From Doctor to Box-Office Disruptor

Vishal Chaturvedi has turned a deeply personal spiritual story into one of 2026’s biggest box-office surprises. In an industry where films routinely arrive with star salaries running into crores, lavish sets and multi-crore marketing campaigns, Hanuman Ansh is a striking anomaly. Made on a shoestring budget reportedly in the region of Rs. 2 crore, the ‘spiritual’ film opened last month to a modest box-office collection. Within weeks, however, audiences began taking a shine to the film with...

min read

Vishal Chaturvedi has turned a deeply personal spiritual story into one of 2026’s biggest box-office surprises. In an industry where films routinely arrive with star salaries running into crores, lavish sets and multi-crore marketing campaigns, Hanuman Ansh is a striking anomaly. Made on a shoestring budget reportedly in the region of Rs. 2 crore, the ‘spiritual’ film opened last month to a modest box-office collection. Within weeks, however, audiences began taking a shine to the film with the phenomenal result that its domestic collections had surged past the Rs. 150 crore mark. Whatever the final tally, the fact that a film made for a fraction of the budgets of mainstream Bollywood productions has emerged as a major commercial success has raised eyebrows. The man responsible for this is Vishal Chaturvedi, a doctor-turned-filmmaker, writer and producer whose route to cinema has been anything but conventional. Chaturvedi was born and brought up in Lucknow and completed his MBBS from Gorakhpur in 2006. While posted in Haldwani that year, he visited Kainchi Dham. It was there that he encountered the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba, the spiritual figure whose life and philosophy would eventually become the foundation of his first feature film. For almost two decades, the thought of making a film around Neem Karoli Baba remained with Chaturvedi. His journey towards Hanuman Ansh itself reportedly took nearly 14 years. Along the way, he left medicine and even gave up music before committing himself fully to filmmaking. What might appear in retrospect as an overnight success was therefore anything but overnight. Hanuman Ansh tells the story of Lakshminarayan, who would later become Neem Karoli Baba. Following his mother’s death, the young Lakshman leaves home in search of God. His journey through forests, temples and villages becomes a gradual renunciation of worldly life and a movement towards spirituality. The film also incorporates episodes associated with Neem Karoli Baba, including the famous account of a British train being stopped after he was forced off it. But perhaps the most revealing part of Chaturvedi’s story is not what he put into the film, but what he deliberately kept out while writing it. He removed digital devices from his room and wrote the story entirely by hand. His assistants subsequently photographed the handwritten pages and converted them into digital form. He spent nearly 45 days writing the first scene alone. For Chaturvedi, however, the first scene was the foundation of the entire film. Once he had found it, the rest of the screenplay came together rapidly, taking another 15 to 20 days. Hanuman Ansh was the culmination of a personal conviction that had survived for nearly 20 years. Its success also raises a larger question about the changing economics of Indian cinema. The film is unlikely to signal the death of stars, spectacle or big budgets. Nor does every low-budget film with a strong idea automatically become a blockbuster. But Hanuman Ansh, alongside other recent successes such as Dhurandhar, points towards something increasingly important: content can create its own market when audiences feel they have discovered something worth talking about. The old model depended heavily on pre-release visibility. The new one increasingly depends on post-release conversation. A film need not necessarily dominate advertising if audiences themselves become its marketing department. That is particularly significant for films operating outside the traditional Bollywood template. Hanuman Ansh does not have the conventional ingredients of a commercial blockbuster. Its subject is spiritual, its central character is not a contemporary superstar and its budget was tiny by industry standards. Yet its audience appears to have expanded precisely because it offered something different. Today, audiences are becoming less willing to accept that the size of a film’s budget determines its value. They can reject an expensive production and embrace a modest one if the latter connects emotionally, culturally or spiritually. For Chaturvedi, the irony is striking. A man who walked away from medicine to pursue filmmaking spent years chasing a story that the mainstream industry apparently did not rush to embrace. That makes Hanuman Ansh’s success more than a box-office curiosity. It is a reminder that while budgets and big-name stars may buy scale and draw attention, the belief among audiences that a particular film is telling a solid story and hence must be seen is priceless. Chaturvedi appears to have spent years building his belief around one story. Judging by the box office receipts, the audience, too, seems to have bought into it.

Caste Caricature

Correspondent

Mar 15

2 min read

A recruitment examination is supposed to test knowledge, judgement and aptitude. It should not, under any circumstances, be used to insinuate prejudice. Yet that is precisely the controversy now swirling around the Uttar Pradesh police’s sub-inspector recruitment examination held earlier this week. Among the questions posed to candidates was what is the correct one-word description for a person who “changes according to opportunity?” The options listed were “Pandit,” “Opportunist,” “Innocent” and “Virtuous.”

The presence of “Pandit” in such a list has provoked a predictable backlash among the Brahmin community. To casually pair it with the notion of opportunism in a state recruitment exam reflects a deliberate carelessness about language that carries social implications. Examinations conducted by state institutions ought to be especially sensitive to such nuances.

Over the past few decades, a curious inversion has crept into parts of India’s public discourse. While caste discrimination remains a deeply serious problem that continues to demand redress, some corners of political and cultural debate have begun to treat the derision of Brahmins as an acceptable form of rhetoric. The mockery has now become fashionable as the recent controversy over UGC guidelines proves. The guidelines implied that only the Brahmins were capable of committing discriminatory acts against others.

The consequences of such casual hostility are rarely examined. Brahmins, like any other community, are neither a monolith nor the custodians of collective guilt. India’s social reform movements, from the campaigns against untouchability to the modernisation of education, have included numerous thinkers and activists drawn from Brahmin backgrounds. Reducing a centuries-old intellectual title like ‘Pandit’ to a synonym for opportunism in an official examination only feeds the narrative that disparaging an entire community is fair game.

This tendency is particularly visible in parts of the country where historical political movements were built on anti-Brahmin mobilisation. In Tamil Nadu, the early decades of Dravidian politics often expressed their rebellion against social hierarchy through symbolic attacks on Brahmin identity. The rhetoric that equates Brahminism with social oppression remains firmly embedded in today’s incendiary political rhetoric.

In Maharashtra, memories of the violent backlash against Chitpavan Brahmins following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 remain part of the historical record. Democracies thrive not by replacing one form of prejudice with another but by dismantling prejudice altogether.

Recruitment tests for police officers are meant to help shape the mindset of the very individuals entrusted with enforcing law and order. A question that appears to mock a specific community raises legitimate concerns about the neutrality of the institutional environment in which such officers are trained.

India’s long struggle against caste discrimination was meant to create a society where identity did not determine dignity. That aspiration is undermined whenever ridicule replaces reasoned debate.

In a country as plural as India, fairness must apply to all communities. A police examination paper should be the last place where that principle is forgotten.

From Doctor to Box-Office Disruptor

Caste Caricature

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