The festival as cinema
Dussehra is a narrative as much as a date on the calendar: dharma defeats adharma, an effigy burns, and a crowd gathers to witness it. Hindi cinema has borrowed that structure across its history, sometimes literally and sometimes as pure atmosphere. A Times of India watchlist gathers four films that touch the festival in strikingly different ways, from a burning Ravan behind a song to a full-scale Ramayana.
Spectacle first
In Kalank, Dussehra is less a plot turn than production design. The song ‘Ghar More Pardesiya’ places Roop and Zafar inside traditional festivities, a towering Ravan effigy burning behind them as they cross paths. The costumes, warm lighting and period staging make the festival feel regal rather than religious — a reminder that Hindi cinema has long treated Dussehra as a canvas for romance and scale.
The epic beneath the effigy
Adipurush sits at the opposite end. The film goes directly to the Ramayana, with Prabhas as Raghav and Saif Ali Khan as Lankesh. Here the Ravan figure is not a backdrop but the antagonist, and the climactic conflict between the two is framed as dharma against adharma. That defeat is what gives Vijayadashami its meaning, which makes the film the most literal Dussehra pick of the four.
Folklore and internal conflict
Nayyi Naveli borrows the cultural atmosphere of Ram, Ravan and Dussehra for a supernatural comedy. Yami Gautam plays Mohini, a newly married woman whose in-laws begin to suspect she is a witch; the tension sits in the gap between the ideal bride and something darker underneath. Ek Villain takes the festival’s moral core inward. It has no iconic Dussehra sequence, but its obsession, loss and revenge echo the festival’s larger theme: the contest between good and evil inside a single person.
- For spectacle: Kalank and its burning-effigy song.
- For the epic: Adipurush, the most direct Ramayana retelling on the list.
- For folk comedy: Nayyi Naveli’s bride-suspected-of-witchcraft premise.
- For a darker reading: Ek Villain and the battle within.
Why the spectrum matters
Most Dussehra programming reaches for the obvious mythological titles. The value of this list is that it treats the festival as a spectrum — as backdrop, as epic, as folklore and as psychology. For readers who follow Hindi cinema closely, the four titles together show how one festival can survive translation into romance, comedy and thriller without losing its symbolic core.
Source: The Times of India
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