Filmmakers Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon have collaborated for their new sci-fi fantasy universe ‘MAYA’. Gandhi is the man behind titles like Ship Of Theseus and Tumbbad. And the new attempt at pushing the envelope seems just as exciting and pulsating.
In 2019, Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon launched SHASN, a political strategy board game that lets players roleplay as politicians navigating power, ideology and public opinion. It was a smash hit, picking up the Social Impact Award at IndieCade Europe in 2021.
And after its success, SHASN proved a theory: that politics can be played. In the process, Memon built a new syntax for storytelling rules and grammar that now form the foundation for their next, even more ambitious world-building experiments.
In an exclusive interview with Firstpost, the filmmakers spoke about the idea of Maya, the genre of sci-fi in the landscape of Indian cinema, and films that inspired them during their impressionable ages.
Edited excerpts from the interview
You have always pushed the envelope in terms of storytelling right from Ship of Theseus to Tumbbad. What can we expect in Maya?
MAYA is the culmination of our life’s work. Ship of Theseus examined the self, continuity and meaning. Tumbbad used folk-inspired horror to present a thesis on greed and evolving power structures. MAYA is a civilizational epic that turns to the biggest questions shaping modern life: What does human agency look like when the systems we live inside can quietly shape our futures? How does a society grapple with an accelerating divide between haves and have-nots?
To even begin to answer those questions, we simulated an entire planet from scratch. We worked with geologists, biologists, linguists, architects and many others to create a living, breathing system that holds together along consistent first principles. Every species, every technology, every belief system in MAYA emerges from the interaction of those rule sets.
What you can expect from this is a science-fantasy narrative universe that stretches across novels, games, films and immersive experiences, with each format revealing textures the others cannot. MAYA is the most ambitious story we’ve ever attempted. The task in front of us is monumental. Each story set in MAYA should feel simple and enthralling on first encounter, and then invite you into a long treasure hunt of underlying layers if you choose to keep digging.
Where did the idea stem from for Maya?
MAYA began with a persistent unease about the world we inhabit. We found ourselves asking: What does freedom mean when algorithms can predict and manufacture our desires? Given that our current technological capabilities could feed everyone, why does scarcity still define the human experience? How do we create authentic meaning when reality itself feels increasingly authored by forces we cannot see?
None of the frameworks we had inherited felt adequate to diagnose these problems, let alone help us solve them. We realised we needed a new mythology that could translate the unprecedented challenges of a hyperconnected, AI-shaped century into compelling fables and epics.
Over the past four years, we’ve assembled an extraordinary team of more than 200 artists and thinkers from around the world. Out of those collaborations, we’ve been able to lay the foundations of a new global mythology. The work, however, has only just begun. We expect to be building and evolving MAYA for the rest of our lives.
What is your take on the genre of sci-fi and the way it’s been essayed in Indian cinema?
Science fiction has incredible potential as a genre because it allows us to prototype possible futures and reverse-engineer the values we need to reach desired futures or avoid unwanted ones. The best science fiction uses technology as a vehicle to examine the most fundamental questions about human behaviour, values, and objectives.
There have been some evocative sci-fi films in Indian cinema, but we have largely treated the genre as spectacle divorced from meaningful inquiry. We have borrowed the markers of aesthetic and grammar without engaging with the philosophical depth that makes the genre truly transformative. There has been a tendency to replicate other templates or treat the label as window dressing for simpler stories.
MAYA is our attempt to demonstrate what becomes possible when you combine the rigor of hard science fiction with the South Asian philosophical tradition, and the magic systems of high fantasy.
Are there any specific films that inspired you as collaborators made in any language?
The Matrix, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey have been foundational for both of us. These are works of modern myth-making that quietly shaped our worldview and our craft. What is remarkable about them is how they use spectacle in service of big ideas: the nature of reality, the seduction of transcendence, the cost of birthing new forms of sentience.
We’re just as influenced by non–science fiction cinema. Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Kusturica’s Underground, Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor, the films of Kurosawa, Miyazaki, Spielberg, Villeneuve, Lanthimos, Östlund… the list really does go on. Each of them has taught us something different about tone, rhythm, performance, or moral complexity.
Beyond cinema, we lean heavily on literature. Ursula K. Le Guin’s anthropological intelligence, Asimov’s philosophical architecture, the precise scientific optimism of contemporary authors like Ted Chiang, Kim Stanley Robinson, Andy Weir, the civilizational sweep of Frank Herbert’s Dune… these are some of the imaginations we’re in constant conversation with while building MAYA.
What was the most surprising thing you discovered while making Maya?
The most surprising discovery was how quickly the world of MAYA started arguing back with us. We began with abstract systems: ecological, political, economic. Then we dropped characters into those systems and they refused to behave predictably. Yachay would resist doing what the plot politely asked of him. Kshar’s moral conflicts forced us to rethink the entire political history of the Naags from first principles.
The world came to life when it was no longer a canvas for us to paint on, but a collaborator that demanded respect. The realization was that truly robust worldbuilding creates a system complex enough to generate its own internal logic, its own conflicts, its own stories.
The other revelation arrived when we finally shared MAYA. The first book crossed about $423,000 in pre-orders in its first month. For a completely new universe, that response felt astonishing. It told us that readers are waiting for new mythologies that speak to the world they actually inhabit. That trust is both humbling and incredibly energising.
What kind of legacy do you hope Maya leaves behind?
Our deepest hope is that MAYA becomes a shared world mythology. Not just something people consume, but something they contribute to. The foundation is in place, but ideally, five or ten years from now, the most powerful stories in the MAYA universe will come from someone else. Young artists, scientists, educators, storytellers, who take our ideas as a starting point and expand them, or better yet, reject them completely for even greater rigor.
Beyond that, we hope MAYA gives people a new way of seeing. We want audiences to develop an intuitive understanding of how attention economies function, how their choices are narrowed, how their futures are nudged.
Stories are civilization’s most powerful but underutilized technology. MAYA is a proposition to use that technology with intention and purpose.
If you had to describe Maya in one sentence that captures its essence, what would it be?
MAYA is a new mythology for the twenty-first century, a cognitive toolkit disguised as an epic sci-fi fantasy that reveals the invisible architectures of our reality.
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