Siva Rama Raju

Siva Rama Raju is a 2002 Telugu action family drama directed by V. Samudra and produced by R. B. Choudary under Super Good Films. Nandamuri Harikrishna, Jagapathi Babu, Venkat, Sivaji and Monica star, and S. A. Rajkumar composed the music. A remake of the Tamil film Samudhiram (2001), with a flashback borrowed from another Tamil film, Simmarasi (1998), it was released on 1 November 2002 and runs 164 minutes.

What the story is about

Three brothers from a village royal family, Sivaramaraju, Rama Raju and Raju, are inseparable and dote on their little sister Swathi, who is to choose all three of their brides. When the arrogant son of a neighbouring zamindar, Aakash, is slighted by the brothers at the village goddess’s festival, his father Narendra Varma takes revenge in a roundabout way: he arranges for Aakash to marry Swathi and demands the family’s entire wealth as the price. The brothers cheerfully hand it over and move into a small cottage to farm, while Swathi, suffering in her new home, keeps them at arm’s length to spare them humiliation. The film follows the brothers’ loyalty to their sister and the story of their late father, Ananda Bhupathi Raju, told in flashback.

Cast and crew

• Jagapathi Babu as Siva Rama Raju
• Nandamuri Harikrishna as Ananda Bhupathi Raju
• Venkat as Rama Raju and Sivaji as Raju
• Monica as Swathi
• Poonam Singar as Rajeswari, Laya as Janaki and Kanchi Kaul as Rani
• Anandaraj as Veeraju Varma and Rami Reddy as Rajeswari’s father
• Brahmanandam, Dharmavarapu Subramanyam, L. B. Sriram and Tirupathi Prakash

Director: V. Samudra. Producer: R. B. Choudary. Music: S. A. Rajkumar, lyrics by Chirravuri Vijay Kumar.

Music

Apart from “Ding Ding”, every song reuses an earlier Rajkumar tune from a Tamil film, from Samudhiram, Simmarasi and Surya Vamsam. Telugu Cinema’s audio review found the songs less impressive than his earlier hits but said they “can sound better and better as one keeps listening”. The house sets were built at Ramanaidu Studios.

Reviews

Critics were unimpressed. Idlebrain said the director aimed at mass and family audiences with sister sentiment and “forced mass elements”, handled the first half sensibly but lost the second, and used Harikrishna in a 25-minute flashback to cash in on his earlier success. Full Hyderabad found every scene loud and every emotion exaggerated, and Telugu Cinema expected it to be at best average in B and C centres. We have no box-office figures for it from a named outlet. The film was remade in Kannada as Paramashiva (2014).

Where to watch Siva Rama Raju

We do not have a confirmed streaming listing for Siva Rama Raju on file. If we verify one with a platform, it will appear on this page.

Sources: the Wikipedia article on Siva Rama Raju and the reviews it cites, linked above; our own cast and crew records.