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Fresh off the success of Aamir Khan starrer “Sitaare Zameen Par,” director R.S. Prasanna is developing a biopic on legendary Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, positioning the project as a global collaboration between Indian and Western creative teams.
Titled “Dreams of Ramanujan,” the project is being produced through Prasanna’s banner Eklavya Productions and is currently in active script development, with the filmmaker aiming to begin production by year’s end.
Prasanna has been fascinated with Ramanujan’s story since his school days at D.A.V. in Chennai, where he first learned about the mathematician during his 11th and 12th 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 films earned Prasanna recognition for his sensitive handling of taboo subjects with humor.
His most recent film, “Sitaare Zameen Par,” starring Aamir Khan and Genelia Deshmukh, was released in June 2025. The sports drama about a basketball coach training a team of neurodivergent players grossed $30 million worldwide and emerged as the sixth highest-grossing Hindi-language film of 2025.
Prasanna describes “Dreams of Ramanujan” as a departure from conventional biopics. “I call it a biopic on steroids,” he says, explaining that the narrative will interweave Ramanujan’s historical story with present-day applications of his mathematics. Recent scientific discoveries sparked his decision to move forward 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 structure the narrative as a film that cuts between the present day and Ramanujan’s extraordinary journey from poverty in early 20th century South India to Cambridge University, where 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 approach to depicting Ramanujan’s mathematical genius. Prasanna draws parallels to composer Ilaiyaraaja, noting how both 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 approximately half the script and is consulting with scientists from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore while reconnecting with mathematics-inclined friends from his school days and exploring a collaboration with a British writer.
The director aims to make mathematics visually exciting 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 film will be multilingual. “Keeping a lot of it in Tamil, and then keeping it in English when it has to,” he says.
The director is maintaining creative control during the development phase before bringing in studio partners. “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 focus on script development, with production potentially starting by the end of 2026 or early 2027.
Ramanujan’s life has been the subject of previous film adaptations, including Gnana Rajasekaran’s 2014 Tamil-English bilingual “Ramanujan,” featuring Abhinay Vaddi, and Matt Brown’s 2015 international production “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 almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. After initial rejection by British mathematicians, Ramanujan’s 1913 letter to G.H. Hardy at Cambridge led to his invitation to England. He became one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society and the first Indian elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, before his death from illness at age 32. His notebooks continue to inspire mathematical research, with his work now applied to modern physics and quantum mechanics.
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