As soon as eight-year-old Anjali (Sana Saeed) watches a game being aired on The Neelam Show where the participants must respond with the first word that comes to their mind after hearing a random prompt, she knows that’s all she needs to set her secret agenda into motion. So once her widowed father Rahul Khanna (Shah Rukh Khan) returns home, she springs to act as a facilitator and recreate the game with him.
After a brief detour of prompts, she finally utters “Anjali” and curiously (though favorably to her), her father’s response is “Sharma”. Now, following patrilineal norms, Anjali Sharma (hereafter, Anjali S.) cannot possibly be Rahul’s daughter whose official name – as has been previously mentioned during a school competition – is Anjali Khanna (hereafter, Anjali K.). The name Rahul blurts out is actually that of his college best friend (played by Kajol).
Of Sharmas and Khannas: Anjali(s) Reorienting Rahul
Rahul’s prompt reply of “Sharma” to “Anjali” subtly reveals the unfinished nature of his relationship with Anjali Sharma who is yet to become Anjali Khanna; is yet to be united with Rahul in matrimony
Indeed, Anjali S.’s presence haunts the film from the very beginning. Be it in the hospital scene where moments before her demise, Rahul’s wife Tina (Rani Mukherji) peculiarly makes him promise that he would name their newborn daughter “Anjali”, or in the clap-and-boop routine that Rahul enacts with his daughter – which is later revealed to be something Rahul and Anjali S. used to do in college – the presence of Anjali S. looms large in Karan Johar’s romantic drama Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998, hereafter KKHH).
And rightfully so, for KKHH narrates the story of rekindled romance between Rahul and Anjali S., a love that might otherwise have blossomed had it not been derailed by Tina’s arrival in college and Rahul’s ensuing infatuation. Now, nearly a decade later, fate and a series of interventions by Anjali K. – who acts on her deceased mother’s wish to bring Rahul and Anjali S. together, revealed to her in a letter – offers the erstwhile best friends a second chance at what could have been.
Thus, viewed differently, Rahul’s prompt reply of “Sharma” to “Anjali” subtly reveals the unfinished nature of his relationship with Anjali Sharma who is yet to become Anjali Khanna; is yet to be united with Rahul in matrimony – the normative closure to romantic conjugations in mainstream Bollywood films (especially those made before the rise of multiplex films following globalization that variously changed the norms of cinematic conjugations in Bollywood; see Sangita Gopal, 2011)
From Impossible to Irresistible: The Feminization of Anjali S.
The transition from intimate heterosocial friendship to heterosexual romance that KKHH portrays, however, is obviously far more complicated than that in later films like Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), Jab We Met (2007), Jaane Tu…Ya Jaane Na (2008), and I Hate Luv Storys (2010). This is not just because unlike these, KKHH escalates the common trope of third-person love-interest (here, Tina) – external to the central friendship – by allowing this outside relationship to culminate in marriage, albeit short-lived, thus adding an unprecedented layer of complexity to the narrative. (That Rahul is a hard-core believer of the frequently repeated adage that “We live once, we love once, and marriage too happens once only” certainly doesn’t help the case either.)
Even when this already-marriedness is resolved by Tina’s death, KKHH requires Anjali S. to cross yet another hurdle before Rahul can fall for her – she must undergo a transition in her embodied femininity: from the tomboy romping about in college basketball courts to the dominant mode of feminized being (discussed later) – the exemplar trophy in heterosexual romances.
[W]hat makes Anjali S. “beautiful” to Rahul is her inability to, as mentioned before, “look beautiful” [sic] which disqualifies her from the game of heterosexual courtship.
In truth, it would be wrong to frame Tina as the sole factor hindering the romance between the best friends. In fact, it is the key moments that unfold after Tina joins their college (e.g., Rahul identifying friendship as the foundation of love during an English Literature lecture to impress Tina) that make Anjali S. realize that she is in love with Rahul in the first place. However, what really inhibits Rahul from reciprocating those feelings is Anjali S.’s tomboyishness.
Anjali S. wasn’t like the other girls, was just like the boys, maintaining short hair: instead of putting on make-up like other girls, she played basketball, wore sportswear, had no idea how to “look beautiful” [sic] – this is how Rahul remembered her. These are also the reasons why he never deemed Anjali S. as a potential romantic partner. Ketaki Chowkhani (Chowkhani 2024) refers to both real-life case studies as well as Bollywood depictions of tomboys to discuss the “impossibility of the presence of sexual desire in their lives as heterosexual tomboys” (226).
Chowkhani argues that the “deviance from heteronormative feminine ideals [that tomboys exhibit, often causes them great pain that] becomes most apparent in their search and desire for male partners” (217) – an arena where they generally remain unsuccessful unless are ready to feminize themselves.
This is apparent when in a particular scene Rahul consoles Anjali S. when she veritably fails in her attempt to dress “femininely” by saying “Actually, you’re very beautiful because you’re so different from the rest. At least you’re not like those stupid girls who run after me. You know what? You can get any boy you want” – though not without the facetious addition – “only that boy’s eyes need to be impaired”. Thus, what makes Anjali S. “beautiful” to Rahul is her inability to, as mentioned before, “look beautiful” [sic] which disqualifies her from the game of heterosexual courtship.
