Ranabaali - The Movie Through My Eyes

By Meena Yeggina

The film also made me think about the ways generations of hardship can shape a people's relationship with food and security. Forgetting history does not merely erase yesterday. It can leave us unprepared to recognize injustice when it returns tomorrow.

Hello everyone and welcome to India Parent Magazine.  This is Meena Yeggina with this week's movie review, Ranabaali, which of course is a big no-no for kids, it is a disturbing and a violent film. 

Ranabaali, a history we forgot, a pain we must remember. I might never have watched  Ranabaali had it not been for the writer and lawyer J. Sai Deepak and his conversation about the film and the history of South India, particularly the Andhra and Telangana regions.

 Vijay Devarkonda of Arjun Reddy fame and director Rahul Sankrityan who made hinduphobic Shyam Singa Roy had both left me deeply disappointed for reasons I do not wish to revisit here. You can check my old reviews. Ranabaali was therefore nowhere on my watchlist.

I had planned to wait for its OTT release if I watched it at all. But then I saw Sai Deepak in conversation with the director. Having previously shared some of Sai Deepak's criticism of Shyam Singa Roy, I was intrigued by his changed perspective.

The more I listened, the more curious I became. What I heard about our history shocked me. How could so much have happened yet so little of it have reached us? During the same conversation, the discussion turned to the Bengal famine of 1770, British colonial exploitation and the wider historical consequences of these events.

 It made me reflect on my own education. I completed my college and postgraduate studies in Hyderabad at Stanley, St.Francis and the Central University. I studied the humanities.

Yet, I remember learning so little about the suffering of ordinary Indians (2:33) under colonial and the Nawab rule at that time. We studied Marx, Shakespeare and social customs, (2:40) including Polyandry in some distant southern tribes. (2:44) We heard about the unification of India and the railways built by the British.

 But where, I wondered, were the stories of our own people, their hunger, humiliation, resistance and sacrifice? And that the railways were built not to connect people, but to connect villages to ports to export grain. These questions stayed with me. Though this movie is about a hero, who is a composite of the legendary warriors of Rayalaseema, including Buddha Vengal Reddy, Ujjwala Vada Narasimha Reddy and Bobbali Naga Reddy, whose heroic tales are still recounted in folk ballads.

The main plot of the story was inspired by Bobbili Naga Reddy, a fearless horseman believed to have communicated with the gods themselves. His brave life and tragic assassination during a devastating famine (3:37) caused by the British taxation sparked the story. Ranabaali has its flaws.

Vijay's performance feels overdone in parts of the opening act (3:46) and the film occasionally leans into familiar cinematic tropes. The struggle against the British has been portrayed before in films such as RRR, Alluri Sitaram Raju, Lagaan and Ujjwala Vada Narasimha Reddy. (4:00) Such films inevitably mix history with the cinematic drama.

But Ranabaali affected me differently, inspired by the stories of resistance associated with Rayalaseema and its historical figures. The film brings 1750s colonial oppression, famine and the suffering of ordinary people to the forefront. His portrayal of a brutal colonial regime may be cinematic, but the larger historical reality of devastating famines, often due to the policies of exploitation and cruel colonial rule, is well documented with dates and numbers.

The British officer Sir Theodore Hector, played by Arnold Vosloo, embodies this cruelty.  His character evokes the history of colonial administrators whose policies during India's great famines have been severely criticized by historians. The massacres of thousands and even lakhs of people were real.

The fact that Narasimha Reddy's head was hung at the entrance of the Nawab's house for 30 years to scare off other potential heroes is also a historical claim. What disturbed me most was the helplessness of the villagers. While the colonial masters pursued wealth and control, ordinary people struggled to obtain the most basic human necessity, food.

In spite of producing in abundance, the farmers were hunger-struck due to high levels of taxes. The film portrays a world in which hunger becomes a weapon and human dignity is reduced to a price. The scenes are raw and deeply disturbing.

had to close my eyes more than once, particularly during Rashmika's childbirth scene and the horrifying image of a baby being burned in boiling water. I cried several times. The suffering was almost unbearable to watch.

How do you look at such scenes without wondering what our ancestors endured? How many mothers watched their children suffer? How many families were torn apart? How many lives were lost to hunger, exploitation and violence, with no one to hear their cries? When all torture was legal and legitimate in the eyes of the ruled. I left the theatre after three hours feeling devastated, bewildered and angry. (6:18) How is this not worse than the well-known Hitler's genocide? And yet, amid all that pain, there was something else, an overwhelming sense of awe and pride at the resilience of our civilization.

Centuries of invasions, oppression and unimaginable hardship could not erase it. Our ancestors endured, rebuilt, preserved their traditions and passed them on to us. We are here because generations before us refused to disappear.

It also made me wonder why we know so much about Hitler and the Holocaust, yet so little about many of the tragedies that unfolded in our own heritage land. This is not to diminish any other people's suffering.  It is to ask why our own history of famine, colonial exploitation and resistance remains so unfamiliar to so many of us.

Perhaps that is why the film touched me so deeply. It brought back memories of my village in Andhra Pradesh, the people, their innocence and the warmth of a simpler life. Telangana and Andhra were one after all before the Congress divided them into two states.

The wedding night sequence in particular felt awkwardly familiar. I am sure many young brides of past era could associate with it. My aunt had a similar experience.

I could almost hear the conversations and recognize the customs. For a moment, even amid the film's darkness, I smiled. It reminded me that history is not merely a collection of dates and battles.

It is also the lived experience of ordinary people, their relationships, rituals, laughter and love that thrive for generations. Rashmika Mandana is fabulous. She brings tenderness, strength and susceptibility to her role, embodying the different emotional shades beautifully.

Vijay Devarakonda is effective in several portions, even if his performance occasionally feels excessive. The costumes, settings and overall visual texture felt remarkably authentic to me. I found myself imagining that these events had unfolded just a couple of centuries ago among people whose lives were not so different from those of her own grandparents and great-grandparents.

I also was surprised by Rahul Sankrityan. Having strongly disliked his Shyam Singha Roy I did not expect to respond so positively to this film. Here, despite a few moments that may invite criticism, I found a story centered largely and positively on Hindu communities confronting hunger, brutality and colonial oppression.

I do not know why the film had received so much negativity. It could be Devarakonda himself, as he has many critiques. I can acknowledge its flaws and still say that it moved me profoundly.

The film also made me think about the ways generations of hardship can shape a people's relationship with food and security. When scarcity becomes a recurring memory, saving every grain is no longer merely a habit. (9:27) It becomes an act of prudence, gratitude and survival.

The saying, Annam Parabrahmam, food is sacred, captures a reverence for food that resonates deeply within me. (9:38) Wasting even a single grain can feel like forgetting the suffering of those who once had none. I do not believe that any civilization is beyond criticism, nor that history should be reduced to a simple story of good people and evil outsiders.

But I do believe that the suffering of our ancestors deserves to be remembered, studied and understood. Their stories should not remain buried simply because we were never taught to ask the questions that might uncover them.  

For me, Ranabaali was more than a film.

It was a painful reminder of how much we may have forgotten about our very own past and how deeply that past still shapes us. Forgetting history does not merely erase yesterday. It can leave us unprepared to recognize injustice when it returns tomorrow.

I went into the theatre out of curiosity. I came out carrying grief, anger and a renewed desire and awe (10:36) to learn about the people whose suffering made our present possible. And perhaps that is the film's greatest achievement.

It made me feel that history was no longer distant, no longer just a chapter in a textbook. It had become personal. It had become human.

And it hurt.