Rakul Preet Singh has given the most polarising figure in Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana a new job description: the spark that starts the fire. In a conversation with news agency PTI, the actor — who plays Surpanakha — described the character as “misunderstood and layered” and said she was “the reason why the war took place” in the first place.
Singh offered two reasons for taking the part. The first is the project’s global ambition. She called the film “India’s representation to the world,” arguing that the country’s history is being presented on a scale Indian cinema has not attempted before. The second is the character’s complexity — the chance to play “someone with multiple shades.”
The remarks reframe a figure most viewers know from a single episode. In the epic, Surpanakha’s encounter with Rama and Lakshman, and the humiliation that follows, prompts Ravana to abduct Sita in revenge — the act that sets the central war in motion. Singh wants audiences to find more than that one incident. In an earlier response to a fan’s letter, she made the point directly: history remembers Surpanakha “for one moment, but there is so much more to her story.”
Why the framing matters
Ramayana retellings carry unusual weight in Hindi screen culture. The epic has been a fixture of Indian cinema and television for generations, and every new version is read twice — once for fidelity, once for interpretation. By centring Surpanakha as a catalyst rather than a caution, the film signals a character-driven approach to material that is usually judged first for its spectacle.
That matters commercially, too. Ramayana Part 1 opens worldwide on November 5, 2026, with a second part planned for Diwali 2027. The makers are releasing the film in five languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam — which turns its reading of the characters into a pan-Indian pitch, not a single-market one.
The ensemble around her
- Ranbir Kapoor as Lord Rama
- Sai Pallavi as Sita
- Yash as Ravana
- Sunny Deol as Hanuman
- Ravi Dubey as Lakshman
- Rakul Preet Singh as Surpanakha
What to watch for
The recently released trailer offered only a brief glimpse of Singh’s Surpanakha, yet her transformation became one of the preview’s notable talking points. The test for viewers will be whether the film follows through on the actor’s reading — whether Surpanakha’s interior is dramatised, or only invoked in interviews. A five-language rollout leaves little room for a half-committed idea; the campaign’s handling of the character will signal how bold the adaptation really is.
For now, Singh’s framing does what effective pre-release interviews do: it hands the audience a question to take into the theatre. Not “What happens next?” — the epic’s end is well known — but “Were we reading this character fairly?”
Source: The Times of India
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