It was a moment of national swooning. The Bollywood film Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai released on January 14, 2000. At the dawn of the new millennium, it put the country into overdrive. Bolstered by an aggressive publicity blitz, word had already spread about its otherworldly star. He had hazel eyes and a silvery smile. His Stallone-like build betrayed a schoolboy’s charm. He was 27 years old. And, it was rumoured, he could dance.
It’s been 25 years since Hrithik Roshan’s star-making debut in his father’s musical. Families hoarded theatres. ‘Ek Pal Ka Jeena’ played on loop. Young boys and girls had found their new pin-up god. Some, with embarrassing mileage, aped the Hrithik handshake, flicking the palm horizontally. Manoj Desai, executive director of G7 Multiplex (then Gaiety Galaxy) in Mumbai, remembers running packed shows round the clock. “The film ran for 25 weeks non-stop at my theatre. From children to grown-ups, everyone went crazy about Hrithik’s dancing. When he returns in a new avatar after the interval, the seetis (whistles) were boundless.”
The buzz overseas was just as strong. By the mid-1990s, India had one of the largest diaspora populations in the world, concentrated in North America, UK, the Gulf countries and Australia-New Zealand. Bollywood, its boundaries broadened by liberalisation, began reaching out to them. Films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Dil Toh Pagal Hai and Pardes successfully rode the wave of globalisation. The movement reached its apotheosis with Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai. Its star-crossed lovers danced on cruise ships, got stranded on the sands of Krabi, Thailand. Hrithik and his co-star, Ameesha Patel, rode a hot air balloon in Christchurch, New Zealand. Everything about the film was calibrated to sing an international tune. Its dual-hero storyline was a frank allegory of free-market aspirations: After Rohit, a penniless car salesman turned popstar, dies, his NRI doppelgänger Raj rolls up in a BMW and Honda Hurricane.
Hrithik Roshan in a still from ‘Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai’
The film had a curious genesis. Hrithik’s father, director Rakesh Roshan, had initially intended it for Shah Rukh Khan, the reigning knight of the Hindi diaspora film. The 90s were a wild era of remakes and rejigs; French Kiss, the Meg Ryan comedy about a missing diamond necklace, was remade in Hindi as Pyaar To Hona Hi Tha (1998). A year before that, James Cameron’s Titanic had set the bar for the sweeping romantic epic. Cruise ships, aquatic deaths, ill-fated lovers from across the class divide… Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai was like Titanic filtered through Karz (1980). Another oft-cited inspiration is the Kannada film Ratha Sapthami (1986), remade in Tamil as Love Birds (1996). In both, the hero seemingly dies in an accident, the heroine takes a healing trip somewhere far and scenic, and the lovers are fortuitously reunited (the grungy discotheque number recurs in all versions).
“Toh hass kyun ki duniya ko hai hassana (smile, so you can make the world smile),” Hrithik sings in the film. It became a motto of the times. The language of globalisation is threaded throughout Kaho Na… Pyaar Hai. Rohit’s bedroom wall has a poster of the Backstreet Boys. Though he dresses casually, he wears a shirt and tie to work, the dress code of the IT generation. There are product placements for Lexus, Mercedes, Ferrari, Yokohama tyres, and Coca-Cola. The multiracial, tropical-themed nightclub Raj dances at is called Club Indiana. He reads Cosmopolitan magazine on a flight. A year before Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the film boosted tourism and migration interests in New Zealand, highlighting attractions like Lake Wakatipu and The Remarkables ski resort outside Queenstown. In 2004, Helen Clark, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, wrote to Rakesh Roshan: “Your film captured the imagination of Indian audiences and portrayed a rich and vibrant image of New Zealand.”
