Why People Took Off Their Shoes to Watch Hanuman Ansh — When a Multiplex Became a Temple

At Hanuman Ansh, people took off their shoes in a multiplex and stayed through the credits. The building did not need to become a temple. They carried the temple in with them, and that is exactly why devotion needs judgement.

In Brief

In August 2026, a ₹2 crore film without major stars filled multiplexes with people who left their footwear at the door, sang the Hanuman Chalisa and stayed until the last credit. This article asks what that behaviour means, and what it does not mean.

It makes three moves. First, it shows that the habit is old: Indian audiences have brought devotion to the screen since Jai Santoshi Maa and Ramayan. Second, it separates being moved from being convinced: an experience can be real and valuable without proving every belief attached to it. Third, it looks at what phones have changed, when a private act of reverence becomes public content that strangers, and even a film’s own team, can use.

Along the way it offers four tests for telling healthy devotion from captured devotion, and argues that the freedom to keep your shoes on must be protected as firmly as the freedom to take them off. It ends with the first of four capacities this series argues a living civilisation needs: the ability to gather attention that is not wholly for sale.

Core Thesis

The building did not have to become a temple for the act to become devotional. People brought their own understanding of reverence into the room. That is not superstition, and it is not new. But reverence tells us about the bond between people and what they revere; it does not prove that what they revere deserves it. Being moved is not being convinced, and reverence done is not reverence displayed. Take off your shoes if your heart says so. Never take off your judgement, and never demand that anyone else take off theirs.

The Night the Shoe Rack Ran Out of Space

I watched Hanuman Ansh in an ordinary multiplex, the kind that sells caramel popcorn and plays car advertisements before the film. By the end of the night it did not feel ordinary.

The Hanuman Chalisa played, and people sang along. Hands were folded in the dark. A few people had left their footwear at the door, as you would outside a temple. When the film ended, almost nobody stood up. In a multiplex the credits are the signal to leave. Here people stayed until the last name had rolled away.

I can describe what I saw and what was reported elsewhere. I cannot know what each viewer intended. What follows is an argument about what these acts may mean, not a claim to know what was in every person’s mind.

The film tells the life of Neem Karoli Baba, born Lakshman Narayan Sharma around 1900 in Uttar Pradesh. He founded the Kainchi Dham ashram near Nainital in 1964 and died in Vrindavan in 1973 [1]. Aṃśa means a part or portion; his devotees regard him as a portion of Hanuman. That is a devotional belief, not a historical finding, and this series treats it that way. The film opens with a boy who has lost his mother and sets out to find God in the hope of meeting her again [2]. Its first half is about grief, hunger and food: the boy gives away his own meal to children whom caste has pushed aside, and a lifelong sceptic sits down to eat food served by a spiritual teacher [3]. The second half is full of wonders, which I take up in the next article.

What I saw was not unusual. One of the film’s producers, Anupriya Nagar, said that people from many backgrounds were removing their shoes to watch it [4]. A video of a Muslim man watching barefoot went viral [5]. Another, released under the film team’s name, showed audiences removing footwear and joining the chanting [6].

The numbers are just as strange. The film was reportedly made for about ₹2 crore, without major established stars. It opened to about ₹10 lakh and earned about ₹1.08 crore in its first week. Then word spread, and its screens grew from about 40 in the second week to nearly 400 [7]. By early October, trade reports put its worldwide gross above ₹424 crore [8]. These are reported trade estimates of gross collections, not audited profits.

So what happened in those halls? The sceptic says mass emotion. The devotee says the saint’s power. The trade analyst says marketing, but the film was reported to have had very little conventional marketing [9]. “Word of mouth” is not an answer either. It is the thing that needs explaining: why did so many people tell so many others?

The scene below is fictional. The public behaviour that inspired it, viewers leaving footwear at the door and joining the chanting, was reported separately [4] [6].