It is, thus, no stroke of luck that when Rahul is finally enamoured by Anjali S. in the summer camp named “Camp Sunshine” in Shimla – once again orchestrated by Anjali K. with the help of Rahul’s overenthusiastic mother (Farida Jalal) – she has already been metamorphized into a woman with straight, long hair, who can adeptly use makeup to enhance her facial features, gracefully don sarees and pick out the right jewellery to accentuate her look.
KKHH repeatedly highlights this transition by framing Rahul and Anjali S. during their college and during the summer camp in visually parallel frames with slight meaningful inflections. Indeed, the dissolution of tomboyishness towards feminization to realize heterosexual desires in a common narrative arc in Bollywood (see Joshi 2023).
The transition in KKHH finds its most potent expression in a “fractured” montage following the aforementioned game, where Rahul’s inadvertent utterance of “Sharma” compels him to tell his daughter and mother about Anjali S. Each time Rahul is shown attributing Anjali S. from the past with some tomboy feature, the scene cuts to her in the present “feminized” avatar. These shots capture the care given to the putting on of each embellishment and bear testimony to the fact that feminine adornment is as much an act of cerebration as it is a fancy.
The “fractured” nature of the montage derives from Anjali S.’s gradual reveal: first fragmenting different parts of her now-beautified body (e.g. forearms, eyes, torso, forehead) before these features are put together as the camera shows her whole. Again, such a “put-togetherness” highlighted by these shots suggests a sense of disruptive assimilation as much as they frame femininity as an agential performance.
However, this was not the first time Anjali S. tried to transform herself. Remember when Rahul was consoling her after she apparently made a joke of herself by trying to dress femininely (in a failed attempt to imitate Tina’s dressing style)? Well, when she made her first appearance in a non-boyish attire, the camera showed her all at once. This is because this scene shows her inability to feminize herself completely, or alternatively her ability to as yet stay outside the strictures of complete feminization, which once entered leads to a scopophilic and fetishizing fragmentation of the female body.
Given that in this failed attempt, Anjali S. dresses herself in a western outfit while in the successful montage she is wearing Indian traditional clothes, this difference in shots can also be interpreted as the film’s ideological alignment of ideal fragmentizing femininity with Indianness.
Thus, that Anjali S. wears Indian clothes for the first time (though otherwise unadorned) when she leaves her college forever so as not to come between Rahul and Tina’s love – thus embodying a sacrifice that in the Indian tradition is often deemed to be synonymous with femininity; a sacrifice that will later result in the birth of her namesake Anjali K. – is more than mere happenstance.
Not a Bro, Not a Pro: Basketball’s Overtime in Romance
The sacrifice and loss that Anjali S. must undergo in this transformation exceeds her varied responses to lookism, affecting her field of expertise as well. Early on, the film establishes that an important aspect of Rahul and Anjali S.’s friendship was the latter’s proficiency as a basketball player in college as a result of which Rahul would lose to her every time – unless, of course, he was cheating.
However, when Anjali S. appears as a teacher in Camp Sunshine, she isn’t shown to instruct the kids in the tomboyish/ masculine field of sports1 but in the feminine one of singing and dancing – something that Anjali S. was as terrible at as Rahul during college (as shown in the inter-college competition events leading up to the song-sequence of “Koi Mil Gaya” [I Found Someone] where Tina’s feminine dancing-singing abilities saved them and their college from embarrassment). However, at the Shimla camp, while Rahul is shown to remain as inadept in dancing, Anjali S.’s expertise in the same increases manifold.
This increased expertise in feminine skills like dancing, however, isn’t an additive feature for Anjali S. but is shown to be a trade-off for her erstwhile basketball skills. In fact, it is this basketball-centered shift that secures their romantic conjugation as the rest of this article explores.
Not only was basketball one of the key factors that kept Rahul and Anjali S. glued together during their college, but also the sport that Rahul claims to have been consistently practicing – perhaps also in their old college court as a scene seems to suggest – for the eight years prior to re-encountering Anjali S., something that silently kept her presence alive in Rahul’s life all through the time they were apart. Like any other sport, and as the film shows, basketball creates moments of intense physical proximity between these players and hence a potential field of desire both during their college and later when they play the game at the summer camp.
Indeed, the basketball match at Shimla that becomes a key turning moment in Rahul and Anjali S.’s romance is itself a part of Anjali K.’s many interventions, albeit in conjunction with a deus ex machina moment. When Anjali K. grows concerned upon realizing that despite successfully bringing these potential lovers into the same space, their inhibitions are impeding the natural development of their chemistry, much like her grandmother, she prays to God for help. In response a basketball ball drops down onto her palms out of thin air.
