Do we like S. S. Rajamouli?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean run on harm and a huge, joyful body of work, but the public record on how he treats people is thinner than we'd like.
Rajamouli grew up in a deeply religious Hindu family. He told The New Yorker he doubted the god stories as a kid, dived into the texts and pilgrimages anyway, then ended up an atheist who calls religion “essentially a kind of exploitation.” He still loves the Ramayana and Mahabharata for the drama, and you can see it in every frame he shoots.
That storytelling made him the biggest name in Indian epic cinema. RRR's song Naatu Naatu won the 2023 Academy Award for Best Original Song, the first Indian track to do it. For a bloke who says he never dreamt of an Oscar, that's a decent night out.
On the harm check, the record is clean as far as we could find. He told The New Yorker he hates extremism, naming the BJP and the Muslim League in the same breath, and said he keeps his distance from propaganda of any stripe. He also said he was raised in a family that “hated the caste system.” We found nothing from him against LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants. We also found nothing either way on climate, and we say so rather than guess.
His one real stoush of the past year was self-inflicted but small. At the November 2025 Varanasi launch, a glitch stalled the teaser and he said “I don't have much faith in gods,” then vented about Hanuman. A fringe outfit, the Rashtriya Vanara Sena, lodged a police complaint in Hyderabad saying the remarks were derogatory. The reports we read show only the complaint, with no police action reported.
Where you land on that depends on whether you read it as a frustrated atheist blowing off steam or as an insult to people's faith. Either way it's an argument about religion, not a case of him targeting a group of people. Faith, or its absence, isn't the test here; harm is.
The latest news is more box-office than ethics. Varanasi is nearly finished, with IMAX sequences and five songs from M.M. Keeravani, and the April panel in Mexico was mocked online over empty seats. Fans said the photos were misleading, and that other panels at the event had empty seats too. It's marketing goss, not misconduct.