Filmmaker Anand Gandhi And Game Designer Zain Memon's 'Maya' Is Where The Old Gods Meet The Algorithms: 'The Future Needs Its Own Mythology'
An ambitious science-fiction fantasy, 'Maya' promises to offer an immersive experience, aiming to craft a living mythology for the algorithm-driven age.
Published : August 2, 2025 at 5:10 PM IST
They say great stories begin and end with a question. For filmmaker Anand Gandhi, this is true! In Ship of Theseus, Gandhi invited us to ask: 'What makes us who we are? In Tumbbad, he led us into the labyrinth of greed and myth, making us wonder, 'What happens when human desire feeds on itself endlessly?' These weren't just films for entertainment, but philosophical provocations wrapped in cinematic spectacle. Now, alongside collaborator Zain Memon, a game designer, Gandhi has attempted something that makes those earlier works look like prologues. Their new ambitious project, Maya Narrative Universe, a science fiction, isn't just a film or a book – it's an entire storytelling ecosystem.
Science Fiction, but Real
Think of sprawling science-fiction fantasy worlds that unfold not only on cinema screens but also across diverse media, including films, games, novels, toys, graphic novels, and immersive experiences. It's a multi-decade odyssey that aims to become a living mythology for the 21st-century age of AI. It will begin with the release of the novel Maya: Seed Takes Root. But why take on something so vast, so complex, that it could take years, in this case, four years, to fully realise? For Gandhi, the answer begins in the oldest of places: the very birth of storytelling itself. “The inspiration was a question we tried to answer with great intellectual honesty about whether the work we do as storytellers can genuinely serve society," Gandhi says.
He paints an evocative picture of humanity’s first storyteller, who was a woman in prehistoric times, collecting berries. She learns through trials and sometimes errors to know which ones are safe to eat and which are not. She passes this knowledge to her kin by etching symbols on cave walls so the future generations might survive. "She was also a journalist, a scientist, and an artist. We, as her descendants, have become more specialised over millennia, breaking down the vast complexity of life into narrow silos, serotonin molecules for neuroscientists, qubits for quantum physicists, narrative structures for storytellers. But in doing so, we have lost the ability to piece these fragments back together," expresses the director.
A Moral Compass For 21st Century
Gandhi argues that this fragmentation has a cost as behavioural economists don't talk to behavioural biologists, scientists, artists, and policy-makers often speak different languages, "So the world has grown more complex, but our stories haven't evolved to help us navigate it." And that’s where Maya comes in. For Gandhi and Memon, the role of the 21st-century storyteller isn’t only to entertain, it’s to bridge these silos, to help one differentiate between good from bad, nourishment from poison, and reality from illusion. "The problem is that storytellers often don’t study the very systems that shape the world, science, AI, policy, and democratic structures. Intuition is no longer enough. Systems have become too complex to navigate without understanding them deeply,” says Gandhi.
So, the two are building a toolkit, not as a textbook, but as a fable. Just as Buddhist parables, Indian itihasas and Greek myths gave humans a moral compass to navigate life. Memon says, "Maya aims to become a modern mythology rooted in science, systems thinking, and the urgent realities of the 21st century."
A New Universe
When asked if Maya’s preoccupation with technology and AI is about making it more relevant to the Gen Alpha generation, Gandhi is quick to expand the frame. “AI and certain technologies are just one of the many problems and many opportunities we will have to tackle in the coming decades,” he says. “At the pace things are evolving, we don’t even know all the problems yet. So what we need is for our cultural software to catch up to technology. We can’t let technology run amok without institutions to safeguard both the technology and ourselves from it. While we are living in times of great bounty, we also have to make sure this garden isn’t overrun with weeds," stresses the filmmaker.
For Gandhi, technology is not just a contemporary obsession—it’s been part of the human story forever. “The invention of cave painting was technology. Writing was technology. The pen, the plough, these were all tools to extend human capacity. So this isn’t a new conversation. It’s an ancient one. But the new aspects of this conversation require new storytelling frameworks. That’s why it’s both timely and urgent to talk about these ideas now.”
So, is Maya simply a sci-fi project designed for the modern age? Gandhi nods in positive, but addressing a crucial distinction. "The genre of the world is science fiction, and within science fiction it’s hard science fiction,” he says. “By that we mean everything in the world is scientifically plausible," he says. To enable this, the duo assembled an "army of scientists". While geologists helped design the planet's terrain, evolutionary biologists created its species and ecosystems, and economists modelled societies. "Like all science fiction, it’s a blueprint for the world we want to live in. At the end, it's about personal human stories told through the medium of science fiction," says Memon.
