In a recent interview, Karan Johar, basking in the glow of his well-received film Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani, sheepishly says “What’s going on? I didn’t sign up for this… I am wondering what I did right this time”. Well, he has done many things right, and not only this time but also in the past — which he hardly admits.
Rocky aur Rani, in a broader sense, reminded me of Raj Kapoor. Big, dramatic, emotional, melodious, and yet high on social messaging. Remember Satyam Shivam Sundaram? Just before the release of the movie in 1978, Raj Kapoor famously or infamously said: “Let them come to see Zeenat’s t**s, they will go out forgetting her body and remember the film.”
And damn, was he right.
That was Raj Kapoor, the showman.
Johar, however, is not Kapoor. He knows this is not India in its infancy, one that needs to be coddled and told what is right and wrong. It’s India in its teens — hormone-raging, judgmental with a fleeting attention span, and one that hardly cares about moral preaching. Thus, Johar handles his messaging — so fragile in this polarised world — with the utmost care.
And this is not even the first time that he has done so.
Fifteen years ago, as a producer, Johar showcased Dostana where two or three good-looking men fell for a vivacious woman. He nudged the topic of homosexuality, then rarely seen in a blockbuster movie, but without queering the pitch of a mainstream movie. He made two of his hunky men pretend to be gay. He made them funny, awkward, and juvenile. Many LGBTQ+ activists slammed the movie and Johar, of course, for stereotyping gay people and making them comical — all of which he admittedly did. But that same movie also had the song, ‘Maa Da Laadla’, which first portrayed a loud Punjabi mother’s disappointment with his “masculine” son’s sexuality and then ended with her trying to find a “remedial cure” for him. What the film did here was that it unwrapped the issue of homosexuality from its hypocritical, social chaadar and placed it right at the centre of our dining-table conversations. Our mothers, brothers, buas and tais, all who regaled in the ‘Maa Da Laadla’ song in shaadis and tyohaars, did not find it taboo anymore. If they saw their sons and nephews holding other boys’ hands, they would not bat an eyelid to utter, even if mockingly: “Bada dostana hai!”.
Johar blunted the edges of a sharp and divisive issue like homosexuality with some humour, and also some stereotype, of course.
Ten years later, Johar did it again. But this time with a short film in the Netflix anthology Lust Stories. A woman’s right to self-pleasure was no more taboo as we watched a moaning Kiara Advani with the title score of Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham playing in the background. Remember the first time we heard the same score? Twenty-two years ago, when Jaya Bachchan was holding a thaali of aarti to welcome her foreign-returned son.
Johar uses humour, sometimes self-deprecatory, to soften the blow of the serious social messages he wants to convey to his audience. For instance, he uses oodles of romance and emotion to talk about bigotry (My Name Is Khan) and infidelity (Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna).
In Rocky Aur Rani… he pushes the envelope further. Not one, or two, or even three – Johar nudges us with many more social messages. From pitting parochial patriarchy against mellifluous matriarchy to challenging our ingrained perception of body and beauty. From telling us that “hunaar ka koi gender nahi hota” (talent has no gender) to “love hai toh sab hai” (love is everything). From making a brawny “macho” man accompany his would-be MIL (mother-in-law) bra shopping and making him realise that bras are not “poisonous” or to be avoided even while women keep washing men’s underwear, to questioning our new fad of cancelling people at the drop of a hat. From making two men dance on ‘Dola Re Dola’ with sheer aplomb and femininity to making us realise that laughing at someone who doesn’t seem “classy” enough is equally problematic.
In this age of deep-seated toxic masculinity and a Kabir Singh and K.G.F.-loving audience, it’s quite courageous for Johar to do so, and he intelligently delivers, using all filmi tropes and extravagance. He employs all the existing stereotypes to break stereotyping. Like the small girl, I came across in the mall that day, who coaxed her mother to get a book for her, while the woman rushed inside a bridal wear shop berating her 8-year-old daughter in Punjabi: “Pelhan school dee kitaban padh le saariyan. O padh littin? (First read the books of your school. Have you read them all?).”
With the risk of being labelled a KJE — a Karan Johar Evangelist — I would say Johar, undoubtedly, is evolving like many of us; he has the pulse of our transitioning society, and he has done many things right.