Sunil Yadav is the floor manager of a multiplex in Lucknow. In the film’s fourth week, a cleaner tells him there are forty pairs of chappals outside Audi 3. Sunil asks head office what the procedure is. There is none. Nobody has ever needed one. He lays a plastic sheet beside the door and writes “FOOTWEAR” on a sheet of A4 paper. A teenage boy stops and asks him whether he should take his shoes off too. “Do what your heart says,” Sunil tells him. The boy thinks about it. “My heart says yes. My mother says the floor is dirty.” He stands there a moment longer, weighing the two, and then he unties his laces.

The boy is the question at the centre of this article. Not the film, and not the box office. A person in a crowd feels a pull, hears a caution and must decide. His mother is not wrong; cinema floors are dirty. His freedom does not lie in overruling her. It lies in weighing her. Is what he did something to be proud of, or something to worry about? My answer: it depends on whether the choice became his own.

Part One — India Has a Long Habit of Bringing Devotion to the Screen

The behaviour is old. Only the door it came through is new.

Indian religious life is built around darśana, the act of seeing the divine and being seen by it. The scholar Diana Eck wrote the classic account of it [10]. In a temple you do not only pray. You go to look, and to be looked at. Eck writes about temples and sacred images, not cinemas; the extension to a film hall is mine.

Indian cinema grew up close to this habit. The first Indian feature film, Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913), told a sacred story. When Jai Santoshi Maa became a surprise hit in 1975, audiences entered cinemas barefoot and showered coins, flower petals and rice at the screen, as the scholar Philip Lutgendorf records [11]. When Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan ran on Doordarshan from 1987, streets emptied on Sunday mornings and many families garlanded their television sets before sitting down to watch [12].

But these are not the same thing. A television at home sits inside a family’s own rituals. A cinema hall is a public room full of strangers. Folding your hands there is not private piety. It is a public act, done in front of people who may not share it. That difference matters, and I come back to it.

Something else is new. In Jai Santoshi Maa and Ramayan, people bowed to gods on the screen. The first half of Hanuman Ansh shows no god in glory. It shows a grieving child, a plate of food given away, and a sceptic eating with a saint. One reviewer summed up its message as devotion found in kindness and service rather than in miracles [13]. I cannot know what each viewer bowed to. My reading is that many were bowing to a way of living they had stopped seeing anywhere else.

Part Two — A Temple Can Travel With the Person

Is it not wrong, or simply superstitious, to treat a cinema hall like a temple? This is the first question a careful reader will ask.

Start with the difference between ritual and superstition. A superstition is a belief that an act causes something it has no good reason to cause: keep your shoes on and misfortune will follow. A ritual is an act that marks, expresses or trains something: respect, attention, belonging. The two can overlap, but they are not the same. A viewer who leaves her shoes at the door to show reverence is not making a claim about supernatural cause and effect. A viewer who believes the film will curse him if he does not is making a different kind of claim.

Why are shoes left outside a temple at all? The reasons vary by place and tradition: ritual purity, the line between the street and a consecrated space, plain hygiene, humility, custom. Indian traditions also attach real weight to particular places: a consecrated image, a tīrtha, a boundary. A cinema hall is none of these. But some of the meanings of the gesture, humility and attention above all, travel with the person who makes it.

The same is true of other temple habits: lowered voices, attention on one thing, a reluctance to leave before the āratī ends. These customs mark ritual space and sustain shared practice. They also train attention. Carried into a cinema hall, they can do that last work there too, without turning the hall into a temple in the formal sense.

The Bhagavad Gītā puts its weight on the giver’s heart:

Whoever offers me with devotion a leaf, a flower, a fruit or water, that offering of love from a pure heart I accept. (Bhagavad Gītā 9.26) [14]

I read the verse as a reminder that intention matters in an offering. It does not settle every question about sacred space. It helps explain why an ordinary room can hold an extraordinary act. The multiplex did not have to become holy. The people carried the temple in with them.

