Hanuman Ansh is a 2026 Hindi-language biographical devotional drama film that is on the cusp of scripting history and is poised to become a historic box-office blockbusting phenomenon.
It is produced on a slender budget of Rupees 1.8 Crores or whereabouts but is already grossing over 100 Crores and it is still in its fifth week. The film is based on the book – “Divine Detour: That changed my Life”, the film chronicles the early life of a 13-year old boy named Lakshminarayan in pre-independence India. After his mother passes away, he leaves his hometown in Braj, mired in grief. He also concludes that divine love is the only way he can reunite with her. His spiritual wanderings take him across North India. People also get to witness his selfless service and extraordinary spiritual gifts. The metamorphosis happens and he is revered by millions as Neem Karoli Baba.
A film has been made about him. Released without much fanfare, hype or hoopla. It has few screens, no stellar superstar cast and it did not adhere to the familiar pattern of unleashing a conventional marketing blitz. In the first two weeks, it earned only in lakhs, scratching the surface. However, the stirring then happened. It powered its way, driven purely by emotional and spiritual resonance with the audience. Screenings went up and collections surged past 50 crores by early September. From screenings of 390 shows in the first week, it climbed to 5427 shows in the fifth week. 7 records have already fallen by the wayside. It has handsomely beaten Dhurandher 2 and also registered the highest ROI (return on investment) for any Hindi film ever.
By all reckonings, it has qualified to be a Sleeper Hit movie. A film that starts with low expectations and a quiet release but eventually becomes a major financial or cultural success over time. It owes success primarily to ‘word of mouth’ publicity. Social media also amplified the positive vibes. It reverberates with the general public, possibly because, it is an underdog story and worthy of a family audience. Its spiralling and pyrrhic success could be attributed to a couple of other reasons. It has tapped into that emotion. A film well -made shorn of violence without the trappings of a formula film and tapping into spirituality and culture is bound to do well. The life and teachings of Neem Karoli Baba is also a factor for the film’s runaway success.
Neem Karoli Baba (also known as Maharaj-ji) was a revered Hindu spiritual teacher who lived in the 20th century and is widely regarded by his devotees as an incarnation or manifestation (“ansh,” meaning “part” or “aspect”) of Lord Hanuman.
Neem Karoli Baba (c. 1900–1973) was a guru based primarily in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, India. He is best known in the West for being the guru of Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), the American spiritual teacher and author of Be Here Now, as well as for influencing figures like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Julia Roberts, who have spoken of his ashram’s impact on them.
“Ansh” (अंश) is a Sanskrit term meaning “portion,” “part,” or “partial incarnation” — distinct from a full avatar (avatara). Devotees and many followers believe Neem Karoli Baba was an ansh of Hanuman for several reasons. He built and inspired the construction of numerous Hanuman temples across India. His ashram is revered as Kainchi Dham and it is in Nainital district in Uttarakhand. Stories abound where devotees describe events interpreted as evidence of his connection to Hanuman- instances of apparent omnipresence, protection & miraculous intervention. Remarkably similar to qualities attributed to Hanuman in the Ramayana. In the Sanatana tradition, Hanuman represents and personifies the quintessential and selfless devotion(bhakti), service(seva), strength and humility. Devotees vouch that the revered Neem Karoli Baba embodied these very qualities. His teachings centred on serving others, feeding people and loving devotion rather than intellectual philosophy.
Neem Karoli Baba’s Western devotee network is one of the more remarkable threads in modern spiritual history — it essentially transplanted a strand of Hindu bhakti practice into American counterculture and later into Silicon Valley.
The Western Connection
Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) is an oft discussed figure, who invariably features in conversations when it is about Neem Karoli Baba. A former Harvard psychology professor who had been fired along -with Timothy Leary for LSD research, Alpert travelled to India in 1967 disillusioned with psychedelics as a spiritual shortcut.
He met Neem Karoli Baba in the foothills of the Himalayas, and the encounter reportedly upended him completely — the story goes that Maharaj-ji knew details about Alpert’s recently deceased mother that he couldn’t have known through ordinary means, and later, when Alpert offered him a large dose of LSD (expecting nothing to happen to a “holy man”), Maharaj-ji reportedly took it with no visible effect at all. Alpert became “Ram Dass” and wrote Be Here Now (1971), which became a foundational text for the American spiritual counterculture and introduced tens of thousands of Westerners to the Baba.
Other notable Western devotees who traversed through his orbit in the late 1960s/early 70s include:
• Krishna Das (Jeffrey Kagel) — became one of the most famous kirtan (devotional chanting) artists in the West
• Bhagavan Das — an early American spiritual seeker who actually guided Ram Dass to Maharaj-ji
• Larry Brilliant — epidemiologist who later helped eradicate smallpox with the WHO and became an early Google executive; he and his wife Girija credit Maharaj-ji’s instruction as the reason they got involved in smallpox eradication
• Daniel Goleman — the psychologist known for popularizing “emotional intelligence”
This network later had an unusual second life in Silicon Valley:
• Steve Jobs made a pilgrimage to India partly inspired by Ram Dass’s book, and though Neem Karoli Baba had died by the time Jobs arrived (1973), the trip profoundly shaped him
• Larry Brilliant later became the founding director of Google
• Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg have spoken publicly about visiting Kainchi Dham and its influence on them
Julia Roberts is the actress associated with Neem Karoli Baba.
She has spoken openly about her deep connection to the spiritual leader, sharing that her initial interest in Hinduism was sparked simply by seeing a photograph of Neem Karoli Baba. Even though she never met him in person—as he passed away in 1973 before she saw his image—she felt an immediate, strong pull toward his teachings. This connection eventually inspired her to practice Hinduism.