Looking Outward, Connecting Inward
Unlike most science fiction that looks outward, Maya turns inward. Gandhi draws on India's tradition of fables and lore – from Jataka tales to local katha – stories that are at the core of human questions like 'what does it mean to be alive? To be yourself? Where are you headed?
"These stories cut through the noise of everyday life and go to the heart of the questions," says Gandhi. This tradition, he says, is not something they have invented but inherited. "India's rich narrative heritage has always used myth, allegory, and parable to explore the invisible landscapes of the inner self. At the same time there is an incredible wealth of resources from modern sciences and Western thought, political philosophy, democratic theory, experiments in collective decision-making. What we are trying to do is bridge the East and the West, creating a common language that synthesises the great wisdom of the East with the great insights and frameworks of the West into one unified framework for the 21st century," he adds.
Does that mean Maya borrows directly from Indian mythology or folklore to set its futuristic world? "It's indirect. We feel privileged to be part of this long tradition of storytellers from this country who have used lore. Like in Tumbbad, which could have only been made in India. It was an extension of a dialogue that’s been going on for centuries in this part of the world," Gandhi clarifies.
Folklore, Mythology, and the Futuristic Lens
Much like Tumbbad drew on the texture of Indian folklore while creating something entirely new, Maya builds on inherited wisdom without replicating old tales verbatim. Gandhi points to the philosophical foundations like Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Yoga, and Samkhya, whose epistemological and ontological frameworks have seeped into their thinking. "Puranic myths and centuries-old ideas shape the worldview, even if the surface narrative is freshly imagined. So what we’ve tried to do is create new stories within these traditions. The richness comes from that interplay, the old informing the new, the timeless questions meeting the tools of the future,” he says.
We ask if Maya is stepping into the territory of speculative science fiction just like his earlier works, he agrees. “Our harshest critics, who are also our closest friends, often say our work is too didactic,” Gandhi admits. “It’s too explicit in its morality, almost like Dada-Dadi’s tales. We don’t want any guessing. We are not interested in ambiguous endings. What we want is to use stories to give ideas, warnings, prescriptions, and solutions to the modern world.”
The Gap, and Why It Persists
Like Tumbbad and Ship of Theseus by Gandhi and Shasn, a political strategy game by Zain Memon, Maya will also be unapologetically prescriptive. It will offer maps of where humanity could go, and a compass for where we might go, to steer in the right direction. But these ideas aren’t meant to be dictates. Gandhi and Memon have designed Maya as an 'ideology sandbox', a place where people from all walks of life can contribute ideas and debate solutions. At its core, Maya tackles what Gandhi calls “the biggest challenge of our time”: inequity.
“We have technology to grow food in space, but we haven’t figured out how to feed two billion people here on Earth. That’s a serious problem,” says Gandhi. The gap is evident, but Maya is less concerned with pointing fingers and more interested in understanding the systems that perpetuate it. “What happens is we keep pointing fingers at political leaders, at corporate leaders. But in a world as complex as ours, we are also those leaders. Many of us perpetuate the very systems we are victims of, often without realising where the perpetrator ends and the victim begins within ourselves," he stresses. “Kings, rulers, and CEOs will come and go. What remains are our collective wisdom and our collective anxieties. Those are what we must address.”
While his stories may be rooted in Indian culture, they resonate far beyond it. “We grew up on media, culture, philosophy, and science from all over the world,” he says. “We inhabit the American, European, Australian, and African zeitgeist as much as we inhabit the Indian zeitgeist. When we tell a story, we are speaking about where we are as a civilisation, and where all of us as a collective are headed,” says Memon.
Artistic Vision Meets Commercial Reality
During this conversation, Gandhi also said that he never looks for creating a film that banks multi-millions, but something that resonates with the audience universally. For instance, Tumbbad was set in India but resonated with audiences worldwide, making it one of the highest-grossing re-releases of the year. It was the same with his Ship of Theseus. And for Memon, his board game Shasn has seen tremendous commercial success.
However, navigating the space between art and commerce is never easy, especially for a work as ambitious as Maya. The duo insists that they are not chasing mega-budget, box-office-first formulas, but that doesn't mean commercial success is irrelevant. "With Tumbbad, Ship of Theseus, and our documentaries, we have seen tremendous commercial success. The idea is to create work so resonant that it finds its audience, whether in India or around the world," says Memon before we sign off.
Read More:
- Interview | Makarand Deshpande: "My Plays Are Connected To Life And Life Never Gets Outdated"
- Exclusive | Puneet Issar: 'Most TV Actors Today Are Speaking The Lines, They Don’t Internalise The Character'
- Exclusive | Rituparna Sengupta: "I Was Over The Moon When Sharmila Tagore Said She Wants To Do A Movie With Me"
