Dr. R. Ganesh is a 'shatavadhani' and one of India's foremost Sanskrit poets and scholars. He writes and lectures extensively on various subjects pertaining to India and Indian cultural heritage. He is a master of the ancient art of avadhana and is credited with reviving the art in Kannada. He is a recipient of the Badarayana-Vyasa Puraskar from the President of India for his contribution to the Sanskrit language.  He writes:

''The epics and mythology of a culture deeply influence art and literature. This is pronounced in the case of India, as our heritage still has the unbroken, living tradition of the sublime epics and their fascinating stories. For close to three millennia, our culture has drawn inspiring themes from these perennial sources, thus perpetuating their metaphorically powerful and aesthetically elevating expressions. All art forms of India—irrespective of distinctions like classical and non-classical, traditional and modern—are indebted to our extraordinary epic heritage. It is quite natural to explore this for the purpose of film-making. India still enlivens and celebrates its past and so it is no wonder that even a modern medium like movie-making was inspired by mythology. India's first ever celluloid venture Raja Harishchandra (1913) of Dadasaheb Phalke is based on the story of a king from the solar dynasty, a torchbearer of truth, a theme that finds its roots in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (Ṛgveda), Devībhāgavata Purāṇa and the Rāmāyaṇa.''

''But among the two thousand plus 'talkies' that have been produced in Kannada since 1934, hardly fifty or sixty movies were made based on our epic mythology until 2000. Later, in these seventeen years (up to April 2017), no more such films have been produced. In the past eighty-three years, less than three percent of the movies have had a mythological theme; the number of mythological films drastically decreased year by year and decade by decade. This fact can be verified by looking at the ratio of the total number of films that were produced in every year/decade against the number of mythological movies that were made in the respective period.''

''In the present article, statistical details are not elaborated, as the emphasis shall be on the aesthetics and cultural philosophy that work behind film-making in Kannada. We will, however, study this topic by comparing it primarily with Telugu cinema. This consideration is not out of place, for the Telugu film industry has produced the maximum number of mythological movies in India, and most of them being of a high quality. As languages, Kannada and Telugu have many similarities, which include aspects of culture and aesthetics. Furthermore, even the traditions of movie-making in these languages are similar. Just one instance of the many similarities: films of both languages were produced in an alien location (Chennai, which was then Madras).''

From his article on Kannada films and Mythology 

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