By Samit Garg
For decades, India has sat on what might be the world’s most valuable intellectual property vault. India mythology and spiritualism – that served and moved many of us. But we haven’t used it to create a global cultural current.
We’re talking about mythology as narrative architecture – the kind that built billion-dollar franchises for everyone except us.
Consider what others have done with far less material.
Sony took Greek mythology and built God of War into a franchise worth hundreds of millions. China recently dropped Black Myth: Wukong, which moved 10 million copies in three days by reimagining Journey to the West through Unreal Engine 5. Even Hades, an indie game from a small American studio, turned Greek gods into a roguelike masterpiece that won Game of the Year and demonstrated how ancient myth could speak to PlayStation 5 audiences.
Meanwhile, India – home to the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, and a cosmology so vast it makes Greek mythology look like a short story collection has struggled to translate any of it into a format the world actually wants to consume. In short, we haven’t made a product. We haven’t built IP.
Until, possibly, now.
Enter the Cultural-Tech Category
Shiva Immersive, launching December 22 in Delhi, is positioning itself as something India has never produced before: an immersive mythology franchise designed not just for the faithful, but for the global experiential entertainment market.
This is a $2 million, 45-minute, multi-sensory installation featuring 360° projection mapping, spatial audio, kinetic scenography, and computer aided dramaturgy – is essentially mythology told through the language of cinema, gaming, and installation art.
This is India’s first attempt at what the makers, E-Factor Experiences is calling “cultural-tech”, where mythology meets motherboard and becomes globally exportable IP.
The term matters. Not “tech-enabled culture.” Not “digital heritage.” Culture and technology as co-equal forces, producing something that belongs fully to neither
Think about what TeamLab Borderless did for Japan. It’s now Tokyo’s top tourist attraction ; not a shrine, not a historic site, but an art-tech installation that became synonymous with contemporary Japanese creativity. Or consider how Korean game developers like Pearl Abyss and Nexon built global franchises by encoding Korean aesthetics into gameplay systems. These aren’t exports of tradition; they’re tradition recompiled into the syntax of global entertainment.
That’s the opportunity Shiva Immersive is chasing. And if it works, it could finally answer a question India’s creative economy has been avoiding for 30 years: How do we turn 3,000 years of narrative wealth into 21st-century opportunities?
And India gets something it’s never had: a cultural product category that’s both economically viable and globally competitive.
Apart from Bollywood (which struggles outside specific markets) or classical arts (economically marginal).
Something entirely new.
Why Games Got There First
The gaming industry figured this out because it had no choice.
Games are inherently global products – built for digital distribution, consumed across cultures, monetized through engagement rather than geography. When a studio in Poland makes The Witcher using Slavic folklore, or when China’s miHoYo builds Genshin Impact around a fantasy inspired by Chinese regional aesthetics, they’re not making content for their domestic market that happens to export. They’re building global IP from the ground up, using cultural specificity as differentiation rather than limitation.
India’s gaming industry has produced glimpses of this. Raji: An Ancient Epic (2020) was a small but significant indie game that used Indian mythology as its narrative foundation and sold globally on Steam, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch. It wasn’t trying to teach Hindu philosophy -it was trying to deliver a good third-person action-adventure experience that happened to be set in a world inspired by Indian myth. The game didn’t succeed because of its cultural content; it succeeded despite people’s assumptions about what “Indian culture” could mean in a gaming context.
That’s the template.
Cultural specificity as texture, not sermon. Mythology as architecture, not ideology.
The Industrial Argument
What makes Shiva Immersive potentially significant isn’t just that it’s “immersive” or “high-tech.”
Plenty of projection mapping exists. Plenty of museums have tried multi-sensory installations. What matters is the industrial logic behind it.
This is designed as a franchise model: Delhi for three months, then Mumbai, then replicable across metros and diaspora hubs like London, Dubai, Singapore. It’s not a one-off cultural statement. It’s a revenue engine that also creates employment & promotes skill development. Three to five shows daily, competing directly with multiplexes, Netflix binges, and escape rooms for experiential spending.
It’s positioned in the same mental category as Meow Wolf in the US or ARTECHOUSE installations – cultural experiences that operate as entertainment businesses.
This is critical.
Because India’s creative economy has traditionally operated in two modes: either commercially successful but aesthetically different (Bollywood masala), or culturally serious but economically marginal (art films, classical performances). There’s been almost no middle ground, no equivalent to what Broadway musicals are to American theater, or what manga is to Japanese publishing. No format that’s both culturally credible and industrially scalable.
Shiva Immersive is attempting to build precisely that middle ground. It’s not dumbing down mythology for mass appeal, but it’s also not presenting it as solely educational heritage.
It uses Sharad Kelkar’s voice (recognizable, cinematic) and spatial audio design to create an aesthetic experience rather than a devotional one. The 45-minute runtime is deliberate short enough for repeat visits, long enough to justify ticket pricing that matches premium entertainment.
The Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet
If this model works, the second-order effects could matter more than the first. Because what gets created isn’t just a show, it’s a skills ecosystem.
Right now, India doesn’t meaningfully train “experience architects” or “spatial sound designers” or “mythology-technologists.” These aren’t job categories that exist in any formal sense.
But if Shiva Immersive generates copycats if a Ramayana version launches in Bangalore, if a Krishna immersive opens in Mathura, if suddenly there’s demand for 50 such installations across India and diaspora markets, then you’d need to build that workforce.
This is how industries emerge through commercial proof-of-concept that creates demand for specialized labor. Korea’s rise to industrial eco systems around k drama is proof of this.
India’s creative economy needs those proof-of-concept moments.
Because the raw materials are absurdly abundant.
The Mahabharata alone contains enough narrative complexity to generate a Marvel Cinematic Universe-scale franchise. The cosmology of Shiva creation, destruction, the dance of time is begging for the kind of abstract, philosophical interpretation that audiences who loved Arrival or Blade Runner 2049 would respond to.
But storytelling at that level requires infrastructure: studios that can handle real-time rendering, sound designers who understand spatial audio, narrative architects who can structure non-linear experiences. These capabilities exist globally – Meow Wolf has them, teamLab has them, Moment Factory in Montreal has them. They just don’t exist in India at a meaningful scale.
The Exportability Question
The real test will be whether this works outside India. Not just among diaspora audiences (who might come for nostalgia or identity reasons), but among genuinely global audiences who have no prior relationship with Shiva as a concept.
This is where the comparison to Black Myth: Wukong becomes instructive. That game succeeded globally not because international audiences knew Journey to the West, but because the gameplay was excellent and the visual design was stunning.
The cultural specificity became flavor, not barrier.
You didn’t need to understand Buddhist cosmology to appreciate the boss fights.
If Shiva Immersive can achieve something similar – if someone in London or Singapore can walk into that installation, know nothing about Hindu mythology, and still walk out feeling like they experienced something profound, then it’s solved the exportability problem.
It will have demonstrated that Indian mythology can be substrate for universal storytelling, not just content for the already-converted.
The mythology has always been there. The technology is finally catching up. The question is whether the industrial imagination is ready.
This isn’t an event; it’s category rupture cultural-tech where ancient ore meets motherboard, birthing IP that travels light, scales infinite.
Shiva Immersive is the fracture point – our mythology, future-proofed, unbound. This may very well be the start of Prime Minister’s vision of taking our intellectual heritage and spiritualism global.
Author, is the Co-Founder of E-Factor Experiences Limited- An experience creation company and President of Eema
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.