Pune: When Lillete Dubey took the Mahabharata to the stage as “Jaya” in 1998, she chose rock and roll. Nearly three decades later, in singer-composer Someshwar Mahadevan’s retelling of Ramayana, rap has found a place, compressing the seven kaands into a little over six minutes.The difference is more than musical. It reflects the way two generations encounter stories from India’s epics.Dubey’s English-language “Jaya” ran for 40 shows back then. She recalled how audiences included filmmakers Shyam Benegal and Yash Chopra, who were “blown away” because they had never seen the Mahabharata presented that way.The play was conceived as “the Mahabharata for the 21st century”, said Dubey, with its characters speaking like contemporary people rather than in archaic language. The production was revived in 2024, retaining its rock-opera format and touring across different cities in India to introduce yet another generation to this masterpiece.Mahadevan’s “Ramcharit Rap”, released last Oct, takes the same broad idea of changing the form without abandoning the epic. The 6-minute-11-second track, made with rapper LoneKing, aka Ankush Singh from Rajasthan, moves through the epic in a combination of traditional verses, Hindi rap and contemporary music.For Mahadevan, “The Ramayana is not merely a scripture or an ancient story. It is a guide to living, to understanding responsibility, relationships, sacrifice, courage, compassion and the consequences of our choices. What has stayed with me most about Ram is his discipline, restraint and commitment to dharma even when circumstances are difficult. That is how I wanted the new generation to perceive him too.”The challenge is how to make those values relevant to a generation growing up with social media, constant digital exposure and instant gratification, Mahadevan said. “Young people today live in a world of instant reactions and instant gratification, with constant digital exposure. I don’t want to preach to them. I want to give them something that makes them pause, think and discover these ideas for themselves.”That, he said, was the purpose of his “Ramcharit Rap”. “I wanted to take values such as discipline and courage and put them into a format that young people would listen to. The idea was to create a contemporary doorway into something timeless,” said Mahadevan.The choice of rap also fits a dramatically changed Indian music ecosystem. According to Spotify, Gen Z accounted for more than 70% of hip-hop listeners on its India platform, while hip-hop made up close to 30% of India’s Top 50 tracks in 2023.The project is also personal. “My father passed away in 2020. After that I wanted my mother to keep herself engaged in something meaningful. So I involved her in this project. She became the producer, and it gave us both something to work on together,” he said.Mahadevan is based in Jaipur and said his connection to Rajasthan also informs his effort to promote folk traditions such as Maand.The result is therefore less a replacement for traditional storytelling than another entry point. As Mahadevan puts it, “If someone hears the rap and becomes curious enough to open the Ramayana or Ramcharitmanas and learn more, then the experiment has achieved something meaningful.”
