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The marriage was already over. Karan Johar’s ‘Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna’ just said it out loud

Twenty years later, Karan Johar's most uncomfortable love story is still his most honest

When Dev and Maya finally confess their love to their spouses, Rishi (Abhishek Bachchan) erupts, smashing the house around him, while Rhea (Preity Zinta) remains composed. (Photo: Still from Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna)

Written by: Anas Arif

4 min readAug 10, 2026 11:30 PM IST First published on: Aug 10, 2026 at 02:37 PM IST

Released 20 years ago, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna was greeted with a wave of pessimism. It was accused of glorifying infidelity, criticised for questioning the sanctity of marriage, and called out for its refusal to believe in the neatness of love. Two decades later, however, it stands as perhaps Karan Johar’s most substantial melodrama. Coming immediately after the emotional maximalism of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, the film was its complete antithesis. It was not about an ideal family so much as the ideals that disappear within one. It was not about a couple fighting the world for their love but two people creating wars of their own, wounding those they loved in pursuit of a forbidden union.

For once, it was not Johar’s familiar belief that “pyaar dosti hai” (love is friendship), that held the film together. Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, instead, looked at what happens when friendship is made to carry the weight of love, when companionship slowly becomes a substitute for intimacy, when two people remain together long after the thing that once held them together has slipped away. Perhaps Johar was beginning to see what his earlier films had never allowed him to confront: That sometimes friendship does not save love as much as it scars it. Sometimes friendship becomes the life a marriage settles for, until comfort begins to masquerade as love.

But above all, Johar did something more subversive: He weaponised Shah Rukh Khan’s stardom to make us empathise with a character we would ordinarily have little reason to forgive. Khan’s mythology, cultivated over the years by filmmakers like Johar and Aditya Chopra, had made him the definitive romantic hero, who could turn longing into devotion and love into destiny. Johar took that very imagery and turned it against itself. He made Khan play Dev, a bitter, insecure and emotionally corrosive man, whose cynicism is matched only by his capacity for self-pity. He is a failed footballer, a failed father and a failed husband. And he completed Dev with Maya (Rani Mukerji), a woman whose unhappiness has curdled into resentment, equally lonely and equally unfaithful in her marriage.

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They are made for each other, not because they redeem one another, but because they recognise the same failure in each other. They are the unlikeable ones, the whiny, embittered spouses in their respective marriages, the cowards who cannot confront what has gone wrong, the wounded who retreat into resentment rather than summon the courage to change their lives. Perhaps that is why their world suddenly fills with colour in the stunningly shot ‘Tumhi Dekho Na’, when they surrender to the possibility of each other, when they realise that, in their emptiness, they may be the only ones capable of completing what is missing in the other.

And then Johar makes them confront the cost of that discovery. When Dev and Maya finally confess their love to their spouses, Rishi (Abhishek Bachchan) erupts, smashing the house around him, while Rhea (Preity Zinta) remains composed. Rishi wants to know if Maya enjoyed sleeping with Dev; Rhea asks Dev only whether he is in love with Maya. That dissonance reveals Johar at his most unsparing: Morally messy, emotionally uncompromising. He had spent years building worlds where ideal families triumphed and ideal love endured. Here, he simply watched both wither, slowly and inevitably.

Arif is deputy copy editor, Screen. anas.arif@indianexpress.com

Anas Arif

Anas Arif is a prolific Entertainment Journalist and Cinematic Analyst at The Indian Express,... Read More