The Rahul Sankrityan film releases October 16 and its first promotional episode ties the story to a famine that reportedly killed nearly a crore Indians.
Turns out Ranabaali isn't the freedom-fighter drama a lot of people assumed it was.
The Vijay Devarakonda and Rashmika Mandanna starrer, directed by Rahul Sankrityan and set for an October 16 release, is instead built around the Great Madras Famine, a catastrophe that hit the region between 1876 and 1878. The team confirmed the backdrop through the first episode of a four-part promotional series called Never Forget, released Sunday, where Sankrityan lays out why he chose this chapter of history over the more familiar colonial-era narratives Telugu cinema tends to reach for.
According to Sankrityan, the famine claimed close to a crore lives. That's the number he puts on screen, if not literally, then in intent. He described the film as extensive research turned into something he's calling a tribute to the people who died and suffered through it, and the framing in the Never Forget episode makes clear this isn't meant to be background noise for an action drama. It's the point of the film.
Rashmika, in the same episode, talked about how she felt learning the details for the first time, calling herself heartbroken by what she found out during the process. Vijay's contribution to the conversation is more pointed: he brings up food grain being shipped out to Britain while people starved in the region, a detail that's long been part of how historians talk about famines under colonial administration and one that clearly shaped how the writing team approached the script.
What's interesting is the choice to lead promotions with history rather than first-look posters of Vijay in whatever look this film has given him. Fans on social media have already been chattering about a makeover for him tied to this project, and there's been chatter around Sankrityan's approach to genre too, but the studio's decision to put the famine angle front and centre before any of that suggests they want audiences walking in knowing what they're signing up for. A period action drama that isn't about the British leaving India, but about what colonial policy did to people while it stayed.
Whether that pitch holds up depends entirely on execution, and three more episodes of Never Forget are presumably coming before October 16 to fill in the rest of the picture, plot, characters and how Vijay and Rashmika actually fit into this famine narrative rather than just react to it in a promo. None of that's been detailed yet.
With less than three weeks to release, the makers will need those episodes to do a lot of work fast. The first one has set the stakes. The rest need to show the film.
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