-Anjali Pathiyath

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) is a romantic Bollywood drama, written and directed by Karan Johar, starring Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, and Rani Mukherjee. The movie narrates the triangular love story between three youngsters – Rahul, Anjali, and Tina – and follows their lives through the years of college and beyond.
Karan Johar was the first of many directors to make a foray on a hitherto unexplored path of cinema-making in the 90’s, which later came to be termed as the “new-age” cinema of Bollywood.  Typical of all Johar movies, this too is characterized by exotic foreign locales, an urban cosmopolitan culture, and an upper middle-class “young generation” who, largely sporting western wear, are still “desi” at heart, when it counts. To begin with, a girl and a boy are “best friends”, apparently overthrowing conventional gender roles, and that too despite the Indian definition of friendship immortalized by filmmaker Barjatya where a girl and a guy can never remain “just friends”. Anjali, being a tomboy who prefers jeans rather than skirts, and basketball over the knitting basket, is not seen as a romantic possibility by our urban protagonist Rahul, until she goes in for a make-over and graduates from jeans and t-shirts to chiffon saris and long hair.  This provides us an interesting take on the gender norms in our society; more so because it is coming from a director who unabashedly wears the medal for being the pioneer of this genre of the so-called “progressive, modern, and liberal cinema” in the Hindi film industry today. The friendship between the college-mates Rahul and Anjali is completely devoid of any sexual tension, owing to the explicit lack of any heteronormative feminine sexuality displayed by Anjali. But years and makeovers later, their friendship as fully grown adults is fraught with sexual tension; the mutual desire and attraction is overtly emphasized by external factors like rain (and subsequent rain dancing), slipping saris, and chilly breezes that function as catalysts to underscore the “romance in the air”, as if the long looks and awkward silences between conversations weren’t enough to drive the point home. Moreover, whether in college as youngsters or years later as mature adults, despite having their own individual agency, it is interesting to note that the man is unfailingly always the one to make the first move in the act of courtship.
As a young woman revisiting this movie years later, I cannot help but see that the moral one is asked to take home is that social conditioning and years of dominant mainstream notions of “romance” and “love” will inevitably lead to women becoming “friend-zoned” (the current popular term  for not being romantically attractive), if you venture out of your confining boxes of normative gender stereotypes and don’t try to fit in with the rest of society. In other words, nice women who are not normal in their culture of sexualization and gendering are likely not to find love or get married.  In the movie, things only end happily)when the subverted notions of gender and relationships are brought back into order and above all, the “Indian tradition” is kept alive and thriving, this despite the movie being the story of urban, liberalized young adults living in post-colonial “modern” India. The movie may have been “modern and westernized” for its times, but in some ways, it is also regressive in the sense that it reinforces certain traditional and orthodox ideologies about gender and relationships in our country.
Anjali is a student at English and Foreign Languages University