There's a scene in Hanuman Ansh where a train simply stops working. Not a dramatic crash, not an explosion, just an engine that refuses to move because a colonial railway officer forced a barefoot sadhu off it. Engineers check the brakes. They check the boiler. Everything is fine. The train still won't move. It's the moment the film has been quietly banking on to sell tickets, and going by the numbers, it worked.
By early September, this small Hindi devotional drama about the life of Neem Karoli Baba had crossed ₹50 crore at the box office. On a reported budget of around ₹2 crore. With a cast most Indian moviegoers had never heard of before August.
The film follows Lakshman Das, thirteen years old when his mother dies and he walks out of his village convinced that only divine love can bring her back. He spends years wandering, sleeping by rivers, eating whatever's offered, picking up more from birdsong and forest quiet than from any temple he passes through. At one point he stays underwater for so long the villagers in the story assume he's drowned.
Then comes the train. At twenty-five, Lakshman boards one without a ticket. He's thrown off. The train won't restart. Once the railway staff figure out what's happened, they beg him back on, and he forgives them, produces four first-class tickets from nowhere, and asks for exactly two things: that no sadhu ever again be pulled off a train for not having a ticket, and that a station be built right there. That station is real, by the way. It's in Farrukhabad district, Uttar Pradesh, and it's roughly how Lakshman Das becomes Neem Karoli Baba, and eventually Hanuman Ansh.
Vishal Chaturvedi wrote and directed this, which is a strange sentence to write because Chaturvedi used to be a practicing doctor before he switched to filmmaking entirely. He's talked about the project as something personal rather than a calculated commercial swing, and the script draws on a spiritual memoir called Divine Detour.
The casting story is almost stranger than the plot. The actor originally lined up to play the adult Baba fell ill during the first shooting schedule in Chitrakoot. Shobhinaw Satyaa, who was on set as a second assistant director, auditioned on short notice and walked away with the lead role himself. Chandan Anand, Purnima Tiwari, and Vihaan Shedge round out a cast that's mostly unfamiliar faces. Shooting moved between Chitrakoot's Punjabi Baba Ashram and Mumbai across November 2025.
It wasn't smooth sailing before release, either. Premanand Maharaj, a well known spiritual figure, publicly warned the makers earlier in the year not to distort the saint's character on screen, and Hindi entertainment press ran with that warning for weeks. On the flip side, kirtan singer Krishna Das (whose recordings sit on the soundtrack alongside Sadhu Sushil Tiwari's original compositions) blessed the production team, and the first poster dropped at Kainchi Dham, which happens to be Neem Karoli Baba's own ashram.
The release itself wasn't exactly smooth. Originally dated for July 31, it got pushed a week to August 7, opening in Hindi with Braj and Bundeli subtitles through Cinépolis India, with Panorama Studios running the Delhi-UP circuit.
And then it just... didn't stop. Nobody quite agrees on the exact budget, most figures land near ₹2 crore, which is basically nothing by industry standards. By the end of its third week, trade reports already had it past ₹40 crore. Mint clocked it at roughly ₹57.5 crore around day 26, close to 28 times what it reportedly cost to make. The Hindu had it crossing ₹50 crore by early September. No stars, barely any advertising, and the thing kept climbing on word of mouth alone, largely from devotee communities showing up for repeat viewings.
Hindi News18 said the film gets to its emotional core without leaning on heavy drama. DNA India called it an engaging biopic made on a shoestring with unknown actors but real intent behind it. Deccan Chronicle framed it around introspection and inner peace. Audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes ran even warmer than the critics, with more than one viewer comparing the film's pull to Ramanand Sagar's old televised Ramayan.
A hit this size doesn't stay quiet for long. On September 2, Chaturvedi announced Hanuman Ansh 2 while the first film was still running in theatres. Hombale Films will handle the overseas rollout starting September 11, taking the film well past the domestic circuit where it first caught fire.
Hanuman Ansh started as a low-budget devotional drama nobody was watching for and ended up as one of the year's biggest surprises: a ₹2 crore film about Neem Karoli Baba that crossed ₹50 crore, launched a second-time-lucky lead actor in Shobhinaw Satyaa, earned warm reviews across the board, and already has a sequel on the way.
