The boldest decision in Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana is not in the casting or the budget. It is in the music. The film pairs A.R. Rahman with Hans Zimmer — two of the most celebrated film composers alive — for their first collaboration on an Indian feature film, and for Zimmer’s first score for an Indian production. One brings the devotional sound of Indian cinema; the other brings the orchestral weight of the modern Hollywood epic. Together they had to score a story that almost every viewer in India already knows by heart, and make it sound new. This article explains how the partnership came about, what each song on the soundtrack does, how the background score works in the film, and where you can listen to it all.
The short version is this: the soundtrack was released in carefully staged waves, building over more than a year, and the full album arrived as a five-track EP in five languages on 21 October 2026, two weeks before the film reached cinemas. The songs are composed by Rahman, with lyrics by the poet Kumar Vishwas. The orchestral themes are credited jointly to Zimmer and Rahman. And the score itself — the music that runs underneath the film, from Ravana’s rise to Sita’s abduction — weaves Sanskrit verses into the orchestral soundscapes Zimmer built, so that the oldest words in the story sit inside the newest sound in Indian cinema.
How Rahman and Zimmer Came Together
The partnership did not begin with Ramayana. Rahman has said his association with Zimmer goes back to 2009, the year Rahman won two Academy Awards for Slumdog Millionaire. The two composers moved in the same circles for years — the Indian composer who transformed film music with Roja in 1992 and went on to Lagaan and Jodhaa Akbar, and the German-born composer behind Gladiator, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar and Dune, an Oscar winner for The Lion King and for Dune. When Tiwari and producer Namit Malhotra set out to make the Ramayana on a scale Indian cinema had never attempted, bringing the two together was, in the words of one report, an audacious answer to the question of what the epic should sound like.
The public got its first glimpse of the partnership on 4 July 2025, when Rahman posted a selfie with Zimmer on Instagram, captioned with nothing more than Zimmer’s handle and the film’s hashtag. It was a small post with a large meaning: the two most famous composers in their respective worlds were in a room together, working on the same film. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter India in January 2026, Rahman admitted that scoring something so iconic was terrifying for both composers, and explained that he had to unlearn conventional ideas of what Ramayana music should sound like in order to create something fresh. That is the central problem of the whole soundtrack, and it is worth understanding before listening to any of it.
Every Indian listener carries a version of the Ramayana in their head, and almost always that version has music attached to it — the television serials, the devotional albums, the bhajans sung at home. A composer scoring the Ramayana is not starting from silence. He is starting from a sound the audience already loves, and he has to honour it without copying it. Rahman’s answer, by his own account, was to unlearn what Ramayana music is supposed to sound like. Zimmer’s answer was to bring the orchestral language of the modern epic — the low brass, the vast string beds, the percussion that makes a cinema shake — and let Rahman fold Indian melody and Sanskrit verse into it.
The Sound of the Score: Sanskrit Verses Inside Orchestral Themes
The score works in two registers, and the film moves between them constantly. There is the devotional register: melody, voice, and Sanskrit. And there is the orchestral register: scale, power, and the sound of armies and kingdoms. The most distinctive thing about the Ramayana score is that the two registers are not kept apart. The score features the integration of Sanskrit verses, which Rahman added to the initial thematic soundscapes developed by Zimmer — so the ancient words of the epic are sung and chanted over orchestral writing that could belong to a Hollywood blockbuster.
That fusion is the point of the collaboration. Zimmer’s themes give the film its size: the golden city of Lanka, the forest, the armies, the gods. Rahman’s melodies give it its intimacy: Rama’s duty, Sita’s longing, the tenderness of the forest chapters. When the two meet — a Sanskrit verse carried by a full orchestra, or a devotional melody underpinned by Zimmer’s low strings — the film sounds like neither composer’s earlier work and like both at once.
It also solves a practical problem. Ramayana is released in five languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam — and the film’s songs exist in all five. But the score has no language at all. A theme composed by Zimmer and Rahman, carried by orchestra and Sanskrit verse, plays the same in every version of the film. It is the one element of the soundtrack that needs no translation, and it is the element that carries the film’s emotional continuity from the opening in Lanka to the cliffhanger at the end of Part 1. For what happens in that story, see our guide to the Part 1 story.
