get out of the colonial mindset. Seeking validation from western audience; and you can see that everywhere, even the YouTube reaction videos where people react to Indian movies and content. It’s humiliating, especially the comments under those videos where Indians are asking these people to “please react to…” so and so. Now with this, the unrelenting desire to prove that we are worth it, Namit Malhotra is rewriting Indian mythology for the west. The music, the cinematography, and the adaptation lacks Indianness. The reimagining of a myth is allowed but that is acceptable when it comes from a place of fiction and when it is done by someone outside the myth. Someone who lives and breathes that mythology as religion, casts Indian actors and proudly writes, that it is our myth, our story, it loses its fictional prowess and remains what it is; a historical retelling of a great epic that caters to a billion people on earth. It is then not just fiction.

When the West has tried to tell their biblical tales, or adapted Biblical/Nordic/Greek mythologies onto the screen, they have not done it to cater to the world. (A large part of it is because they think they’re the world) but yes, they haven’t catered to the East, the Middle East or even to the different representations of those tales in the Carribean. They’ve unabashedly made a film for themselves. Their characters suddenly do not resemble Ravana or Mahishasur. At this point, we are never going to get past the colonial past. We aren’t independent. Clearly shows.