But our tradition also warns against the opposite mistake. Kabir spent his life mocking outward show: the pilgrim who bathes in every river and comes back unchanged, the worshipper who turns his beads while his mind wanders. In one of his best-known songs, the divine speaks to the seeker:

Where are you searching for me, friend? I am right beside you. Not in the temple, not in the mosque, not in the Kāba, not on Kailāsa. (Kabir, Moko kahāṃ ḍhūḍhe re bande) [15]

Kabir’s songs survive in many oral and written versions, and this rendering is mine. His target is not outward action as such. Visible practice can express real commitment and hold a community together. His target is the assumption that the outward act proves the inward change. Neem Karoli Baba, his devotees recall, liked to quote Kabir on exactly this: “It is easy to dye your cloth, but it is hard to dye your heart” [16].

The sociologist Émile Durkheim described what happens in rooms like this. He called it collective effervescence: when people gather around a shared symbol, the group feels a force larger than any one person in it [17]. Imitation, shared grief, the pull of the music and the wish to belong all play a part.

Does that not explain the whole thing away? No. Explaining how a feeling happens is not the same as proving it is worthless. We can describe a mother’s love in terms of hormones; that does not make her love fake. But the rule cuts the other way too. Feeling something deeply is not the same as proving that what you feel it about is true. Both halves matter, and most arguments about religion use only one.

Can people of other faiths watch a film like this, or join in? Of course. Nobody knows why the Muslim viewer took off his slippers except him, and I will not put reasons in his mouth. What the video shows is that the hall made room for him, and he made room for the hall. Respect does not require agreement. The Ṛgveda says:

Ekaṃ sad viprā bahudhā vadanti. The one reality, the wise call by many names. (Ṛgveda 1.164.46) [18]

In its hymn, that line is about the many names of the divine. Applying it to strangers in a cinema, honouring the same moment for different reasons, is my reading, not the hymn’s.

Part Three — Being Moved Is Not Being Convinced

Now the harder part, which a devotee may not enjoy reading.

The same reverence that takes off its shoes for a saint can take off its judgement for a fraud. In 2015, a self-styled guru starred in his own film, MSG: The Messenger, widely described by critics as a vehicle for promoting its star [19]. Folded hands can be collected, counted and used. Devotion is like electricity. It powers whatever it is connected to.

The tradition knew this. The Gītā does not treat all faith as good. It says faith comes in three kinds, shaped by each person’s nature, and then says something sharper:

A person is made of faith. As his faith is, so is he. (Bhagavad Gītā 17.3) [14]

I take from the verse a modern question: not only whether we have faith, but what we place it in, and whether it stays open to examination. That application is mine; the verse’s traditional meaning is wider.

Here is the distinction this film forces on us. To be moved by something is not yet to know that it is true. A song can make you weep without proving the story it tells. A speech can fill you with courage without making the speaker honest. So after a moving experience there are two questions, not one. What did this awaken in me? And what, if anything, does it give me reason to believe? The first is about knowing yourself. The second is about judgement. Mixing them up is how devotion becomes easy to exploit.

The pressure on a person in a crowd also comes in grades, and they are not equal. Someone may order or threaten you; that is coercion. People may make you fear their judgement; that is social pressure. Music, grief and the crowd may move you; that is emotional influence. Or you may join a practice because it says something you mean; that is free identification. Being influenced by a crowd does not mean you have lost your freedom. The absence of a threat does not prove you had it.

I define mokṣa as freeing the will from three things that capture the mind: innate tendencies, acquired conditioning and past karmas. That is my working definition, not the only one in our schools. On it, the same act can go two ways. Done only because everyone else did, removing your shoes adds one more layer of conditioning. Done because you decided this moment deserves your whole attention, it frees one choice.

The boy at Sunil’s door is a picture of this, not a proof of it. His heart pulled one way, his mother’s voice another, and the crowd was watching. Nobody is free of influences. Freedom is not the absence of influence. It is the ability to notice your influences, weigh them, and choose.

