When Shohini Ghosh argues that “Bollywood plays on the idea of false appearances and mistaken identities,” she uses the example of Kal Ho Naa Ho (Nikhil Advani, 2003) to substantiate her claim. ¹ Kantaben, Rohit’s housekeeper, sees a homosexual relationship in the otherwise homosocial bond between Aman and Rohit. In other words, she misrecognizes the nature of the desire between the two men when she looks at them, which evokes a homophobic response in her. D.A. Miller, in his seminal essay Anal Rope, states that the desire to look gets connotated based on how a man looks at other men. He also points out that the way culture prescribes sexuality is dependent on how this look transpires or how long it is. How, then, does one draw the line between looking as an “acceptable epistemological task” and looking as a “reprehensible erotic fascination”? ² 

Taking both KHNH and Anal Rope into conversation with each other, I argue that in the process of looking to determine the homosexual look between the two men, the audience also participates in homosexuality. In fact, if Kantaben’s reaction is anything to go by, they not only just look at it but also effectively derive pleasure from the act of looking at it.

On the level of the plot, KHNH tells the story of a love triangle between Aman (Shah Rukh Khan), Naina (Preity Zinta) and Rohit (Saif Ali Khan). Naina is a headstrong pessimistic woman who must take care of her disabled brother and her adopted little sister along with her widowed mother. Rohit, who is Naina’s classmate in business school in New York City, is a happy-go-lucky fellow who at first denies any sort of romantic attachment towards her. When Aman and his mother move to Naina’s neighborhood, they start off as frenemies. Naina clearly feels Aman will disrupt her monotonous life, which he eventually does by falling for her. It takes some time for Aman’s feelings to be reciprocated, but they eventually are. A separate side plot ensures that Rohit also falls for her. While those feelings are initially not returned, Aman makes sure that Rohit and Naina get together because he is suffering from a terminal illness. What runs parallel to this triangle of desire between the trio is also the relationship between Aman and Rohit. There is an element of misrecognition from the very first time the two men meet, albeit of a different nature. Aman misrecognizes (or pretends to) Naina and Rohit’s relationship, partly guided by Naina’s misleading claim of her and Rohit being lovers, when they were actually just friends. ³

What this scene therefore establishes to be used by other key scenes later on, is that there is always an element of misrecognition that will shroud Aman and Rohit whenever they are together. This misrecognition manages to transcend the continuum between the homosocial and the homosexual.

Eve Sedgwick, in her book Between Men, points out that “to draw the ‘homosocial’ back into the orbit of ‘desire’, of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual”. ⁴ Sedgwick’s argument about the unbroken continuum manages to throw a new light on the nature of Aman and Rohit’s relationship. In a scene that straddles this very continuum, Aman and Rohit are shown to wake up next to each other, having slept together on the same bed. The trope of misrecognition starts from the very beginning when Rohit misrecognizes Aman as Laila, his dog, and sweet-talks her. However, it isn’t until Kantaben sees Aman laid horizontally over Rohit because he wants to get the bottle of water, that this trope of misrecognition becomes an identifier of homosexual desires. It is through Kantaben, then, that the audience makes the association of the men, who until a moment ago weren’t seen as engaging in anything sexual, as displaying homosexual tendencies. This is of course partly aided by the fact that Aman puts on a performance for Kantaben through actions like romantically caressing Rohit or leaning into him, as soon as he recognizes that Kantaben has misrecognized their behavior. ⁵ In a minuscule moment then, something perfectly homosocial turns into homosexual by this misrecognizing look.

Aman’s performative action and Rohit’s disavowing response put homosexuality squarely in the “totalizing, tantalizing play of connotation.” ⁶

It is never explicitly depicted, and the only association of homosexuality that the audience can draw from looking at the duo is through Kantaben’s homophobic reaction to her own misrecognition of them. As a response to Kantaben’s reaction, Aman’s performance connotates homosexuality only in so far as it is misrecognized as such. Had it not been for Kantaben’s reaction, there would be no scope of seeing homosexual behavior in Aman’s performative homosexuality. Since the homosexual nature of the relationship between Aman and Rohit has been placed in the realm of the connotated, which itself becomes connotated because of the misrecognition stemming from looking at the unbroken continuum between the homosocial and the homosexual, Rohit can only disavow homosexuality by reaffirming heterosexuality that configures “entirely in terms of men.” In other words, Rohit’s claim to heterosexuality doesn’t stem from a “desire for women” but from “the negation of the desire for men.” ⁷

This is clearly seen in the scene when his father tells him what Kantaben had reported to him. He says, “Kantaben was telling me that you…Forget it.” Nowhere does he directly refer to homosexuality, yet Rohit instantly understands what his father is talking about. Once again, homosexuality is only alluded to through connotation. This is why Rohit’s first response is a resounding “No!” (even though he does later talk about his love for Naina). ⁸

All of this is to say that the notion of connotation raises the desire to see proof that literalizes or denotes that connotation. In yet another scene, when Rohit, egged on by Aman beside him, calls Naina to ask her to meet him, there is a hug that feels it’s a split second too long between the two men after the call ends. ⁹ According to Miller, the audience is always “put in the position of being just about to see” what they are waiting for. ¹⁰ As spectators, there is a feeling that the hug may or may not connote something entirely different from what we are actually seeing. This feeling of uncertainty is also helped by Kantaben’s reaction to seeing this hug, whose reaction we see in turn only after the men break the embrace. It is only after seeing Kantaben’s reaction that we understand that the embrace can potentially be read as something entirely different from what it appears to be on the surface. This also raises interesting questions about how Kantaben herself is choosing to interpret what she is seeing.

