'Ramyug,' another disappointing entry in Bollywood’s mythological genre

Why has it proven so difficult for Indian creators to match the popularity of Ramanand Sagar’s 'Ramayan' and B.R. Chopra’s 'Mahabharat'?

One of the first things you notice about Kunal Kohli’s Ramyug (the first episode of which premiered on MX Player recently) is that hardly any actor on display seems to be comfortable with the task at hand. Perhaps it’s because the task itself is ill-defined: with the gym torsos on display and the emphasis on special effects, Ramyug clearly wants to be a vaguely modernised retelling of the Ramayana, a Game of Thrones-flavoured retelling, if you will. . But nobody told the writers. The dialogue, therefore, betrays no sign of this modernisation brief — there are no indirect references to the contemporary era, nothing allusive at all, in fact. At its best, Game of Thrones worked because the dialogue was ambitious and tried to establish connections across eras and cultures. In the absence of such ambition, a period drama’s dialogue then has to gun for era-specific authenticity and, of course, strength of characterisation.