And there is a second freedom, which matters as much. Will people judge me if I keep my shoes on? They should not. The moment reverence becomes a test of belonging, it turns into pressure. A viewer who keeps his shoes on, because he does not share the faith, or his feet hurt, or the floor is dirty, has done nothing wrong. The freedom to show reverence and the freedom to decline it must be protected together. A public room that honours one and punishes the other has stopped being a temple and become a checkpoint. A shared experience should be judged by what it means to the people inside it, and also by how it treats the people who do not join.

So how do we tell healthy devotion from captured devotion? These are four tests I now apply to any film, guru or movement that moves me.

1. Service: does it ask me to give to others, or to give to it?

2. Questions: can I question it without being punished, mocked or shut out?

3. Freedom: can I walk away, and still be treated with respect?

4. Accountability: when something goes wrong, money or misconduct, is it examined openly, or hidden?

Then one cross-check, which is a signal rather than a test on its own: over time, do I become less afraid, or more? A good teacher can make you face uncomfortable truths; a manipulative one can make you feel safe for a while. That is why the four tests come first. The Gospel puts the principle in a single line:

Ye shall know them by their fruits. (Matthew 7:16) [20]

The teaching associated with Neem Karoli Baba, as his Western devotees remembered it, was to love everyone, feed everyone and remember God [21]. Two of those three instructions point away from the teacher. That is a good sign. It is not a guarantee about any teacher, his institutions or his followers. A kind message does not certify the messenger. That is why the questions must keep being asked.

Part Four — When Reverence Becomes Content

There is one thing in those halls that Jai Santoshi Maa never had: phones.

Three different things happened to the barefoot Muslim viewer, and they should be kept apart. He chose, as far as anyone can tell, to remove his slippers. Someone recorded him and put the clip online; we do not know whether he agreed to that. Then millions of strangers decided what his act meant, “this is the real India”, and used it for their own purposes. He controlled the first. He may not have controlled the second. He had almost no control over the third.

I am using his image too, in this article. That does not give me his reasons. What I am writing about is the life of the clip, not the inside of the man.

This changes devotion in a way we have barely begun to think about. A gesture made for God, or for the moment, is different from a gesture made for a camera. Once people know reverence gets filmed, shared and praised, some of it will be performed for that reason. Platforms reward the most striking performance. If one hall removes its shoes this week, another may light lamps next week, and a third may do something louder still. Piety becomes a competition, and the most visible devotion, not the deepest, wins.

Our tradition named this danger long before smartphones. The Gītā describes austerity of the restless, rājasic kind:

Austerity practised to gain respect, honour and reverence, and done with show, is called rājasic. It is unsteady and does not last. (Bhagavad Gītā 17.18) [14]

The verse is about motive. It gives us a lens for examining performed reverence; it does not let us read any viewer’s heart. A public act can be sincere. A private one can be vain. Most of us act from mixed motives. Visibility is not a measure of depth, in either direction.

There is also a point of honesty I owe the reader. Some of the strongest evidence of devotion at this film came from people with an interest in it. The statement that audiences were removing their shoes came from one of its producers [4]. One of the best-known videos was released under the film team’s name [6]. That does not make the reports false; I saw the same thing with my own eyes. But a careful reader notices who is telling a story, and why. Reverence done and reverence displayed are not the same thing, and only the first is the point.

Sunil’s plastic sheet, in my story, was never filmed. Nobody made a reel of it. In real halls, the same is true of most of what happened. That unfilmed majority may be the most honest evidence of all.

Part Five — What the Ticket Could Not Buy

The most telling moment was not a scene. It was the end. Why did people stay through the credits?

I can offer a reading, not proof. Some may have stayed for the music, some out of devotion, some because nobody wanted to be the first to stand. But I think many were reluctant to leave a state they had entered.

Indian aesthetics has words for this. Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra explains how a performance produces rasa [22]. Rasa is not simply the character’s emotion, nor the viewer’s private feeling. It is the aesthetic tasting of an emotion that the work has shaped and offered, savoured rather than suffered. The Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta, about a thousand years ago, defended śānta rasa, the taste of peace, as a rasa in its own right, though its place was long debated [23]. The film opens in karuṇa rasa, the taste of grief and compassion.

