Easter Eggs in the RAMAYANA Movie Trailer (Malhotra, ‘26)
Did you watch the new RAMAYANA trailer & catch all the hidden easter eggs only hardcore fans of Sri Ram will recognise?
Here's the tea!
So Part 1 of this 2-part series will clearly have a lot of Ravana's backstory & it’s a stylistic choice to hype up the villain, similar to what Rehman Dakait was in Dhurandhar.
Easter Egg 1 - So his birth name was Dashagriva. Goaded by his mother Kaikasi to match the glory of his half-brother Kubera, he does tapas for 10,000 years, offering one of his ten heads into the fire every 1,000 years to please Brahma Dev. Brahma refuses him immortality, so he chooses invulnerability from devas, danavas, rakshasas, yakshas & nagas.
But in his pride he leaves out humans, thinking no human could ever defeat him. That loophole is exactly why Vishnu incarnates as Ram, and why the devas father the Vanara army to help him, with Vayu fathering Hanuman.
Easter Egg 2 - We catch glimpses of Indra Dev, king of the Gods, going head-to-head with Ravana, who takes down his Airavata, shown here as a flying elephant. Ravana also fends off Indra's thunderbolt, the Vajra. Fun fact: Valmiki actually describes Ravana's chest as scarred by Airavata's tusks! But it's his son Meghanada who binds Indra & earns the name Indrajit from Brahma.
Easter Egg 3 - We see Ram lifting Shiva's bow, Raja Janaka's condition for Sita's hand. There was no "svayamvar ceremony" as such. Sita was a prize for valour, and whoever strung the bow would win her. Then an axe, the Parashu, flies at Ram. That's Parashurama's cameo! In Valmiki, he confronts Ram on the road back to Ayodhya & challenges him to string Vishnu's bow too, which Ram does with ease. No axe is thrown though!
Easter Egg 4 - In what'll be the most action-packed sequence, Jatayu battles Ravana in his golden flying chariot. This is not the Pushpak Vimana, Kubera's original vehicle that Ram later flies back to Ayodhya in after winning the war. The trailer shows a whole flock of birds, but in Valmiki, Jatayu fights Ravana alone. He's the aged vulture king, son of Aruna & an old friend of Dashratha, and he fights until his wings are hacked off by Ravana's sword.
Easter Egg 5 - We prominently see Ravana wearing a Tripundra tilak & worshipping Shiva. But his Shiv bhakti, including the episode where Shiva names him Ravana, "the one whose roar terrified the three worlds", comes from the Uttara Kanda. That's a later & debated book of the Valmiki Ramayana, not the core story. And the Tripundra itself appears nowhere in Valmiki.
Overall the VFX & animation look dope, but the script & storytelling seem a bit shaky. We'll only find out when Part 1 releases on November 5.
Let me know which references you caught in the comments below!