Mahakavya Shri Ramayan Katha Trailer: A Smaller Ramayana Walks Into a Casting Storm

There are, as of this month, two very different Ramayana adaptations sitting in Bollywood's release calendar. One is Nitesh Tiwari's Ramayana Part 1, a reported Rs 4,000 crore two-part epic with Ranbir Kapoor, Yash, and a VFX team pulled straight from Dune, aimed at Diwali. The other is Mahakavya Shri Ramayan Katha, a Chhattisgarh-produced mythological film that launched its trailer at a Mumbai event on Thursday, September 17, 2026, and opens in theatres just eight days later, on September 25 — releasing simultaneously in Hindi and Chhattisgarhi across India. These are not the same project, not the same scale, and not really competing for the same audience. But the smaller film has generated its own share of attention this week, mostly because of who's playing Sita.

What the trailer actually shows

According to Bollywood Hungama and IANS, the trailer covers a fairly complete arc of the Ramayana rather than teasing a single act — Ram and Sita's bond, their vanvas (exile into the forest), Sita's abduction, Hanuman's devotion, and the climactic dharma-versus-adharma confrontation. That's a lot of ground for a single trailer to gesture at, and it suggests the film itself is aiming for something closer to a full retelling than a narrow slice of the epic.

Director Abhishek Singh framed the production's guiding idea around "Maryada" — dharma, essentially, in the specific sense of righteous conduct — and said the foundation of the whole shoot was maintaining what he called "Katha Bhav," the emotional bond and affection between Ram and Sita. That's a fairly specific directorial through-line to name publicly, and it tells you where the film wants its emotional center to sit: not primarily on the battle with Ravan, but on the relationship the rest of the story is built to protect and eventually avenge.

Who's in it

The cast, per Bollywood Hungama and IANS: Dev Sharma plays Shri Ram, Anjali Arora plays Mata Sita, Rajniesh Duggall plays Ravan, Sheel Verma plays Lakshman, and Nirbhay Wadhwa plays Hanuman. It's directed by Abhishek Singh, produced by Prakash Mahobiya and Sanjay Bundela, with Honey Kuldeep Agarwal and Monika Sen credited as co-producers. Ajay Kanojia of AJ Film Entertainment World presents the film, under the Mahobiya Films Production banner.

Duggall taking on Ravan is probably the most conventionally "known name" casting choice here — he's a working actor with a reasonably long résumé. The rest of the principal cast is made up of names without major prior box-office footprints in Hindi cinema, which fits the film's identity as a regional, lower-budget production rather than a star-driven tentpole. Portions of the film were shot on location in Chhattisgarh, according to the same reporting, which lines up with the state-level production backing and the simultaneous Chhattisgarhi release.

Anjali Arora's casting, and why it became the story

Anjali Arora is a social-media and reality-TV personality, and Mahakavya Shri Ramayan Katha marks her feature-film debut. Casting her as Sita — the moral and emotional center of the entire epic — in a debut role is the kind of decision that was always going to draw scrutiny, and it did. Online reaction included trolling directed at her background, questioning whether someone known primarily for viral content and dance videos belonged in a mythological lead role.

Arora responded directly rather than staying quiet about it, saying, "I didn't do anything different; I just followed the trend," and defending dancing as a hobby that's common among actors generally, not something disqualifying. It's a fairly measured response given the volume of criticism reportedly aimed at her — she's not disputing that she came up through social media, just pushing back on the idea that this makes her an illegitimate choice for the role.

Whether that response settles the debate is a separate question from whether it should. Influencer-to-film-lead casting has become a recurring flashpoint across Indian cinema over the past few years, and putting that casting decision specifically into a mythological epic — a genre with an unusually devoted, unusually vocal audience about fidelity and reverence — practically guaranteed a louder-than-usual reaction. The trailer's reception bears that out.

The trailer reception is genuinely split

Per a review roundup covered by Free Press Journal, the trailer's reception has been mixed in a way that doesn't cleanly favor one side. Critics of the trailer described it as having "TV show vibes from a theatrical release" — a specific and fairly pointed complaint, given that mythological content has a long, dense history on Indian television and the line between a TV-grade production and a theatrical one is exactly the comparison a film like this can't afford to lose. The same coverage singled out Anjali Arora's dialogue delivery as "cringe," and cited broader overacting and inconsistent VFX as recurring complaints in the response.

