Six months ago, Anupriya Nagar was getting ready to move to Switzerland for a job in the art world. Today, at 21, she's the producer of Hanuman Ansh, the low-budget devotional drama about Neem Karoli Baba that has turned into one of the most unexpected box-office stories of the year — reportedly pulling in tens of crores in India against a budget of just around INR 2 crore.
Anupriya spent three years studying Economics at the University of Bath in the UK, graduating last year. In her final year, she went looking into how founders of companies like Apple and Meta arrived at their ideas. Somewhere in that research, she came across an account describing how Neem Karoli Baba had shaped Steve Jobs' thinking during his time at Kainchi Dham, the ashram in Uttarakhand associated with the Indian spiritual figure, in ways she says fed into the philosophy behind Apple's products.
An Indian saint's influence on a global tech icon, and she was learning about it through a Western source rather than something already familiar to her at home. That question — why she was hearing this secondhand — is what pushed her to dig further into Neem Karoli Baba's story.
At the time, none of this was supposed to lead anywhere professionally. Anupriya had already lined up a job in the art industry in Switzerland. Her family collects work by names like M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza, and V.S. Gaitonde, and she'd already put together exhibitions of her own.
Her first instinct for the research was maybe a book, maybe a comic. Filmmaking wasn't on the list. But her plans shifted when she returned to India and crossed paths with director Vishal Chaturvedi, who happened to already be developing a film on Neem Karoli Baba. She describes the meeting as a coincidence that redirected the project entirely.
Hanuman Ansh released on August 7 to a muted opening, and industry watchers had reportedly written it off as a flop within the first week. Anupriya has said morale on the project dipped hard during that stretch. But word of mouth and social media buzz turned the film’s fortunes around in its third and fourth weeks, pushing collections well past its modest budget and keeping it in theatres over a month after release.
A sequel is already in the works, with Vishal confirming development had begun in early September. The film is also set for an international release on September 11 through Hombale Films' overseas arm — a date which marks the anniversary of Neem Karoli Baba's mahasamadhi.
Anupriya's film taps into Neem Karoli Baba’s reputation among a handful of Western tech and entertainment figures. Steve's visit to India in search of him in the 1970s is the best-known thread, but reports over the years have also linked Mark Zuckerberg's visit to Kainchi Dham and actress Julia Roberts, who has spoken publicly about her connection to the saint's teachings. Closer to home, Indian celebrities including Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma have made their own visits to the ashram.
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