Amitabh Bachchan was the quintessential toxic hero in Kabhi Kabhie, but Yash Chopra presented him as a romantic poet

Bachchan’s character Amit was in love with Rakhee’s Pooja when they were in college but they break up after her parents decide to get her married to someone else. She asks him if she should speak up and talk about their relationship, but he just says, let it be. Amit, for some strange reason, believes that marrying for love and sharing that with their parents would somehow be hurtful for the elders. It’s bizarre to watch this sequence now because who is to say how the parents would have reacted, but it is one of those things where you have to give in to the filmmakers’ fantasy, or else there is no way for this story to move forward.

Shashi Kapoor’s Vijay (right) is almost like a stand in for the director’s thoughts in Kabhi Kabhie.

Anyhow, decades later, when Amit is married to Waheeda’s Anju and they have a grown-up daughter, he finds out that she gave birth to a child before she married him. He shames her repeatedly for her ‘sins’ and threatens to leave her. When Waheeda reminds him that he too was in love before they got married, he snaps and asks her to leave.

For the most part of Kabhi Kabhie, Amit is projected as a brooding hero who could never recover from his heartbreak but in fact, Amit is the hypocritical man who is okay with Pooja still having a place in his heart, but is deeply offended when he finds out that his wife ever loved someone else. The idea that his wife had a lover, when she was a single woman, is appalling to him, and this is where Shashi Kapoor’s Vijay starts looking more like a hero than Amitabh’s Amit.

Vijay is married to Pooja (Rakhee) and after he finds out about the Amit and his wife’s college romance, he laughs it away. He points out that men often expect their wives to be chaste, even though they themselves can’t hold up their end of the bargain. At this point in the film, he is the filmmaker’s stand-in. Chopra, in an interview with Rafique Baghdadi in 1984, said, “In Kabhi Kabhie, I wanted to say that the social binding of the tradition should be broken. When a couple gets married no one has the right to go back to the girl’s past, and drag it into her present. No one does that to a man. If a man has an affair before marriage it is not held against him. Why should we hold it against a woman?”

Amitabh’s Amit is deeply offended when he finds out that his wife Anju loved someone as a single woman.

The film’s plot triggers with Neetu’s Pinky but it comes to an end only after Amit finds it in himself to accept his wife, along with her daughter, and makes an effort in trying to let go of Pooja’s memory. The idea of this man, who has lived most of his life practicing double standards, being seen as a hero is a little hard to accept. Unlike the ‘angry young man’ of his time, he isn’t wronged by the system, he is just a heartbroken man who refuses to move on.

Amit isn’t the brooding hero, he is just a man who thinks too highly of himself and believes that no one understands love like he does, even though his understanding of love has made him a bitter person. Kabhi Kabhie is a love story, but not necessarily a happy one. Even though the film ends with a traditional ‘happy ending’, it leaves you with the notion that Amit was the ‘hero’ even though his acts were never heroic.