Srinivasa Ramanujan Biopic in Works From ‘Sitaare Zameen Par’ Director

Fresh off the success of Aamir Khan starrer “Sitaare Zameen Par,” director R.S. Prasanna is growing a biopic on legendary Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, positioning the project as a global collaboration between Indian and Western inventive groups.

Titled “Dreams of Ramanujan,” the project is being produced by way of Prasanna’s banner Eklavya Productions and is presently in lively script development, with the filmmaker aiming to start manufacturing by yr’s end.

Prasanna has been fascinated with Ramanujan’s story since his faculty days at D.A.V. in Chennai, the place he first discovered about the mathematician during his eleventh and twelfth grades. “After ‘Sitaare Zameen Par,’ I’m obsessed with this right now,” he tells Variety. “I’ve always wanted to tell the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, right from my days in school. I was like, man, what a fascinating story. And I was like, let me grow up to a point where I can actually tell this story with some sort of credibility as a filmmaker.”

Prasanna made his directorial debut with the 2013 Tamil-language erectile dysfunction comedy-drama “Kalyana Samayal Saadham,” which he remade in Hindi as “Shubh Mangal Saavdhan” in 2017. The movies earned Prasanna recognition for his delicate dealing with of taboo topics with humor.

His most current movie, “Sitaare Zameen Par,” starring Aamir Khan and Genelia Deshmukh, was launched in June 2025. The sports activities drama about a basketball coach training a team of neurodivergent gamers grossed $30 million worldwide and emerged as the sixth highest-grossing Hindi-language movie of 2025.

Prasanna describes “Dreams of Ramanujan” as a departure from typical biopics. “I call it a biopic on steroids,” he says, explaining that the narrative will interweave Ramanujan’s historic story with present-day purposes of his arithmetic. Recent scientific discoveries sparked his choice to maneuver ahead now. “Six months ago, I read an article about how quantum mechanics and black hole behavior is going to use Ramanujan’s mathematics,” he explains. “That was mind blowing.”

The filmmaker plans to construction the narrative as a movie that cuts between the current day and Ramanujan’s extraordinary journey from poverty in early twentieth century South India to Cambridge University, the place he collaborated with British mathematician G.H. Hardy.

“For me, Ramanujan is a story of immigration. It’s a story of cross-border bromance between Hardy and Ramanujan, who are so in love with mathematics,” Prasanna says. “When the Britishers were ruling Indians, there was a bromance happening between two, Indian and British. It’s a very beautiful contrast.”

He sees deeper themes in the narrative: “A guy who’s possibly oblivious to the caste privilege that he has, born into the high caste here, which gives him a lot of time and privilege of working on mathematics, somehow being transported to Cambridge. In a way, he’s the lesser privileged and the lower caste in the academic caste system.”

The project will take a novel method to depicting Ramanujan’s mathematical genius. Prasanna attracts parallels to composer Ilaiyaraaja, noting how each artists describe receiving their insights as transcendent experiences. “We have Ilaiyaraaja, who constantly, for me, is like a living example of Ramanujan, who pours out music,” he says. “When you ask him about music, he speaks in esoteric terms. So I think what a lot of scientists today, neuroscience, is studying as a state of flow – where you’re like in this trance when you’re writing, or you’re dancing, or you’re doing art with mathematics.”

Prasanna has already written roughly half the script and is consulting with scientists from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore while reconnecting with mathematics-inclined pals from his faculty days and exploring a collaboration with a British author.

The director goals to make arithmetic visually thrilling and accessible to mainstream audiences, citing “The Big Short” as inspiration.

When Ramanujan credited his insights to visions from the Goddess Namagiri Devi, Prasanna plans to render these moments cinematically. “When he says that the Devi came and gave me the math, what is that?” he explains. “If I were to stay true to the visual, you have this dreamscape of mathematics that opens up.”

The movie will probably be multilingual. “Keeping a lot of it in Tamil, and then keeping it in English when it has to,” he says.

The director is sustaining inventive management during the development section before bringing in studio companions. “I’m not immediately signing because I want to keep this, I want to write as much of it as possible,” he explains. “Because it’s so unique. It’s interesting to take it to a studio when a lot of the vision is already formed.”

The next six months will deal with script development, with manufacturing probably beginning by the end of 2026 or early 2027.

Ramanujan’s life has been the topic of earlier movie variations, including Gnana Rajasekaran’s 2014 Tamil-English bilingual “Ramanujan,” that includes Abhinay Vaddi, and Matt Brown’s 2015 worldwide manufacturing “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” which starred Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as Hardy.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) was a largely self-taught mathematical prodigy who, despite having nearly no formal training in pure arithmetic, made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, quantity concept, infinite sequence, and continued fractions. After preliminary rejection by British mathematicians, Ramanujan’s 1913 letter to G.H. Hardy at Cambridge led to his invitation to England. He turned one among the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society and the first Indian elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, before his demise from sickness at age 32. His notebooks continue to inspire mathematical research, together with his work now utilized to fashionable physics and quantum mechanics.