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In the early 2000s, when Abhishek Bachchan was on the verge of making his debut, there was a palpable excitement amid the audience. The reason behind this excitement had nothing to do with Abhishek himself but the idea that this generation of cinema would get its very own Bachchan. The son of two of the greatest actors of Hindi cinema, Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bachchan, was entering the movies and the audience was there to support him for the love they had for his parents. Despite the many failures he had in the early years of his career, the audience (along with the producers of the time) carried him up in their arms and sat through the many mediocre movies he made in those early years, until he had hits to his name. Now, imagine if this was in the present day and Abhishek was making his debut now. There is no way that Abhishek would get the same kind of welcome as he did back in the day, and it seems rather unlikely that he would get the same kind of love as well.
It is this end of the bargain that has landed in the lap of Janhvi Kapoor. Being the daughter of Sridevi, Janhvi was launched with all the pomp and show that any newcomer could dream of. But this exciting phase of her life also coincided with one of the worst tragedies that could hit anyone. The world lost Sridevi a few months before the release of Janhvi’s debut film Dhadak and there was a wave of support for the newcomer. But even then, Janhvi had made her debut in a world where the word ‘nepotism’ was thrown around casually and the love for the legacy of her mother soon evaporated. Her next film Gunjan Saxena released when the world was dealing with the loss of Sushant Singh Rajput and as is well known, the narrative largely propagated by social media at the time dictated that Sushant’s death was somehow related to the nepotism in the film industry. In this volatility, there was no way that Gunjan Saxena would have survived. The quality of the film wasn’t even the point here, it came at a time when it was going to sink despite that and so it did.
In the consequent years, Janhvi stayed true to her course and chose films where she wasn’t being the ‘flower pot’, which was a bold choice for a newcomer making her way in a world where movies are designed with the male hero in mind. Her choices, which are reserved only for the privileged, didn’t earn her enough brownie points, thanks to her ‘nepo’ tag. In a film like Good Luck Jerry, which had a strong ensemble cast featuring Deepak Dobriyal, Mita Vashisht, Sushant Singh, Janhvi held her own and even though she wasn’t the strongest performer in the film, this was a strong addition to her filmography. Mili, where she starred with Manoj Pahwa and Sunny Kaushal, was another decent film but as per Janhvi’s own admission, her social media followers (almost 24 million in March 2024) weren’t her screen-going audience here. Her appearance in Zoya Akhtar’s short in Ghost Stories was worth noticing but in hindsight, one can see that Janhvi doesn’t have an army of followers that builds her myth for strong parts but she does have a military of haters who like to pick on her when she makes a mistake.
In an interview with Aaj Tak in December 2023, Janhvi broke down as she spoke about the “unfair advantage” she had over many others as she got an express entry into Bollywood because of her parents, Sridevi and producer Boney Kapoor. “I am her daughter and I can’t run away from that truth,” she said with tears in her eyes. If it took over five years for Janhvi to stop feeling guilty about being her mother’s daughter, there is no way that the world would stop punishing her for it. The tag of nepotism casually hangs around Janhvi’s name. The moment she misspeaks, or makes a misstep, she is bombarded with a slew of hate messages. But the strange part of it is, that Janhvi still gets the attention that she wants, just not for her movies.
Nepo kids are often criticised for the privilege they are born into, which they can’t help, but it gets worse when they flaunt that privilege in front of those who don’t even have a fraction of that, and don’t even make it count. Like recently, when Janhvi spoke about her education at an acting school in Los Angeles where she “learnt nothing” and realised that learning more about India would have been of bigger help. The idea that someone had enough and more resources at their disposal to get an expensive education abroad, and then discard it like it meant nothing was not appreciated by her potential audience. But a statement such as this would still get more eyeballs than her film Mili.
Indian movies have existed for over 100 years and most of the mainstream industry is still run as a family business. Actors like Sunny Deol, Kajol or even Salman Khan are all products of nepotism but their successes or failures aren’t associated with their parents, despite the fact that they had the same advantages as Janhvi. It is almost as if the audience has accepted the nepo kids of the past because they have had an emotional journey with them through decades of their movies but they just can’t put in more emotional investment into stories of privilege that are packaged as ‘struggle stories’. Actors like Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor, who are often proclaimed as two of the best actors of their generation, get the nepo kid tag sporadically but it isn’t permanently attached to them, like it is to Janhvi or her contemporaries like Sara Ali Khan or Ananya Panday.
In the five years that Janhvi has been around, most of her movies have largely been watched (and appreciated) by a niche audience that watches a movie for what it is. The nepo tag is stuck like an albatross around her neck and until the time that social media finds something else to hate on, or maybe another set of nepo kids, Janhvi stands in the direct line of attack. Or maybe, just maybe, there could be a film that makes this noise go away but that just sounds a little too utopian.
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