Anupriya Nagar
About

The economist who chose to tell a story that lasts

At twenty-one, one of the youngest feature-film producers in the world. Economist, artist and storyteller, born in Mumbai, built in London, carrying a spiritual story to more than twenty countries.

21Debut producer20+Countries10+Years in art£10kRaised for charity

Anupriya Nagar is an economist turned film producer, and one of the youngest people ever to produce a feature film. She did not arrive in cinema the usual way. She arrived through numbers, through art, through service, and finally through a question that a whole generation seems to be asking at once: in a world that never stops, how do you find something that stays?

Originally from Mumbai, Anupriya moved to the United Kingdom to read Economics at the University of Bath, one of the leading economics faculties in the country. Economics gave her a way of seeing the world as a system of incentives, behaviour and value, and she was good at it, later carrying that same analytical instinct into research on innovative ecosystem banking. But a spreadsheet, she is fond of saying, can describe a life without ever explaining why it matters. That gap, between what can be measured and what is actually felt, is where her real work began.

Living far from home, she noticed something in the people around her, and in herself. Her generation was extraordinarily connected and quietly exhausted, endlessly productive and strangely unsure. They had every tool for success and very little language for meaning. Rather than treat that as a private mood, she treated it as a problem worth solving, and the answer she kept returning to was one she had grown up beside without fully seeing it: Indian culture, devotion, and the simple, radical idea of service.

"I don't see spirituality as something distant. It is something you live every day."
Anupriya Nagar, producer and storyteller
A decade in art

Ten years of making things by hand

Before she ever produced a frame of film, Anupriya was an artist. She held her first group exhibition at the age of twelve and scored a perfect hundred in ICSE Art, and for over a decade she has kept making, drawing and collecting. Art taught her the discipline that cinema now demands of her: that taste is built slowly, that detail is not decoration, and that an audience can feel the difference between something made carefully and something made quickly.

At Bath she carried that sensibility into student life, serving as Treasurer of both the Bath Fine Art Society and the Bath Indian Dance Society, and leading outreach for the Women in Business Society. She represented her university and her country in Bollywood dance at Just Bollywood 2022 in London, where her team won the head-to-head award, an experience that taught her how devotion and performance can move a room the way few things can.

Leadership & service

Seva came long before the film

If there is one thread that runs through everything Anupriya has done, it is service, what in Hindi is called seva, the act of giving without keeping score. As Chair of Raise and Give (RAG) at the University of Bath, she led students in raising ten thousand pounds for the university's chosen charities, work that earned her the title of Volunteer of the Month in September 2023. She has taught spoken English to underprivileged children, volunteered with the British Heart Foundation in London, and raised funds for cancer patients at the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai. Through her Just Bollywood performance she helped raise money for Snehalaya and Nanhi Kali, organisations working with vulnerable women and girls in India.

None of this was a stepping stone to a film. It was, and remains, simply how she believes a person should move through the world. When she talks about Hanuman Ansh, she talks about seva in exactly the same breath, because for her the film is not a departure from that life of service, it is its natural extension onto a bigger screen.

House of LordsInvited to speak in London
Volunteer of the MonthRaise & Give, Bath, 2023
Just Bollywood 2022Head-to-head winners
Perfect 100ICSE Art
Why cinema

From economics to emotion

People sometimes ask how an economist becomes a film producer at twenty-one. Anupriya's answer is that both are really about value, and about noticing what a market has failed to price. She saw a generation starving for stillness, for meaning, for a story that did not shout, and she saw an industry that mostly answered that hunger with more noise. Hanuman Ansh is her response: a film built not as a product to be consumed and forgotten, but as an experience meant to stay with you, the way a real conversation does.

She has carried that idea onto some of the most significant stages in the world, from an invitation to speak at the House of Lords in London to conversations across more than twenty countries. Wherever she goes, the message is the same, and it is disarmingly simple. Slow down. Serve someone. Pay attention. It is an old idea, older than any of us, and somehow it has never felt more urgent.

"Real ambition, I've learned, is creating something that emotionally stays with people."
Discover Hanuman Ansh →