What could move a viewer from the first towards the second? In my viewing: the same chant returning until it stopped being a song and became a rhythm; a story that turns from loss to service; and a hall singing together. For some viewers, a dark hall may also have offered a rare permission to grieve without having to explain themselves. Perhaps what they held on to was both: permission to grieve, and then rest. I cannot say every viewer tasted this. I can say what in the film made it possible.

Now the hard question for my own argument. The film sold tickets. It became a commercial phenomenon. Its team released a video of devotion as publicity. So in what sense was anything “not for sale”?

Three layers need to be kept apart. There is the transaction: people paid to see a film. There is the experience: what some of them met inside the hall, grief, peace, reverence, which no ticket price measures. And there is the circulation: how that experience was later filmed, shared and turned into promotion. All three were real at once. A commercial product can open a door to an experience that is not reducible to commerce, and that experience can then be packaged and sold again.

The film also travelled differently from most hits. It did not rest on a star persona or a large paid campaign; reports describe a slow climb on word of mouth [7] [9]. But the audience’s chanting, and the footage of it, became part of how it travelled. Both are true.

Does the box office prove the film is divine? No. Popularity proves a need, not a truth. The ₹424 crore cannot tell us whether any miracle happened, or what each viewer felt. It tells us that something in the film, or around it, reached a very large number of people. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that part of what reached them was a pause that nobody inside the hall was trying to sell them.

This is the first of four capacities this series is about. A civilisation that can still gather attention that is not wholly for sale is not finished. The question is not only whether a crowd gathers, but what gathers it, who profits from the gathering, and whether people stay free to think. That is why the next three capacities matter: what we do with power, how we take criticism, and whether faith and reason can both stay open to correction.

Shoes at the Door, Judgement Switched On

In the sixth week, Sunil stops asking head office for a procedure. The plastic sheet stays. Someone has laminated the A4 sign; he does not know who.

One evening he notices a man in the back row of Audi 3 with his shoes still on. A woman two seats away glances at the man’s feet, then at Sunil. Sunil says nothing. The man watches quietly, stays through the credits like everyone else, and leaves. On his way out he nods to Sunil, and Sunil nods back.

That nod is the whole argument in one gesture. A room made space for something many people valued, and kept room for the person who did not share it. Nobody demanded that he conform. Nobody filmed him. The next time a crowd makes such a space, judgement will decide whether it is for a saint, for a showman, or for a camera.

Take off your shoes if your heart says so. Never take off your judgement, and never ask anyone else to take off theirs.

Words to keep

These are not slogans. Each line carries a step in the argument.

• “The multiplex did not have to become holy. The people carried the temple in with them.” A place does not need to be consecrated for people to bring reverence into it. The line moves attention from the building to the conduct and attention of the people inside. It is my interpretation, not a claim that every viewer experienced the hall the same way.

• “Explaining how a feeling happens is not the same as proving it is worthless.” Psychology can explain how music, grief and crowds produce emotion. Knowing the mechanism does not make the emotion fake.

• “Feeling something deeply is not the same as proving it is true.” The intensity of an experience is a fact about the experience, not evidence for every belief attached to it. You can honour the experience without accepting all its claims.

• “Freedom is not the absence of influence. It is the ability to notice your influences, weigh them, and choose.” Nobody chooses in a vacuum. Freedom asks for awareness, not escape. Sometimes the practical objection, a mother’s “the floor is dirty”, is the one worth keeping.

• “The freedom to show reverence and the freedom to decline it must be protected together.” A devotional act means most when refusing it remains possible. Keeping your shoes on should never cost you respect.

• “Reverence done and reverence displayed are not the same thing.” The same gesture can express commitment or seek approval, and a camera cannot tell which. This is not an accusation against anyone; it is a reminder that visibility is not depth.

• “Popularity proves a need, not a truth.” Box office shows that a film answered a hunger. It cannot show that its miracles happened, that every viewer felt the same, or that the film is good art.

