Designing the most generously documented and visually rich baddies from Indian mythology, was never really about creating a larger-than-life antagonist for stylist Saniya Sardhariya. The stylist and costumier, who designed Yash’s sweeping, intricate looks as Ravana in Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana, was more interested in understanding the man behind the mythology.
“They say Ravana was a king, a scholar, a warrior and an extraordinary devotee of Lord Shiva. I wanted to amplify this aspect,” Sardhariya tells The Hollywood Reporter India in an exclusive interview.
The sheer complexity and contradiction in the Lankan emperor drove the basis of the lookbook — a big part of which was the silhouette. “Even without his crown, I wanted to depict a sense of authority and power through texture, structure and proportion.”
While Yash is seen in lush costumes of black and gold in key scenes, including the Jatayu battle and his coronation, the rest of the colour palette leans towards jewel tones. “We worked with a lot of emerald greens, aubergines, oxblood and so on. Everything that excluded him from being soft.”
A big part of the process was to create a design language for a civilisation, and in particular, Ravana’s heritage. “We're talking about an emperor coming from Lanka. It needed to feel like a civilisation with a language of its own rather than a conventional interpretation of mythological royalty,” she says. Sardhariya's research involved studying traditional South Asian craftsmanship, temple architecture, sculptural form, historical jewellery, and visual references commonly associated with Sri Lankan heritage. One of the most important design decisions was to treat Ravana's jewellery almost like armour. “The pieces on his chest and shoulder needed to give him the physical presence of a warrior.”
A lot of this underlying philosophy was built up to inform the design of the film’s most complicated yet engrossing element: Ravana’s ten heads. The stunning sequence, which sees Ravana taking counsel from his ten heads, moves beyond conventional depictions of the Lankan king’s defining visual aspect.
“We called it the mind chamber sequence, where you enter his consciousness and discover that there isn’t just one Ravana but ten different personalities coexisting within him,” she says. “It was written very strongly by Nitesh sir and there was a lot of input by Yash sir and Namit [Malhotra, producer] sir was involved too.”
Apart from the king in the centre, the compelling counsel in his head includes nine other personalities. “A warrior, a musician, the ascetic, the shiv bhakt performing the tandav, a cursed man who has done a lot of wrong, the skeptic who is always doubting his way of life, a charmer, an astrologer, and the version of him who came to Lanka before he became king.”
The idea was to not create ten different characters but ten different expressions of the same character. “Each personality needed its own visual language through silhouette colour, texture, draping etc. But ultimately they needed to have the same DNA.” She recalls drawing from Yash’s voice and character modulations to design the king’s rarity.
“I was drawing inspiration from the way he was developing his personality traits. We also had a wonderful hair and makeup team." The effort includes months of work by hair and makeup artists, she reinforces.
"I really want to thank our makeup artist, Prashant Doiphode, who did such fabulous work with the prosthetics. We also had our hair designers, Alex Vijaykanth, Surender Dalvi, and Wally (Walter Dorairaj) who helped us create such magnificent looks. We were a big bunch, but a good bunch."