Dancing Fans: The Choreography of Kaho Naa…Pyaar Hai and its Footprints

Kaho Naa...Pyaar Hai (2000), which completed 25 years on 14^th January, released in 2000 to a thundering box office and a spiralling fanbase. Directed by Rakesh Roshan, it was meant to launch his son Hrithik Roshan into Hindi film stardom. The film was almost a curated display of the various facets of Hrithik’s talent—also featuring the classic double-role trope to showcase his seamless transition from the ‘lover boy’ to the ‘action boy.’ But there was something else the film was making Hindi cinema transition into—a new language of filmi dance. Choreographed by Farah Khan, Hrithik’s dance steps from the film had laid the foundation for what wa🧜s to become, in addition to his stardom, the language of Bollywood song and dance.

From films like Mughal-E-Azam (1960), Pakeezah (1972), and Umrao Jaan (1981), where dance was an integral part of the narrative, to films like Tezaab (1988) and Chandni (1989)—it was not new for dance to be an active force in scripting stardom and fan base in Hindi cinema. But this stardom was mostly rooted in classical dance. Two decades before Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai released, Disco Dancer (1982) had launched Mithun Chakraborty into frenetic fandom. His disco moves, along with his “Mithun cut” hairstyle were easily doable for fans. But his dancing star persona somehow did not spill into the rest of his career. The 1990s saw Govinda emerge as a dancing star, whose steps were also extremely popular and easily reproducible. Kaho Naa...Pyaar Hai, and through the film Hrithik, brought in a kind of filmi dance that was both carefully choreographed and reproducible. He also came to be known as someone who was ‘flexible’ enough to carry out anything. In an old behind-the-scenes interview, Farah Khan mischievously revealed how she and ༺her team reworked on the choreography of the film, after Hrithik successfully performed an extremely complicated dance step that they had tasked him with, just as a prank. In fact, the film itself feels like a lot of Hrithik’s dancing skills were a deciding factor in the narrative direction. But it wasn’t just Hrithik’s role; the film’s choreography was part of a larger shift in industrial practices that was taking place in Hindi cinema—that of hiring young background dancers from India and abroad, trained in international dance forms.

Farah Khan, along with Shiamak Davar, whose dance academy has played a pivotal role in producing trained dancers and stars, have been pioneers in making these shifts. As a self-admitted Michael Jackson fan, Khan has elaborated how the concert sequence at the end of the film was at par with any other concert of her ‘guru.’ She, along with Davar, were heavily adapting international dance trends into Hindi cinema. Khan has often emphasised on the need to hire young, trained dancers in her troupes. In fact, the concept of having ‘troupes’ for dance numbers itself was something that hardly existed before them. The choreographies designed by Khan and Davar produced dance steps that were easily reproducible by young fans without formal training and inspired them to undertake formal training in these dance forms. Till then, dance training only ever meant classical Indian dance. But Kaho Naa...Pyaar Hai, and the star it launched, marked a cultural moment that created a new market for the training of ‘Bollywood dance.’ Not just Davar’s academy, but dance institutes have sprung up across the country in the last two decades, which are constantly churning out aspiring fi🐼lm actors and dancers, stories of whom are quite commonly heard in television dance reality shows. Earlier, dancing stars were often rooted in Indian classical dance, which cannot be casually emulated without training. If not classical dance, it would be limited to free-flowing moves that hardly looked choregraphed, or limited steps where the actors wouldn’t have to do much. But the language of dance created by both Farah Khan and Shiamak Davar, marked a shift in this respect.ꦫ They created dance troupes of professionals outside the circuits of classical dance, quite a few of whom later went on to become actors and film stars themselves.

Releasing at the beginning of the millennium, less than a decade from when India’s economy had opened up, the film’s shift to New Zealand in its second half was both a nod to young India’s global aspiration, as well as a precursor. It was this shift that made the use of international dancers fit seamlessly into the narrative. As the camera swoons into a nightclub, the film announces the arrival of Raj (even though it was really announcing the arrival of Hrithik) through the impeccably choreographed “Ek pal ka jeena.” Music director Rajesh Roshan has commented on how he was inspired by youngsters playing disco music in moving cars and in parties. Unlike the 1980s when Disco Dancer had released, discos had become more mainstream, at least i💜n the urban centres of India. Moreover, the easy availability of music facilitated by cassette and CD culture, enabled 🃏young people to turn personal parties into disco-like spaces where they could break into free-flowing dance moves. The film’s song-and-dance sequences can be located amidst these shifting economic and cultural practices at the start of the millennium. And Farah Khan’s easily imitable dance steps broke right into these spaces.

Contemporary Hindi film dance is often composed keeping in mind certain ‘hook steps’ that can go viral on the internet through fan-made reels and videos. Kaho Naa...Pyaar Hai released at a time when this concept obviously did not exist. But Hrithik’s steps from the film’s title track, and especially from “Ek pal ka jeena,” ended up achieving cult status within the personal spaces of parties and fandoms. It had emerged as a cultural code, quite literally, where in dumb charades (a popular indoor game, more so in the 1990s and 2000s), just performing the hook step was enough for people to guess the film correcꦫtly. If you knew the step, you knew the film, and not the other way round.  A lot of ‘90s kids who were probably too young to either watch, or retain the film, have grown up associating the film through its song-and-dance-sequences.

This association continues till the present, where these steps are still popular in both the digital and TV space (through reels and dance shows, respectively).  A recreation of the film’s title song sequence by Vina Fan, popular Youtuber from Indonesia who recreates Bollywood songs, has more than 3 million views on YouTube. The original video of the same song, released by the official YouTube channel of Zee Music Company just three weeks ago, has almost 4 million views, pointing to the popularity that the film’s song-and-dance sequences continue to command. Hrithik’s later films, quite a few of which have elaborately choreographed dance sequences, have failed to occupy the cult status of Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai. It was perhaps because it was the first time that professionally produced ‘good choreography’ was both aspirational yet approachওable—a feeling that classical dance has often failed to provide. It is perhaps this in-betweenness that makes the film’s dance sequences fit in as easily into reel culture, as it did in the discos and parties of the 2000s. It is as much a cultural phenomenon now, as it was then. However, the film isn’t flawless. A lot of its sequences would, rightfully, not be suitable for today’s sensibilities. But neither is the dancing star it launched flawless—with his extra finger and his stutter that he very openly talks about—both of which he has quite poetically weaved into his craft and his star persona.

Rini Dasgupta is a Ph.D scholar of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She works on the relationship between labour and technology in popular Hindi cinema.