Jai Jai Ram: The Anthem of the Film
The first song most listeners will know is “Jai Jai Ram”, and it is the centrepiece of the soundtrack. Composed by Rahman, with lyrics by Kumar Vishwas, it is performed by Shreya Ghoshal and Arijit Singh, and it runs for 5 minutes and 20 seconds. It is a devotional anthem in the fullest sense: a song that celebrates Rama, built on voices that Indian audiences trust with their most beloved melodies, and arranged on a scale that matches the film around it.
The pairing of the two singers matters. Ghoshal and Singh are the two most prominent playback voices of their generation, and putting them together on the film’s central song is a statement of intent: this is not a background number, it is the song the film will be remembered by. Vishwas’s lyrics give it a rich Hindi literary voice, the kind of language that fits a story told in verse for two thousand years. And Rahman’s composition gives the singers room — the song builds slowly, in the way devotional music does, rather than arriving all at once.
There is also an orchestral version of “Jai Jai Ram”, running 3 minutes and 2 seconds and credited jointly to Zimmer and Rahman. It is the same melody stripped of words and rebuilt for orchestra, and it is the clearest single example of what the collaboration sounds like: Rahman’s tune, Zimmer’s orchestral weight. In the film, the orchestral version is the kind of music that plays over images rather than voices — the golden city, the armies, the scale of the world — while the sung version belongs to the moments of devotion. The two versions together show how the soundtrack is designed to work both as songs and as score.
Ravana Tandav: The Sound of the Villain
If “Jai Jai Ram” is the sound of the hero, “Ravana Tandav” is the sound of the villain — and the contrast is deliberate. Composed by Rahman, with lyrics by Kumar Vishwas and performed by Vishal Dadlani, the track runs 3 minutes and 14 seconds, and it is the most aggressive piece on the album. Dadlani’s voice, raw and percussive, is the opposite of the smooth devotional register of “Jai Jai Ram”. It is the sound of a king who conquered the three worlds and built a golden city, and who dances his tandava in triumph.
The track matters because of how the film is built. Part 1 opens with Ravana’s rise — his penance, the boon he wins from Brahma, his defeat of Indra and his takeover of Lanka — before Rama even appears. The villain is introduced before the hero, and his kingdom is established as a real place before the story moves to Ayodhya. A film that opens with its antagonist needs music that can carry him, and “Ravana Tandav” is that music: the sound of power, pride and menace, in a register the film returns to whenever Lanka is on screen. Our guide to Yash as Ravana covers the character the song is written for, and why the actor also produces the film.
There is a real musical idea underneath the aggression. The tandava is Shiva’s dance of destruction, and Ravana, in the epic, is Shiva’s great devotee — the scholar-king who won his power through penance and devotion. The song plays on that contradiction: devotion turned to pride, worship turned to conquest. It is the darkest piece on the soundtrack, and it is the one that tells you most about how the film understands its villain.
Sita’s Aspiration: The Quietest Song on the Album
The third song on the EP is the quietest, and in some ways the most interesting. “Sita’s Aspiration” is composed by Rahman, with lyrics by Kumar Vishwas, and it runs 2 minutes and 42 seconds. It is performed by four voices: A.R. Ameen — Rahman’s son — alongside Vaishali Samant, Rakshita Suresh and Antra Nandy. Where “Jai Jai Ram” is an anthem and “Ravana Tandav” is a declaration of power, “Sita’s Aspiration” is intimate: a song about longing, about what Sita hopes for, sung softly.
The song’s place in the film is the forest chapters, where Rama, Sita and Lakshmana build their life in exile at Panchavati. Those are the slowest, most tender passages of Part 1, and the music has to match them: not grandeur, but closeness. The choice of four voices, including a young male voice in Ameen, gives the song a choral, almost prayer-like quality — as if Sita’s hope is being carried by more than one voice. It is the track that shows the soundtrack’s range. The same composers who built the orchestral weight of the Rama Theme can also write two minutes and forty-two seconds of quiet.
It is also the song that most clearly belongs to Sai Pallavi’s Sita. The film’s Sita is not a passive figure: she refuses to stay behind when Rama is exiled, she chooses the forest, and her abduction is the event the whole first film builds towards. A song about her aspiration — her hopes, her will — is the soundtrack’s way of giving her an interior life, a voice of her own in a story that is often told as Rama’s alone.
The Rama Theme: The Film’s Musical Identity
The fifth track on the EP is the “Rama Theme”, running 2 minutes and 27 seconds and credited jointly to Zimmer and Rahman. It is the film’s musical identity — the theme that was released in April 2026 alongside the teaser, and the first proper listen audiences got to how the two composers’ styles come together. Where the songs are tied to specific characters and moments, the theme is tied to Rama himself: it is the music that announces him, and the music the film returns to whenever the story needs to remind the audience who its hero is.
