Hanuman Ansh opened in August to near-empty halls and, four weeks later, was posting one of the largest fourth weeks Hindi cinema has ever recorded. This Hanuman Ansh review is not really about whether the Neem Karoli Baba biopic is a well-crafted film; the critics have already argued that point fairly. It is about what the film understands about grief that most of us do not: that a boy who loses his mother does not stop loving her, and that where he sends that love will decide the shape of his entire life.
If you have ever lost someone and become strangely useful to everyone afterwards, this film was made about you.
Is Hanuman Ansh worth watching? Yes, with one caveat. The first half moves like a documentary that has not yet decided to become a drama, the supporting cast seldom rises to meet the lead, and the period detail is uneven. But Shobhinaw Satyaa’s stillness as the young Baba is the real thing, and the film has the rare discipline to let devotion stay quiet. Go for the second half, and go for the idea underneath it.
What Hanuman Ansh is about
Written, directed and produced by Vishal Chaturvedi, a doctor turned filmmaker, and adapted from his own book Divine Detour, the film is the first of a planned trilogy on the life of Neem Karoli Baba, the saint his devotees call Maharaj-ji and whose name is also spelt Neeb Karori. His Kainchi ashram in Uttarakhand later drew Western seekers such as Ram Dass and Krishna Das and, famously, a handful of Silicon Valley founders.
The film’s telling begins in pre-Independence India with a boy of about thirteen, Lakshman, whose mother dies. He leaves home. The film is emphatic on one point: he does not leave to renounce the world. He leaves to find her, convinced that only divine love could bring them together again. Everything that follows grows from that single motive: the years of wandering and alms, the temple priest who tests him, the train that refuses to move once he has been thrown off it, the feeding of the poor and the sick.
The title means a fragment, or essence, of Hanuman, and, as DNA’s critic noted with some relief, the film resists turning its subject into a self-declared god. It shows a devotee, not a deity. Released on 7 August 2026 after a week’s postponement, it runs 150 minutes and was distributed by Cinépolis.
The film nobody watched, and then everybody did
The commercial story deserves a paragraph because it is a psychological story. According to Bollywood Hungama’s tracking, Hanuman Ansh took roughly ₹10 lakh on its opening day and about ₹1 crore in its first week, with no stars and almost no marketing, competing for screens against a Spider-Man release. Then something happened that money cannot buy. Week three was ten times the first. Week four, by trade estimates, cleared ₹60 crore net, the second-largest fourth week a Hindi film has recorded, and the India total has since passed ₹100 crore. Uttarakhand declared it tax-free.
I find this irresistible, because the film’s fortune mirrors its subject. Neem Karoli Baba gave no discourses, built no organisation around himself and, in this film at least, refused every offer of comfort and status. People came anyway, because other people told them to. Advertising asks you to trust a stranger’s claim. Recommendation asks you to trust a friend’s experience. The second is slower and, once it starts, almost impossible to stop. A film about a man who let himself be found was found in exactly the same way.
A boy who would not let go
Here is where the film earns its place in this column rather than in an entertainment section. The conventional twentieth-century model of grief, the one still embedded in everyday advice, held that the work of mourning was to detach: to withdraw your love from the dead so that it could be reinvested in the living. Anyone who could not do this was, by definition, grieving badly. Then, in 1996, Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman published the research collected as continuing bonds, and the model turned over. Healthy grievers, it turned out, did not sever the relationship. They changed its form. The dead moved from being a presence to being an influence, and the bond continued.
Hanuman Ansh dramatises that finding a century before it was written. The boy does not “process” his mother’s death. He refuses to accept that the love now has nowhere to go, and he walks across North India until he finds somewhere to send it. In the film’s logic that somewhere is Hanuman, and through Hanuman, Ram. In psychological terms, it is what I have come to call the forwarding address: the place a bereaved person sends the love that can no longer be delivered. For some it is a deity. For others it is a cause, a craft, a child, a queue of hungry strangers.