Diaspora films tend to reflect the dualities of immigrant life, its characters caught between tradition and modernity. But Raj — an assault of soft power charm, in a netted vest and sunglasses — seemed perfectly at home in the wider world. Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai is not a reincarnation story, unlike Karz, and poor Rohit, searching for ‘saadgi’ (simplicity) in a capitalistic world, meets a dark end. Written by Honey Irani and Ravi Kapoor, the screenplay has silly contrivances that most audiences happily ignored at the time, but which do not survive a rewatch. Rohit’s younger brother is frozen mute by his passing. Sonia’s fashion sense changes every 15 minutes. A lovelorn Raj follows her back to Mumbai, happily abandoning his aging parents (returning NRIs were a fiscal asset, and were granted tax benefits).
Hrithik Roshan and Ameesha Patel in a still from ‘Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai’
Though a parade of pretty people in pretty places — Krabi also featured in Danny Boyle’s The Beach the same year, becoming a major tourist hotspot — Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai is also a film of sounds. There are lines, at times mere words, that are permanently stuck in our heads: Tannaz Irani’s nasal “Sonias…”, for instance, or Raj tooting, “Isse kehte hai ittefaaq. Ittefaq No. 3.” Rajesh Roshan, Hrithik’s uncle, composed the film’s songs, appropriating — not his first time — tunes from Greek composer Vangelis. The film’s cultural legacy is inextricably linked to its soundtrack. Lucky Ali blessed it with his vocals, belting out two diametrically opposite hits, the electronic headrush of ‘Ek Pal Ka Jeena’ soothed out by ‘Na Tum Jaano Na Hum’, with its tranquil guitar strums and melancholic outro.
Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai was the antithesis of all the raucous energies shaping Hindi cinema at the time. Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya and John Matthew Matthan’s Sarfarosh had nudged Bollywood into gritty, challenging directions. But Roshan, with his escapist blockbuster set aboard a big boat, steered it back on course. Anurag Kashyap, the lead writer of Satya, mocked this apparent regression in a line of dialogue in Nayak: The Real Hero, released the following year. Reluctant to join politics and change his country’s course, Anil Kapoor’s character remarks, “I want to live the easy life… watch Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai on Sundays.”
There was a shocking, Satya-like coda to the Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai wave. On January 21, 2000, a week after the film’s release, Rakesh Roshan was shot at by two unidentified gunmen outside his office. In a bleeding state, he drove to Santa Cruz police station, scared more for his son’s life than his own. It emerged that the shooters belonged to Mumbai’s Budesh gang, who had tried extorting the director over the film’s overseas earnings. Bollywood was corporatizing and bringing in the big bucks, and the underworld, its uneasy ally since the 90s, wanted a piece of the pie.
Hrithik Roshan and Ameesha Patel in a still from ‘Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai’
Over the last 25 years, Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai has turned up in popular culture in amusing ways. Na Tum Jaano Na Hum became a full-length film with Hrithik, Saif Ali Khan and Esha Deol. Raj flipping through photographs of his dead lookalike is a meme. During the surreal early weeks of COVID-19, someone registered the film title ‘Corona Pyaar Hai,’ inviting the wrath of Rakesh Roshan. Canadian YouTuber Lilly Singh made Hailey Bieber dance to the film’s title track, and, in 2021, while campaigning for the Trinamool Congress in Asansol, West Bengal, Ameesha Patel sang a few lines from the same song — an apparent dig at Babul Supriyo, a singer on the film, who was fielded from the BJP in the assembly elections.
Hindi blockbusters today have moved past the candied nothingness of Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai. They have become more strident and unabashed. Curiously, even their internationalism now feels parochial. Hrithik’s most recent smash was Fighter, a politically-slanted actioner from 2024, inspired by the Top Gun franchise. In a disappointing scene, Hrithik’s combat pilot, bashing up a terrorist, yells the words ‘India-Occupied Pakistan’ — the kind of triumphalist coinage that has become depressingly commonplace. It makes one long for the easygoing Sundays, when life was less hectic and charged, and we all watched Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai.
Published – January 14, 2025 10:15 am IST
Indian cinema
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Hindi cinema