The theme’s history is part of the film’s campaign. The soundtrack was released in carefully staged waves, and each wave gave audiences a new piece of the music to carry into the next one. The Introduction theme came first, released by Sony Music India in July 2025 alongside the film’s first glimpse. The Rama Theme followed in April 2026 with the teaser. The Trailer Theme arrived in August 2026 after the first trailer. And then the full EP, with all five tracks, was released by T-Series on 21 October 2026. Each release built on the last, so that by the time the film reached cinemas, audiences had been living with its music for over a year.
Rahman has called Ramayana the most exciting project he has worked on, and has said the soundtrack took nearly three and a half years to develop. By the time “Jai Jai Ram” was released, he said, around 70 percent of the album was already out, with further surprises still to come. That last detail matters: the five-track EP is the album as it stands, but the film’s full score — the cues that play under the scenes themselves — is larger than the EP, and more music is expected to follow. The EP is a beginning, not the complete record of what the two composers wrote.
The Full Tracklist
The Hindi EP, released by T-Series on 21 October 2026, runs about 16 minutes and contains five tracks. All lyrics are written by Kumar Vishwas.
1. “Jai Jai Ram” (5:20) — music by A.R. Rahman; sung by Shreya Ghoshal and Arijit Singh.
2. “Ravana Tandav” (3:14) — music by A.R. Rahman; sung by Vishal Dadlani.
3. “Sita’s Aspiration” (2:42) — music by A.R. Rahman; sung by A.R. Ameen, Vaishali Samant, Rakshita Suresh and Antra Nandy.
4. “Jai Jai Ram (Orchestral)” (3:02) — music by Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman.
5. “Rama Theme” (2:27) — music by Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman.
The same five tracks were released as separate EPs in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, with the songs adapted into each language — in Tamil, for instance, “Jai Jai Ram” becomes “Jai Jai Rama” and “Ravana Tandav” becomes “Ravana Tandavam”. The producers of the soundtrack album are listed as Namit Malhotra, Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman. The full album jukebox is available on the T-Series YouTube channel, and the EP is streaming on major music platforms.
The Business of the Music: A Reported Rs 75 Crore Deal
The soundtrack is also a formidable commercial asset. T-Series reportedly locked the music rights for both parts of the saga with an advance of Rs 75 crore, one of the largest music deals in Indian film history. The figure is reported rather than confirmed by the label, but the scale of it tells its own story: the music of Ramayana was treated as an asset in its own right, not as an afterthought to the film.
That makes sense when you consider what the music has to do. A two-part epic, released a year apart, needs music that keeps audiences connected to the story between the films. The themes released in 2025 and 2026 — the Introduction, the Rama Theme, the Trailer Theme — did exactly that: they kept the film in the public ear for over a year before it reached cinemas. And the songs, released in five languages, gave the film a presence in every market it is playing in, from Hindi-speaking audiences to Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam listeners. The music is not just part of the film’s marketing. In a real sense, the music was the marketing — the first thing audiences heard, and the thing that told them what kind of film this would be.
The reported deal also covers both parts of the saga. That matters for Part 2, planned for Diwali 2027, because the full Ramayana soundtrack is being conceived as a single sweeping work across the two films. If Part 1’s music is about devotion, love and exile, Part 2’s will need to carry Hanuman’s leap, the burning of Lanka and a war of cosmic proportions — and the themes established in Part 1, above all the Rama Theme, will be the foundation it builds on. For the scale of the production the music serves, see our budget explained.
What the Music Does in the Film
It is worth stepping back from the tracklist and asking what the music actually does while the film is playing. A score for a film like this has three jobs, and Ramayana’s does all three.
First, it gives the film its scale. The orchestral writing — Zimmer’s contribution, most clearly heard in the Rama Theme and the orchestral “Jai Jai Ram” — makes Lanka feel like a golden empire and the forest feel like a vast world, rather than a set. The low brass and the percussion do work that the images alone cannot do: they tell the audience, before a word is spoken, that this is a story about gods and kings.
Second, it gives the film its emotion. The songs — “Jai Jai Ram”, “Sita’s Aspiration” — do the work of telling the audience how to feel about the characters. The devotional register, the voices, the lyrics in Vishwas’s Hindi: these are the elements that connect the film to the way the Ramayana has always been experienced in India, as a story sung and heard, not just watched.