The forwarding address is the difference between grief that closes a person and grief that opens one. Readers of my piece on what home really is will recognise the family resemblance to the original address, the body’s earliest memory of being safe and welcome. The forwarding address is what a person builds when that first address stops answering.
I write often about how to let go of the past, and this film sharpened something for me. Letting go was never the right instruction for love. It is the right instruction for the demand that the person come back. Lakshman lets go of the demand. He never lets go of the love, and the film’s quiet argument is that this is precisely why he became who he became. In my life coaching work, the people who struggle longest with a loss are rarely the ones who loved too much. They are the ones who were told, kindly and repeatedly, to stop.
The temple that offered him comfort
The scene I would put in front of any leader is an early one. The boy arrives at a Vaishnav temple in Rajkot, and the old Mahant, recognising something in him, sets out to test him. What follows is not a trial of endurance but of appetite. He is offered comfort. He is offered compliments. He declines both, says almost nothing, and eventually leaves without ceremony. The film reads this as a lesson that religious institutions can become a form of bondage. I read it as something more portable.
Most of us cannot refuse a compliment. We deflect it, which is a way of asking for another, or we feed on it, which is a way of never being full. The boy does neither. He lets praise arrive and lets it pass, because he is not there for praise; he is there for his mother. When a person’s motive is clear enough, other people’s approval simply stops being load-bearing. That is not humility as a performance. It is the natural side effect of knowing what you are for.
The train that would not move
The film’s most famous sequence, and the one that gave the saint his name, has a young man of twenty-five boarding a first-class carriage without a ticket, being put off the train by a British official, and the train then refusing to start. Take the miracle at whatever value your own faith allows. What interests me is the negotiation afterwards. When the officials apologise and invite him back, he does not ask for anything for himself. He asks for two things: that no sadhu ever be removed from a train again for lacking a ticket, and that a station be built at that spot for the villagers who have none. The station stands today, in Farrukhabad, and its name became his.
This is the part of the film that quietly links grief to leadership. The research on post-traumatic growth, developed by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, describes how some people emerge from devastating loss with a stronger sense of what matters, deeper relationships and a changed spiritual life. It does not happen to everyone, and it should never be demanded of anyone. But its signature is exactly what the train scene shows: a person whose loss has found its forwarding address stops asking on his own behalf. The love that could not reach one woman now reaches a platform full of strangers.
Pause here for a moment. Where did your own losses go? Is there someone you have been trying to stop loving, when what you needed was somewhere to send it? And what would you ask for, if you knew your own need was already met?
Where the film falls short
I would be doing you no service by pretending Hanuman Ansh is flawless, and the critics who found the first half sluggish are not wrong. The early stretch hovers between documentary and drama and commits to neither. Apart from Satyaa, who was an assistant director on the film before being cast, few performances stay with you once the lights come up, a point DNA’s reviewer also made. The soundtrack is functional rather than memorable, though Krishna Das’s bhajans on the background score do a great deal of the emotional work. The budget shows in places; some of the period sets look assembled rather than inhabited. And at 150 minutes, the film could lose a reel without losing anything that matters.
My one psychological reservation is the film’s occasional temptation to let a miracle do the work that a scene should do. It mostly resists. When it does not, the story briefly stops being about a boy’s grief and becomes about a god’s powers, and the former is far more interesting than the latter. Devotees will not mind. Sceptics will notice. Both will find the second half moving.
What Hanuman Ansh finally asks of you
The film’s own summary of its subject is the line devotees still repeat: love all, serve all, feed all, remember Ram. It sounds like a creed. Watch the film carefully and it looks more like a forwarding address, written out in four parts by a boy who had nowhere else to send what he carried. Set beside the Janmashtami story I read recently as a study of leadership under threat, Hanuman Ansh is the gentler companion piece: not what fear does with a rival, but what love does with an absence.
A saint is not someone who stopped missing his mother. He is someone who found a forwarding address for the missing.
If a loss has left you unusually useful and unusually tired, and you suspect your own love has been circulating without a destination, that is a conversation worth having with someone who will not rush it. A free 15-minute conversation is a reasonable place to begin.