Subsequently, Anjali K. creates a situation fertile for these old basketball players to challenge each other to a match. That Anjali S. is entering the field in a new and feminized avatar which might not be very conducive for this game is emphasized by Rahul’s sassy remark asking her to take care of her saree while playing. Indeed, though Rahul and Anjali S.’s competitive spirits remain the same, Rahul’s competence seems to have increased manifold, while that of Anjali S. has evidently diminished leading her to join Rahul in cheating though ultimately losing to Rahul for, what seems to be, the first time.
Meanwhile, all through the match, the two repeatedly come tantalizingly close against the picturesque landscape of Shimla creating a tangibly romantic aura. This is furthered by the slow-motion shots that hover a moment too long on the exchange of their glances. While the college basketball match also comprised the cinematographic usage of slow-motion, it was more aligned with the aesthetics of sports highlights to focus on the characters’ athletic finesse rather than with the exploration of their sensual tectonics.
Needless to say, given that unlike their college days, this match is not being played in a mostly empty courtroom but in a field filled to the brim with summer campers, these visuals are very much appreciated especially by the precocious Anjali K. and her grandmother, whose gaze frames Anjali S. within the legitimized frames of femininity, perceiving her solely in the potential role of a daughter-in-law.
While this scene underscores the centrality of basketball in KKHH in making Rahul and Anjali S. fall in love, it also indicates that the fate of their romance seems to be narratively hinged on Anjali S. losing a part of her erstwhile identity as a steadfast and competent basketball player. Thus, if love makes one falter, then in the game of basketball, as a feminized tomboy, Anjali S. must take the fall. Following her loss, when the crowd shouts that girls can’t play basketball, Anjali S.’s face portrays various hues of shame and embarrassment, albeit under the veil of feminine coyness (e.g., looking down, fidgeting with her hair, biting her lips).
The fleeting poignancy captured in these often-ignored shots, which can be readily subsumed under the auspices of cinematic comedy, easily becomes evident if only one remembers the confidence that Anjali S. drew from her basketball success in her tomboyish past as opposed to how her feminized body betrays her in the present.
It is easy to ignore these shots not because the audience is especially unthinking but again due to the narrative unfolding in the film for these shots are immediately followed by Rahul ceasing his mocking laughter to break into a musical whistle. Anjali S. turns around to look at Rahul and her face is immediately filled with a gleaming smile as her hair blows in the wind before the whistle transitions into the romantic song-sequence “Ladki Badi Anjani Hai” [This Girl is So Unknown]. Thus, the very composition of the scene makes the audience forget Anjali S.’s agony swiftly and in accordance with the established interruptive narrative tropes of Bollywood.
[T]he romance between Rahul and Anjali S. in KKHH is not simply a kindling of love between old friends, but also an intensification of the flame, fueled by Anjali’s newly feminized self, even as her tomboyish parts char away.
Indeed, the entire emotional roller-coaster that Rahul and Anjali S. undergo between all the reciprocation and non-reciprocation over the years, is succinctly captured in one scene from this same song-sequence.
We are shown that amidst all these dancing and singing with the feminized Anjali S., the tomboyish Anjali S. from his past creeps up unbeknownst to him literally, upsetting his otherwise balanced self, that would very much have liked to maintain “We live once, we love once, and marriage too happens once only” but veritably fails, falling hard and deep in love with Anjali S. The shot where it is Anjali S.’s tomboyish figure from the past that Rahul hugs passionately might indicate that Rahul’s love for Anjali S. isn’t one-dimensionally based on her new feminized embodiment.
However, the reverse shot reveals Rahul gazing at this new embodiment surrounded by small children, even as he holds her tomboyish-self close. This juxtaposition indicates that the romance between Rahul and Anjali S. in KKHH is not simply a kindling of love between old friends, but also an intensification of the flame, fueled by Anjali’s newly feminized self, even as her tomboyish parts char away.
A longer version of this article was first published on The Overanalyst’s Guide, a newsletter maintained by Sragdharamalini Das with the title “Tomboy on Court, Trophy in Courtship: The Aesthetics of Embodiment and Transformation in “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai””
Note
1. Over the last two decades, several Bollywood films have increasingly depicted women in sports. For discussions on ways in which many of these still operate under the aegis of patriarchal control and others that have successfully subverted the same, see Ankita Chakravarty, 2020, “Teaching Gender through Films on Sportswomen: Contrary Messages,” IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities 7, no. 1 (Summer): 103-110; Antara Mukherjee, 2018, “Representational Politics in Bollywood Sports Movies of the 21st Century: Empowering Women through Counter Cinema,” postScriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies III, no. ii (July): 65-80.
References
- Chowkhani, Ketaki. 2024. ““Hey! She’s a Bro!”: Tomboys, Body Image, and Desire in India.” In Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, edited by Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg, 216-231. Philadelphia, Rome, Tokyo: Temple University Press.
- Gopal, Sangita. 2011. Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- Joshi, Nandini. 2023. “Embracing Femininity: Failure of the Tomboy Trope as an Ideal Arc for Female Roles in Mainstream Bollywood.” Feminist Media Studies 23, no. 2: 712-717. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2023.2186820