Third, and most unusually, it gives the two halves of the film a single sound. Part 1 covers the first half of the epic, from Ravana’s rise to Sita’s abduction, and ends on a cliffhanger. Part 2, a year later, must pick up the story and carry it to the war. The themes — the Rama Theme above all — are the thread that will connect the two films. When audiences hear that theme again in Part 2, they will be hearing a year of memory in two minutes and twenty-seven seconds. That is what a great film theme does, and it is why the composers spent three and a half years on this score.
Where to Listen
The Ramayana soundtrack EP is available on major streaming platforms, and the full album jukebox — all five tracks in sequence — is on the T-Series YouTube channel, with separate album videos for the Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam versions. The individual themes released earlier — the Introduction theme, the Rama Theme and the Trailer Theme — are also streaming. The best way to hear the collaboration is to listen in order: the Rama Theme first, for the joint Zimmer-Rahman sound; then “Jai Jai Ram” for Rahman’s songwriting at full scale; then the orchestral “Jai Jai Ram” to hear the same melody rebuilt for orchestra; and finally “Ravana Tandav”, to hear the other end of the film’s emotional range.
One note for listeners coming to the soundtrack fresh: the five-track EP is not the whole score. The music that plays under the film’s scenes — the cues for the exile, the forest, the abduction, Jatayu’s last flight — is larger than what has been released, and further music is expected. What is out now is the album: the songs and the themes. The complete score, if it is released, will be a different and larger record of what Rahman and Zimmer built together. For the film itself — the cast, the story and the release — see our guide to Ramayana Part 1.
FAQs
Who composed the music of Ramayana?
The music of Ramayana is composed by A.R. Rahman and Hans Zimmer together. It is their first collaboration on an Indian feature film, and Zimmer’s first score for an Indian production. Rahman composed the songs; the orchestral themes are credited jointly to Zimmer and Rahman.
What songs are in Ramayana Part 1?
The soundtrack EP contains five tracks: “Jai Jai Ram”, “Ravana Tandav”, “Sita’s Aspiration”, an orchestral version of “Jai Jai Ram”, and the “Rama Theme”. All lyrics are written by Kumar Vishwas. The EP was released by T-Series on 21 October 2026 in five languages: Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.
Who sings Jai Jai Ram?
“Jai Jai Ram” is sung by Shreya Ghoshal and Arijit Singh, with music by A.R. Rahman and lyrics by Kumar Vishwas. It runs 5 minutes and 20 seconds. There is also an orchestral version of the same melody, credited to Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman.
Who sings Ravana Tandav?
“Ravana Tandav” is sung by Vishal Dadlani, with music by A.R. Rahman and lyrics by Kumar Vishwas. It runs 3 minutes and 14 seconds and is the soundtrack’s portrait of Ravana, played in the film by Yash.
What is the Rama Theme?
The “Rama Theme” is a 2-minute-27-second orchestral theme credited jointly to Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman. It was released in April 2026 alongside the film’s teaser, and it is the film’s central musical identity — the theme that announces Rama and returns throughout the film.
When was the Ramayana soundtrack released?
The five-track EP was released by T-Series on 21 October 2026, two weeks before the film reached cinemas. The music had been released in waves before that: the Introduction theme in July 2025, the Rama Theme in April 2026, and the Trailer Theme in August 2026.
Is the Ramayana soundtrack available in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam?
Yes. The EP was released as five separate EPs in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, each with the same five tracks adapted into that language. In Tamil, “Jai Jai Ram” becomes “Jai Jai Rama” and “Ravana Tandav” becomes “Ravana Tandavam”.
How long did the Ramayana soundtrack take to make?
Rahman has said the soundtrack took nearly three and a half years to develop, and has called Ramayana the most exciting project he has worked on. By the time “Jai Jai Ram” was released, he said, around 70 percent of the album was already out.
Who wrote the lyrics for the Ramayana songs?
All the lyrics on the Ramayana soundtrack are written by the poet Kumar Vishwas. His Hindi lyrics run through the songs like a thread, giving the soundtrack a literary voice to balance the international orchestral canvas.
Will there be more Ramayana music for Part 2?
T-Series reportedly holds the music rights for both parts of the saga, and the full soundtrack is being conceived as a single work across the two films. More music is expected, including the themes for Part 2’s story — Hanuman’s search for Sita, the crossing to Lanka and the war — planned for Diwali 2027.