Julia Roberts stated on Good Morning America that she saw a picture of a man, without knowing who he was, felt instantly drawn to him. She learnt it was the Neem Karoli Baba. When filming the 2010 movie Eat Pray Love in India, she spent time learning about the local spiritual practices and her interest in the faith grew. Julia is a practising Hindu who goes to temples to pray, chant and meditate with her family. Her children were also given traditional Hindu names by a Swami while she was in India. Her spiritual journey also deeply influenced her career and her production company is aptly called Red Om Films.
There are a few anecdotes worth mentioning:
• He got the name “Neem Karoli Baba” after an incident in a village called Neem Karoli. He reportedly boarded a train without a ticket and was offloaded at a station. He sat under a tree. It was reported by the passengers that the train wouldn’t budge despite the best efforts of the train authorities. Village elders suspected it was connected to the holy man they had just offloaded. They pleaded with him to reboard and once he was on it, lo and behold, the train started to move again.
• As mentioned above — on their first meeting, Babaji reportedly looked at Ram Dass and said “Your mother died last year” and named the specific illness (a swollen spleen), a detail Ram Dass said he had told absolutely no one in India. At that very moment Richard Alpert aka Ram Dass gave up his skepticism and became the Baba’s ardent devotee.
• He reportedly predicted his own death and told devotees not to grieve, saying he would remain accessible to them in spirit rather than in body — a framing that’s part of why devotees today still feel a living relationship with him decades after his passing in 1973.
The Genesis of the Western Counterculture
The relationship between Neem Karoli Baba and Ram Dass is arguably the single most consequential guru-disciple bond in modern Western spirituality — almost everything most Westerners know about Maharaj-ji traces back through this one connection.
By 1967, Richard Alpert was a Harvard psychologist who had been fired in 1963 along -with Timothy Leary for their controversial LSD research on students. He had spent years chasing transcendence through psychedelics, taking hundreds of trips, and had arrived at a bleak conclusion: the states LSD opened up were real, but they always faded, and he had no way to stay there. He described feeling like he’d seen a door but couldn’t walk through it permanently. Burned out and searching, he went to India as a tourist, not a seeker in any formal sense.
The First Meeting
Traveling with an American hippie named Bhagavan Das, Alpert ended up at a small temple in the foothills of the Himalayas where an old man in a blanket sat on a wooden platform. What happened next became spiritual lore:
Maharaj-ji looked at Alpert and asked about his car (a Land Rover Alpert had bought that day — impossible to know) and then, unprompted, said Alpert had been thinking about his mother the previous night. Alpert had — she’d died a year earlier of a spleen-related illness (Hodgkin’s disease affecting the spleen), something he was certain he hadn’t mentioned to anyone in India. Maharaj-ji reportedly looked up at the sky and said “spleen” in English, naming the exact cause of death.
Alpert later said this single moment cracked something open that years of psychedelics hadn’t touched — not because it was a “trick,” but because it suggested a form of knowing that had nothing to do with ordinary channels of information.
The LSD Test
The next day, still testing this holy man against his own frame of reference, Alpert offered Maharaj-ji a large dose of Sunshine LSD — reportedly enough for several people, and far more than what Alpert himself would take. Maharaj-ji took it without ceremony and, by all accounts, showed no discernible effect at all. For Alpert, whose entire adult identity was built around psychedelics as the fastest route to transcendent states, this was devastating in a productive way — it suggested there was a state beyond what the drugs could produce, one that this man apparently already lived in permanently.
Becoming Ram Dass
Maharaj-ji gave Alpert the name “Ram Dass,” meaning “servant of Ram (God).” Alpert stayed in India for months, living simply, being taught largely through presence and behaviour rather than formal instruction — Maharaj-ji wasn’t a discourse-heavy teacher; he taught through parables, tests, apparent omniscience, and a relentless emphasis on service and love rather than doctrine.
Be Here Now
Ram Dass returned to the US and in 1971 self-published Be Here Now — a genre-bending book part memoir, part illustrated guide to yoga and meditation, part account of Maharaj-ji. It sold in the millions through word of mouth and became one of the foundational texts of the American spiritual counterculture, introducing Eastern practice to a generation who might never have encountered it otherwise. The title phrase itself became a cultural touchstone far beyond spiritual circles.
After Maharaj-ji’s Death (1973)
Ram Dass didn’t stop being shaped by the relationship after his guru died. He spent the rest of his life — through the founding of the Hanuman Foundation, the Seva Foundation (focused on blindness prevention and public health, co-founded with Larry Brilliant), and decades of teaching — explicitly framing his own work as service done for and through Maharaj-ji. He often spoke of the relationship not as one that ended with the guru’s death but as an ongoing, felt presence — describing Maharaj-ji as living “in his heart” and continuing to guide him, including after Ram Dass’s own severe stroke in 1997, which he came to interpret partly through that same devotional lens.
Ram Dass died in December 2019, and up until then, virtually every talk he gave circled back to Maharaj-ji as the central axis of his life — less a historical guru he once knew than an ongoing relationship he never considered over.
And the legend lives on ……
Dangal (2016): ~₹2,024–₹2,200 crore worldwide, heavily boosted by a record-breaking run in China.
Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017): ~₹1,700–₹1,800+ crore worldwide, setting historic domestic and international benchmarks.
Dhurandhar: The Revenge (2026): ~₹1,852 crore worldwide, making it a massive recent franchise success.
Pushpa 2: The Rule: ~₹1,790–₹2,200 crore worldwide with record-breaking opening days and domestic collections.
RRR (2022): ~₹1,300–₹1,387 crore worldwide, achieving massive global acclaim.
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