Over a year ago, Anupam Kher was approached to voice a fierce angry bird.
The character, as the world knows now, was Jatayu, a majestic vulturine demigod that has become one of the standouts of Nitesh Tiwari's Ramayana. A magnificent feathery guardian, with a giant beak and talons, Jatayu is both the film's unexpected superhero — he goes down fighting Ravana in the film's most spectacular, pulsating sequence — and its primary narrator, or sutradhar. The character's visualisation (which took over seven years) has drawn near-universal praise, a showcase of the quality and calibre that Oscar-winning VFX house DNEG is capable of. But it has also moved audiences with its emotional impact, especially during Jatayu's dying moments as he debriefs a crisis-stricken Ram (Ranbir Kapoor).
Kher, in his vast career, has done radio plays and dubbed for animated films like Up and The Lion of Judah. The opportunity to voice Jatayu, he says, was a rare honour, having grown up watching ramleelas and performing plays based on the Ramayana.
In a chat with The Hollywood Reporter India, Kher spoke about his association with Tiwari and Namit Malhotra, the film's global and pop-cultural impact, and why he thinks Ram makes Ravana interesting.
How did you come on board to voice Jatayu in Ramayana?
Sometime last year, in April or May, Namit Malhotra spoke to me about the opportunity to voice Jatayu. I was curious because there had been rumours of Mr (Amitabh) Bachchan doing it earlier. I have read the Ramayana, and I’ve performed as one character or another during the plays in my childhood. So I went to see what they had made. They showed me a nine-minute clip of what the film was about, and I was blown away.
I was supposed to dub the same day. But then they showed me the Jatayu battle sequence with Ravana. Watching it, I was quite taken aback and I said, 'I’m not prepared for this’. So I came back the next day.
Usually, a sequence like this in a normal film would take me not more than 20 minutes. There are only 10 to 12 lines of dialogue as Jatayu lies dying. But this took me about five or six hours because I wanted to capture the soul of the character.
How did you achieve that?
Jatayu knew he would lose this battle, but he does not give up. That was the emotional quality I had to match. Your heart should go out to Jatayu. It shouldn’t just be an impressive vocal projection. This mighty king of the birds had to have a certain depth, and that’s why I was happy that they chose an actor. I also wanted to put in a little more context about the film and the historical importance of the character. Given the significance of this film, I felt I should contribute my bit to it.
You represented the film at its Swedish premiere. What were the reactions?
It was phenomenal. Around 25 per cent of the audience was Swedish, while the remaining were Swedish-speaking Indians and expats. There were children as well as older people at the premiere. This was also the first time I was watching the finished film. I was constantly looking at people’s reactions. The best moment was that there was an 18-year-old Swedish boy sitting next to me and he could not believe what he was watching. I don’t think we have catered to foreign audiences in this way before. For most foreign audiences, our cinema is big in terms of its volume. They know us primarily as Bollywood. This was a moment to shatter that word and call it an Indian film. We have made great films in the past, but we have not yet achieved this level of visual effects and larger-than-life presentation. There is no compromise anywhere. It respects the audience.
Do you enjoy voice acting?
I used to do a lot of radio plays before I got into films. I did them in Shimla, Delhi and Lucknow, at various radio stations. I remember doing a radio play in Lucknow called Striker. I must share something here. Each year on my birthday, I spend it with the students at the Smt Kamala Mehta School for the Blind in Dadar, Mumbai. I have been doing that for the last 25 years. When I went there for the first time, the children surrounded me and started talking about films. I was a little surprised because they were visually impaired, yet they were discussing cinema. Their teacher explained to me how they decide who is a good actor. An actor is good if his modulation allows them to understand the emotion.
When I voiced for the Hindi dub of Up, It was just a translation of the original script in English. I had to stick to the original character’s personality. But here, for Jatayu, there was no tonal reference. I was the first person to do it. Whoever dubs the character in another language will have my version as a reference point.
Did Nitesh Tiwari have a particular way he wanted you to approach it? What was his initial brief?