On the other side, some viewers called the trailer "better than Adipurush" — a comparison that's become something of a default bar for Hindi mythological cinema since that 2023 film's own rocky critical reception. One comparison went further, suggesting Mahakavya Shri Ramayan Katha's trailer even surpassed Ramayana Part 1, the bigger-budget Ranbir Kapoor adaptation producer Namit Malhotra has helped bankroll — though that same comparison noted dubbing and lip-sync issues in the footage, which tempers the compliment considerably. It's worth being precise about what that comparison actually is: a reaction to two trailers, not two finished films, made by viewers reacting online rather than critics doing a formal side-by-side review. Trailer-reaction roundups are soft evidence at the best of times — curated by whichever outlet compiled them, not a scientific sample — but the specific, repeated language on both sides of this one ("TV show vibes" versus "better than Adipurush") suggests a real, live disagreement rather than one outlet's spin.

RelatedEverything to Know About Ramayana Part 1: Ranbir Kapoor's Rs 4,000 Crore Epic Before It Hits Theatres

The music side

The film's music features a genuinely notable lineup of composers and singers for a production this size: Kailash Kher, Javed Ali, Farhad Bhiwandiwala, Anurag Sharma, Sunil Soni, and Shaan. Released songs so far include "Siya Ram," "Ram Ji Ki Sena," and "Hey Hanuman" — titles that map fairly directly onto the film's central relationships and the devotional register the marketing is leaning into. Kailash Kher and Shaan in particular are names with real recognition in devotional and mainstream Hindi music alike, and their involvement is one of the clearer signs that the production put real resources into at least one department, even if the trailer's VFX and dialogue delivery are drawing criticism elsewhere.

Small film, big genre — and a very different bet than Ramayana Part 1

It's worth being clear about what Mahakavya Shri Ramayan Katha is not. It's not competing with Nitesh Tiwari's Ramayana Part 1 for scale, budget, or international VFX pedigree — that film is being built with DNEG, a score from A.R. Rahman and Hans Zimmer together for the first time, and a reported $500 million combined budget across two parts. Mahakavya Shri Ramayan Katha is a regionally rooted, Chhattisgarh-shot production releasing in two languages rather than five, with composers and singers as its headline talent draw rather than a cast of major stars.

That contrast is actually the more interesting story here than the casting controversy alone. India regularly gets multiple mythological adaptations of the same core stories running in parallel — sometimes in the same release year — because the audience for devotional and mythological cinema is large enough, and regionally fragmented enough, to support very different budget tiers telling the same story simultaneously. A big-budget pan-India Ramayana aimed at Diwali multiplexes and a smaller Hindi-Chhattisgarhi release aimed at a more regionally specific, possibly more devotionally oriented audience aren't really fighting over the same ticket buyer. Whether Mahakavya Shri Ramayan Katha can carve out that space, especially with a trailer this divisive, is the real open question heading into September 25.

The release-day traffic jam

September 25 isn't an empty date on the calendar. The Vvaan – Force of the Forest, Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia's own mythological fantasy, opens the same day. And a re-release of Avengers: Endgame — reportedly featuring a new four-minute ending sequence — is also said to be landing in that same window. Neither the Endgame re-release nor its reported new footage has been studio-confirmed at this point; it's circulating as reported information rather than an official announcement, and it's worth treating it that way until a studio actually says so.

Three films chasing overlapping — though not identical — audiences on the same weekend is a genuinely crowded field for a smaller production without major star power to lean on. Mahakavya Shri Ramayan Katha's Chhattisgarhi-language release gives it a regional carve-out that neither The Vvaan nor an Avengers re-release can really touch, which may end up mattering more to its opening numbers than however the trailer debate resolves on social media.

What to watch for

A few specific things are worth tracking once the film actually opens. First, whether the "TV show vibes" criticism holds up against a full theatrical cut, or whether that read was specifically a trailer-pacing issue that a complete film doesn't share. Second, whether Anjali Arora's performance, once critics see the whole thing rather than a trailer's worth of cut dialogue, gets a fairer hearing than the pre-release trolling suggested it would — trailers compress performances into their most exposed, decontextualized moments, and dialogue delivery in particular tends to read worse in short cuts than in full scenes. Third, how the film performs in Chhattisgarh specifically versus its wider Hindi release, since the simultaneous dual-language rollout suggests the producers are banking on regional loyalty as much as, or more than, pan-India curiosity.

None of that is answerable yet. What's clear right now is that Mahakavya Shri Ramayan Katha walked into its own trailer launch with a genuinely divided reaction already forming, a debut lead absorbing real public criticism before a single ticket has sold, and a release date that puts it up against two other films chasing very different but occasionally overlapping audiences. September 25 will settle a lot of that fairly quickly.