Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai
1998 · Karan Johar · Kuch Kuch Hota Hai on Sightlines
An eight-year-old girl opens an envelope on her birthday, and her dead mother begins to talk to her. Tina left eight letters, one for each birthday, and this one sends the film backwards. It tells the child, and us, a story about her father's life that he has never understood himself. His best friend in college, the tomboy in the cap and the logo sweatshirt who beat him at basketball, was in love with him. He didn't see it.
That letter is the hinge of Karan Johar's first film, made when he was twenty-six. The whole picture is built so that we know something the hero doesn't. Sanjay Sankla's editing gives us the college years as one unbroken block. Nothing is broken up and nothing cuts back and forth. We get the past whole, and then for over an hour we watch the present slowly catch up with what we already know.
Deleuze has a name for a cinema that runs on this kind of knowing. He calls it the relation-image. The meaning of a scene doesn't sit inside any single shot or any single character's head. It lives in the relations between people, and the viewer is the one who holds those relations together. Deleuze developed the idea around Hitchcock and suspense, but it fits this film exactly. When Rahul jokes with the grown-up Anjali at the summer camp, the scene is light on the surface. For us it is unbearable, because we are the third party in the room, and we know what the two of them have never said.
Johar builds that knowledge out of what Deleuze calls marks: objects whose meaning comes from habit, so that when you see one you know what to expect. The letters are the clearest. Each birthday brings one, and we learn the rhythm of a dead woman steering the living. The title melody works the same way. Jatin–Lalit bring back “kuch kuch hota hai” as background score, so the phrase is a song, a catchphrase and a signal all at once. Whenever it rises, we know what is being felt and kept quiet. The trick comes from Yash Chopra's Kabhi Kabhie, where one tune carries a buried love across a jump of years. The letter that blows a story open late comes from Raj Kapoor's Sangam. Johar gives that device to a child and multiplies it by eight.
Then comes the moment the habit breaks. Deleuze's word for this is the demark, an anomaly that interrupts the expected chain and forces someone to interpret. Manish Malhotra's costumes are the film's real language. In college, Anjali wears tracksuits and American sportswear, while Tina wins Rahul in a chiffon sari. Eight years later Anjali appears with long hair, in a sari, her whole outline softened, and the film stages it as the revelation it has been holding back. Rahul's old habit, Anjali as one of the boys, cracks, and he finally starts to read her. Malhotra had already used clothes to carry a character's arc in Rangeela. Here he turns the method into the film's central argument. That is also where the film is most exposed. You can love it and still ask whether Rahul sees Anjali or only sees her dressed the way Tina dressed. The film raises that question through its costumes and never answers it in dialogue.
All of this keeps Kuch Kuch Hota Hai firmly in what Deleuze calls the movement-image, the cinema where people see a situation and act to change it. The flashback is a recollection-image: a dated, clearly framed former present that we visit and then leave. Memory here doesn't drift or overwhelm anyone. It has a job to do. The past is handed over so that a little girl can act on it, and she does, setting up a reunion against the pressure of Anjali's engagement to another man. This is the action-image in its large form. A whole situation presses on everyone until a decisive act changes it, and it is a shape Johar learned firsthand as Aditya Chopra's assistant on Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.
The songs are where the film moves fastest, and where Deleuze is most useful. Writing about the musical, he describes the moment a character's own movement passes into a movement of the world. The dancer stops walking through a space and is carried by it. Santosh Sivan, then the most serious cinematographer in Indian cinema and fresh from the natural light of The Terrorist, shoots the numbers with cranes and Steadicam, as trips through space rather than strings of poses. One technical fact sharpens this. The whole film was dubbed after shooting, with the songs pre-recorded and lip-synced. Nothing on the soundtrack belongs to a real place, so slipping into song makes no break in the sound at all. In a Hollywood musical, the start of a number is a threshold you can hear. Here the world was already music before anyone sang.
Sivan does the same thing with color. In the long-lens close-ups on Kajol, the background melts into color you can't read as a place, and the feeling floods the frame. Deleuze would call this an affection-image, a feeling held on a face before it turns into action, here soaked through with color. College is red, yellow and blue. After the eight-year jump, the camp cools into whites, pastels and greens. All of it was done on 35mm, with lighting, filters, sets and clothes. Those colors were physically there in front of the camera.
Film theory has long prized the opposite instinct. André Bazin loved cinema for its respect for the real world in front of the lens. Sharmishta Roy's campus, with its chapel, quad and basketball court, exists in no Indian city. Johar's cinema is pure construction, and it doesn't apologize. The eight-year gap goes by almost without comment, because the form expects you to accept it.
That confidence is the film's legacy. It came out the year filmmaking was granted industry status, it played hugely to audiences overseas, and it fixed a house style for Dharma Productions that has lasted a quarter-century: glossy, urban, built around stars, emotionally all-out. It took the family romance of Maine Pyar Kiya and Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! and gave it to a generation raised on satellite TV. It even argues with its ancestor line for line: Maine Pyar Kiya said a boy and a girl can never be friends.
So watch it again, and watch it as the knowing third. Follow the clothes, listen for the tune, and wait for the moment behind Kajol's face when the room turns into color.
Concepts in play
- the mental-image (relation-image) — The flashback comes as one sustained block, so the audience knows Anjali's love for over an hour while Rahul doesn't. The film's dramatic irony makes the viewer the knowing third.
- mark — Tina's eight letters, opened on successive birthdays, and the title melody returning as background score: habitual signals that tell us what to expect and what is being kept quiet.
- demark — Anjali's change from tracksuits and caps to the sari, long hair and softened outline, staged as the revelation that breaks Rahul's habit of seeing her as one of the boys.
- recollection-image (mnemosign) — The college years delivered as a single, clearly dated flashback block. The letter sets it off and it serves the present action rather than overwhelming it.
- action-image, large form — The situation of a dead mother, an unrecognized love and Anjali's engagement presses until the child's engineered reunion, a shape inherited from DDLJ, changes it.
- movement of world — Sivan's crane and Steadicam song sequences treat each number as a trip through space. Full post-synchronization means the move into song has no break in the sound.
- affective colour — Long-lens close-ups on Kajol where the background dissolves into unreadable color, and the chromatic shift from the college's primaries to the camp's whites, pastels and greens, all achieved photochemically.