• “A civilisation that can still gather attention that is not wholly for sale is not finished.” People can meet something inside a paid experience that the ticket does not measure. The warning: the same attention can later be packaged and sold. Ask what gathered the crowd, who profits, and whether people remain free to think.

• “A person is made of faith. As his faith is, so is he.” (Gītā 17.3) The question is not only whether you have faith, but what you place it in and whether it stays open to examination. That modern use is my reading of the verse.

Terms

• Darśana: seeing the divine and being seen by it. I extend it, as an interpretation, to a cinema screen.

• Aṃśa: a part or portion. Devotees regard Neem Karoli Baba as an aṃśa of Hanuman; that is a belief, not a historical finding.

• Rasa: the aesthetic tasting of an emotion shaped by a work of art. Karuṇa is the taste of grief and compassion; śānta the taste of peace, whose status as a rasa was long debated.

How I wrote this

• What I saw: I watched Hanuman Ansh in a cinema. Descriptions of my own hall are my observation. I did not interview viewers, and I do not claim to know their motives.

• What was reported: Claims about the film’s story, audiences and earnings come from the numbered sources. A report that something was said or filmed is not proof of why it happened.

• What is invented: Sunil and the boy are fictional. They illustrate an argument; they are not evidence for it.

• What is mine: Interpretations of texts and events, and my working definition of mokṣa, are written in the first person and are open to dispute.

• Translations: Renderings of Sanskrit and Hindi are my own unless a translator is named. The sources give an edition where the original can be checked.

• Figures: Box-office numbers are reported trade estimates of gross collections as of early October 2026, not audited profits.

• Tools: I researched and revised this series with the help of AI tools for fact-checking and editing. The arguments, the judgements and any errors are mine. If you find an error, tell me; corrections will be noted at the foot of the article.

Sources

1. Neem Karoli Baba, Wikipedia (biographical dates).

2. Hanuman Ansh crosses Rs 150 crore, The Daily Pioneer.

3. Hanuman Ansh review, Gulte.

4. People are watching Hanuman Ansh after removing shoes, Inshorts (statement by producer Anupriya Nagar).

5. A Muslim man watched a Hanuman film barefoot, Ground News.

6. Hanuman Ansh team video: audience removes footwear and joins chanting, Telugu360.

7. Hanuman Ansh’s unexpected box office success, The Week, 8 September 2026.

8. After ₹424 crore run, Hanuman Ansh to release in Telugu, Business Today, 6 October 2026.

9. Hanuman Ansh is more profitable than Toxic, ThePrint.

10. Diana L. Eck, Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India (Chambersburg: Anima Books, 1981; 3rd edn, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

11. Philip Lutgendorf, “Who Wants to be a Goddess? Jai Santoshi Maa Revisited”.

12. Deepa Gahlot, “Ramanand Sagar: From Movie Mogul to TV Czar”, Seniors Today.

13. Hanuman Ansh review, Deccan Chronicle.

14. Bhagavad Gītā 9.26, 17.3 and 17.18. Sanskrit text and several standard translations at the Gita Supersite, IIT Kanpur. Renderings here are mine.

15. Kabir, Moko kahāṃ ḍhūḍhe re bande. An early English version is No. 1 in Rabindranath Tagore (trans.), Songs of Kabir (New York: Macmillan, 1915). The rendering here is mine; the song survives in many versions.

16. Ram Dass, Miracle of Love: Stories about Neem Karoli Baba (New York: Dutton, 1979). Quoted in his translation.

17. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995).

18. Ṛgveda 1.164.46. See Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton (trans.), The Rigveda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). The rendering here is mine.

19. MSG: The Messenger, Wikipedia (summary of critical reception).

20. Gospel of Matthew 7:16, King James Version.

21. Review of Parvati Markus, Love Everyone, Publishers Weekly.

22. Bharata, Nāṭyaśāstra, chapter 6, trans. Manomohan Ghosh (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1950).

23. J. L. Masson and M. V. Patwardhan, Śāntarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Aesthetics (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1969).