Kareena Kapoor’s on-screen motherhood has always been marked by loss, from Kurbaan to The Buckingham Murders

(Also Read – The Buckingham Murders box office, second day collection: Kareena Kapoor’s film sees growth, grosses nearly ₹2 crores)

sacrificed

Kareena’s first taste of motherhood was in Rensil D’Silva’s 2009 crime thriller Kurbaan, in which she was paired opposite her then-boyfriend and now-husband Saif Ali Khan. A story of a love jihad gone wrong, Kurbaan portrays her as a teacher and an American citizen who is drawn to Saif’s terrorist character in her bid to obtain American citizenship. When she discovers his true nefarious intentions, it is her impending motherhood that protects her life. She reveals that she is pregnant, which prompts Saif’s character to show mercy, against the wishes of his brothers.

Kareena, however, does not use her motherhood as a weapon. She challenges her husband to kill her and their unborn child as it is part of his mission. She is also a hopeful mother who wishes to bring her child to a much more peaceful and harmonious world. This encourages her to leak information about her house’s terrorist plans to secret agents. At the end of the film, she tries to convince Saif to give up his maksad and lead a normal life with her and their child, but he is too attached to his own self-realization. He asks her to take care of their child before committing suicide to avoid being caught red-handed. Kurbaan Hua plays during the end credits, but it is not only Saif who gives his life for love, but also Kareena who sacrifices her love for the greater good.

Motherhood step by step

We never see Kareena with her child in Kurbaan, as she probably hasn’t decided whether she will be a mother yet, as we see in her 2010 film, Siddharth P Malhotra’s We Are Family. She plays the girlfriend of Arjun Rampal, who has three children with his ex-wife Kajol. Kareena is more of a reluctant friend to her future stepchildren than a mother-in-law. But when Kajol discovers that she is terminally ill, she convinces Kareena to take over the role of mother to her children. Kareena makes fatal mistakes, but grows up from an independent, free-spirited woman to a nurturing and caring mother. None other than her didi from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham to support her in her role as a mother.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZlIIED9jUk

She reprises her role as jijaji in the same film, Shah Rukh Khan, to become a full-fledged mother for the first time, to a school-going son in Anubhav Sinha’s superhero film Ra.One (2011). She loses her husband (Shah Rukh) again in this film, due to a scientific experiment gone wrong. This time, her grief is not hers alone. She shares it with her son, who is too young to accept the loss, but too old to be fooled by euphemisms. He rebels against his mother’s decision to move to their homeland while Kareena struggles to raise a child alone on a foreign shore. Watch her cry, drop the umbrella in the rain and clutch the photo of her and her late husband to her chest, in the song Bhare Naina.

Becoming a mother in real life

Five years later, Kareena became a mother herself by giving birth to Taimur Ali Khan. Her first days of motherhood in real life were not without tensions either, as her first son went from being trolled on the day of his birth because of his name to being an internet darling and paparazzi favourite. Irony and humour played crucial roles in Kareena’s first film after becoming a mother – Raj Mehta’s 2019 romantic comedy Good Newwz. In it, she plays an entertainment journalist who struggles to conceive a child with her husband (Akshay Kumar). She opts for IVF, but the sperms get mixed up and she ends up carrying another man’s (Diljit Dosanjh) child.

Kareena plays the role of a mother-to-be who has to deal with this pregnancy complication beautifully. But it is her monologue towards the end of the film that conveys the frustration of a mother-to-be. We have seen pregnant Preity Zinta’s morning sickness and her craving for Ben & Jerry’s Belgian dark chocolate ice cream in ‘Paune barah baje’ in Salaam Namaste (2005), but we have never seen a lead actress go on a rant about the pains of pregnancy – hair loss, rashes, boils, mood swings, depression, deprivation and labour pains – and why mothers do what they want regardless. Kareena’s pain is visceral as she lashes out at her husband for not being by her side for the entire nine months.

The era of single mothers

It’s no surprise, then, that Kareena has been playing the role of a mother all by herself in her recent films. In Advait Chandan’s Laal Singh Chaddha (2022), she plays a woman so obsessed with marrying a rich man due to her poor father’s alcoholism and violence that she ends up with the toxic man she was trying to avoid. All the while, the exact opposite of that – Laal (Aamir Khan) – has been by her side. When she finally seeks him out and has a son with him, she is on her deathbed due to a terminal illness. But when she marries him with little Laal by her side, she leaves with a smile assured that her son is in good hands.

Kareena also fails to escape toxic partners in her upcoming film Jaane Jaan, starring Sujoy Ghosh. This time, she vows to protect her daughter at all costs from her abusive ex-partner. When he chases them to a remote village, she ends up killing him in a violent physical altercation. Throughout the film, she seems ready to give in to the confession, but her mother’s guilt stops her. Mother’s guilt also strikes in her latest film, Hansal Mehta’s detective thriller The Buckingham Murders, where she plays a grieving mother and a tough cop who must investigate a missing child case despite her own personal ordeal.

In this film, Kareena’s single motherhood is at its peak, as there is not even a single mention of her husband, whether he is separated or dead. Her only support is her father, who thinks his daughter has grown up too fast because her mother died too young. Maturity is constant in Kareena’s portrayal, even as she goes through tantrums over the murder of her young son. Her eyes bubble with shock and her hands shake with frustration, especially when she discovers… spoiler alert – that the culprit behind the missing/dead boy case is his adoptive mother. She sees him as a burden and a mere means for her husband to extend his bloodline. Kareena’s character can’t believe that a mother – even one without blood relation – could do this to her own son. Who better than a Kareena knows that a mother has to make sacrifices – be it her partner, her job, her body, herself, her conscience or even her child, but never her motherhood itself.

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