He was there in the studio throughout. I think he just wanted me to match the emotional quality they had created in the visuals. I tried to understand what he wanted and how he wanted it. He was very helpful. He’s a remarkable director, but he also knew what kind of emotional grasp he wanted from the character. I paid a lot of attention to the last “Hey Ram…”, because those are Jatayu’s last words. It resonates with people. A tear appears in his eye there, and a lot of people cry during that sequence. I’m happy with the result. The narration of the film, which I also did, was recorded in Boston. I was touring with my play at the time, and Nitesh was on the other side of a Zoom call.
The film has revived popular interest in Jatayu, with people making edits and sharing cool sketches of the bird on social media. The Jatayu's Earth Center in Kerala is also viral again.
I have a video of a six-year-old girl speaking about Jatayu. She is the child of one of my cousin's daughters. She thinks it's me in costume as Jatayu in the film. She tells her mother in the video, “He (Kher) got into Jatayu’s clothes, and then he flew.” When asked how I managed to do that, she says, "He just flapped his wings and he flew."
I think that’s a great thing. Children are always enamoured by something larger than life, especially when it's in the form of animals. They see so many human beings around them that there isn’t much of a sense of wonder. There’s a sequence in the version I watched in Sweden that isn’t in the Indian print. It's a wolf chase sequence. Oh my God! Everybody was screaming during that sequence.
Beyond the visual effects, people have also responded to the message in the Jatayu sequence, and his courage to fight a losing battle.
There is a great quote from Osho: 'If you try, you risk failure. If you don’t, you’ve ensured it'.
The message in the film is that although Jatayu knew he would lose, he didn’t give up. That’s how legends become legends. They fought, they tried. That’s a good lesson to teach. In fact, all the lessons in Ramayana are amazing. There are lessons about relationships: father and son, mother and son, husband and wife. People don’t like preachy lectures in films today. They want the lessons to be woven into the film.
While watching Ramayana, I found myself more involved in the Ravana sequences than the Ram sequences. While the film is visually stunning, its pacing and character developments did not make an instant connection...
I believe Nitesh knew from the beginning that he was making the film in two parts. It wasn’t an accidental decision. He needed to establish the villain as someone much bigger, so that the triumph of good over evil in the second part would feel much larger. Once you establish the villain, you understand the scale of what has to be overcome. From Sholay to Karma, Hindi films always establish how frightening and powerful the villain is. So when the hero finally defeats him, you feel a high. I think that’s the strategy here.
But when the protagonist is already so good and divine, is he dramatically less interesting than the villain?
No, I don’t think so. Instead, I think Ravana is interesting because Ram is interesting.
Ravana feels larger than life and dramatic, but Ram is different. Ram shows himself through various sequences that will come in the rest of the story. He will kill Vali, he will confront Meghnad. We’re too impatient to understand the whole thing at once. In this part, when you see the scene between Jatayu and Ram, and watch Ram break down, that's when people are moved by his humanity. Nobody knows this film better than Namit Malhotra and Nitesh Tiwari. There are people who spend their life criticising things. There are cynics, and then there are people who actually do things.
On a different tangent, I recently watched an 8K restoration of 1942: A Love Story, and was quite taken by your performance as a revolutionary-assassin plotting against the British.
The problem with me, and I may sound arrogant, is that I’ve given some brilliant performances in certain films so effortlessly that people don’t realise how much hard work has gone into them.
I remember I was doing that film when I had typhoid. We were shooting in the hills in Dalhousie. I was angry with Vinod (Chopra) because he was shooting despite that. But I recall it was a very good experience. A lot of the character's tonality his fear, his paranoia, was already in the script. If you’re a trained actor, if you’ve come from drama school, if you’ve read world literature and heard plays, you can draw so many aspects of the character from the script itself. All you need then is a capable director.
What are you working on now?
I am currently shooting with Prabhas for Fauzi. It's a big film. In fact, my shot is ready and I need to get going.