Revisioning Family Drama: The Global Spaces of Romance and Science Fiction in Honey Irani’s Stories

Abstract

Honey Irani began her scriptwriting career in the prestigious Yash Chopra camp in the 1990s. The well-established Yash Raj Films, which had produced high-profile multi-starrer projects such as Deewar, Kabhi Kabhi, Kala Patthar, and Silsila in the 1970s and early 1980s, had scored a significant hit in 1989 with the romantic Chandni. Honey Irani, with no known credentials in her portfolio, impressed Yash Chopra with her storyline for Lamhe (1991), which was, at the time, an unusual romantic story about a young girl’s love for a father figure who had previously been in love with her deceased mother. The film, unsuccessful upon its initial release, has become one of the most definitive films to come out of the Yash Chopra camp. The film’s popularity in the Indian metropolitan centers and abroad and its initial rejection by the rest of the domestic Indian audience marks the early stages of the complicated role the diaspora would play in the cinematic imagination and the distribution of Hindi films in the new century. Honey Irani’s contribution to this turn in Hindi cinema in terms of the spatial imagination of Lamhe and the genre of romance in her subsequent films needs further exploration. So do her creations of female and male characters that unobtrusively extend beyond the confines of their stereotypical roles in her popular scripts of Kya Kehna, Aaina, and Darr in the 1990s. Her sole, unsuccessful directorial venture, Armaan (2003), was followed by a very successful stint as a screenwriter for the Krrish trilogy, which is acknowledged as the first successful foray of popular Indian cinema into the world of blockbuster science fiction. This chapter discusses Honey Irani’s success in pushing the boundaries of the “family drama” to incorporate the more specialized genres of romance and science-fiction as Hindi cinema entered a new, globalized phase of circulation.