Jun 19, 2026 11:00am IST
Alia as Sita. Ranbir as Ram. Bhatt and Kapoor Will Deliver a Traditional and a Modern Spin on ‘Ramayana’
2026 clearly seems to be the year of "Ramayana" stories, with two highly anticipated releases of the year centred on it—Nitesh Tiwari’s “Ramayana” and YRF’s “Alpha”. What’s more interesting, though, is that the IRL husband-wife duo Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt are owning the reel versions of Lord Ram and Sita with their respective characters in these films.
In April, the first look teaser for “Ramayana Part 1” dropped, offering a glimpse at Ranbir Kapoor as Lord Rama. The film, directed by Nitesh Tiwari, with music by A.R. Rahman and Hans Zimmer, and starring Sai Pallavi as Sita, Yash as Ravana, Ravi Dubey as Lakshman and Sunny Deol as Lord Hanuman, is set to release on Diwali.
But before Kapoor’s Lord Rama enthrals the audiences, wife Alia Bhatt’s reprisal of a model-day Sita is about to hit theaters with “Alpha” on July 3, 2026.
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Alia Bhatt and her two Sitas
The first full-length trailer for Shiv Rawail’s “Alpha” reveals not only more about the backstory of Alia Bhatt’s character but also several direct references to “Ramayana”. For starters, Bhatt’s character is named Sita, and her mother is revealed to be Janaki, which is another name for Sita, being the adoptive daughter of King Janaka of Mithila. As the trailer goes on to narrate, Bhatt’s Sita too has been taken from her parents by Bobby Deol’s character, who trains her for his clandestine “Alpha” programme.
The references go beyond these parallels to give the tale a modern, feminist twist. In the great epic, it was Lord Hanuman who, while visiting Maa Sita at Ashoka Vatika, set Ravana’s Lanka on fire. “Alpha” spins the plot for Alia Bhatt’s Sita to be her own savior. Her dialogue in the trailer goes, “Sita has come to set fire to Lanka herself,” while she beats up the bad guys and destroys a facility, all on her own. In another scene, she says, “Begin the trial by fire,” another nod to the “Agnipariksha” that Sita had to undergo to prove her purity after being abducted by Ravana.
Interestingly, when the casting for “Ramayana” was announced, several fans wondered why Alia Bhatt wasn’t cast as Sita, considering the actors were married and had played Shiva and Isha in “Brahmastra”.
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Furthermore, Alia Bhatt has been vocal about her fascination for the women of both “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata”. In an interview from a couple of years ago, the actress had expressed her admiration for Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s “Palace of Illusions,” which is a feminist retelling of the “Mahabharata” through the eyes of Draupadi.
In 2024, when Alia walked the red carpet for the Met Gala, Lilly Singh’s book club compared her custom Sabyasachi saree to the cover of “The Forest of Enchantments”, Divakaruni’s spin on “Ramayana” through Sita’s point of view. The author had even shared the image on her stories. At the teaser launch for “Alpha,” too, the actress spoke about her interest in adapting the book.
This isn’t the first time the “Brahmastra” actress has played a character named “Sita” either. In Rajamouli’s ‘RRR’, too, her character was named “Sita,” who is separated from her fiancé, named Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan), as he leaves for an undercover mission to fulfil a promise to his dying father. But while her character had barely any screen time in “RRR”, “Alpha” is about to give Alia Bhatt and her Sita the pedestal they deserve.
All in all, 2026 is shaping up to be the year when Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt give us traditional and modern adaptations of the same epic story.
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