Miller further states:

…. the desire for the spectacle of gay male sex is intensified accordingly into that pleasurably prolonged state of expectation we call suspense. What affirms this suspense to panic, at least within the film’s homophobic (not quite to say heterosexual) male perspective, involves the possibility of continuity, even coincidence between the sight that the viewer is looking to see and the very act of his looking to see it. ¹¹

What he says here is quite interesting, especially in the context of the specific scene. There is obviously an expectation of something more happening than what we are simply seeing. Mixed with that expectation, however, there is also an element of pleasure attached to it. It is almost as if we seek enjoyment from the expectation that something sexual is to follow that embrace. It is this very act of enjoyment which the audience recognizes. Once they realize that they expect the seamless continuation (like the unbroken continuum of the homosocial/homosexual) from what they are watching to what they are expecting to watch next, they begin to panic. Therein comes their homophobia.

If we look at Kantaben’s reaction the first time she finds Aman and Rohit in bed together, her reaction is visceral, to say the least. Her hands shake intensely, and her quivering lips manage to reveal to us that she has a strong reaction to whatever she is seeing. The background music that comes on whenever Kantaben is shown on screen (which is also usually the point at which we see the trope of misrecognition play out) suggests that there is an element of humor attached to her misrecognition. The question that remains, however, is what Kantaben is actually feeling when she misrecognizes Aman and Rohit’s relationship. One way to interpret this is that she is disgusted and repulsed by what she thinks is homosexual behavior between the two. At the same time, her reaction can equally signify orgasmic pleasure from what she is viewing. The movement of quivering lips or shaking hands is ambiguous in a way that can come to mean two different things. The background music then comes on whenever she reacts like this to clarify any lingering doubts about what her behavior could signify. Taken on its own, however, Kantaben’s reaction can be read as emblematic of that pleasurable suspense that she and the audience feel upon watching Aman and Rohit.

When Miller questions the ability of the audience to distinguish between a look that signifies “an acceptable epistemological task” and a look that is “reprehensible erotic fascination”, he understands the concept of looking as something that is deterministic in nature. ¹² Miller asks, “what would prevent this second look from being effectively assimilated to the first look that it means to catch” in the case of the homophobic audience who has to look at homosexuality to detect it. ¹³ In other words, Miller proposes that one can never really separate the two forms of look. Instead, they end up acting as a form of continuation whereby one leads to the other. What also assists this seamless flow is the camera. Miller claims that Hitchcock’s camera positions itself in such a way as to arouse the paranoid suspicion of locating homosexuality everywhere, simply because the position of the camera ensures a complete lack of distance between what is actually happening and the audience. This rings true for KHNH as well.

According to Christian Metz in his essay on identification, the camera acts as a form of projector where the spectator, casting their eye on things which get illuminated, is able to have them deposited within themselves. ¹⁴ This is to say that much of what we see on the screen is absorbed by us, which we then project back to the screen. Taking what both Miller and Metz say about the positionality of the camera, it is clear that the extreme closeness of the camera along with the aspect of doubling through the camera’s projection makes the audience complicit not just in viewing homosexuality, but in taking part in it as well. In their quest to inquire if Aman and Rohit’s embrace or their actions connotate homosexuality or not, the audience falls into the trap of playing detectives. The audience begins to ask, “Is that embrace homosexual?” “Was that an intentional sexual action?” Such questions from the audience indicate the audience’s role in identifying and recognizing patterns of homosexuality, which would technically require them to be an active participant in homosexuality to understand.

In all the scenes discussed so far, Kantaben has acted as the catalyst that the audience then uses to see homosexuality by looking at the duo. However, what about in scenes where they are together, but Kantaben is not? When Rohit and Camilla are in the restaurant, Aman goes to his house and tries to find out Rohit’s whereabouts from Kantaben. She refuses to tell him and simply says that he is out with a girl while holding onto him for dear life. An exasperated Aman tells her, “I’ll die, but I won’t leave Rohit. He cannot be loved by any girl.” ¹⁵ A few scenes later, in the restaurant, Aman holds Rohit’s hand and says, “I’ll marry you.” ¹⁶ It seems that in this scene, something shifts. It feels like homosexuality, which had so far remained in the realm of connotation, has finally moved into the register of the explicit, falling just short of being outright denoted. Further, the viewers can look at their interactions and see something far more performative than previously seen only through Kantaben’s reactions thus far. In all their encounters with each other, it is Kantaben who has acted as the audience, giving us the cue on how to interpret Aman and Rohit’s behavior. Now that Kantaben is no longer in the scene, Aman’s joke about marrying Rohit is also viewed with that pleasurable turn to paranoid suspicion by the audience. The viewers end up taking on Kantaben’s role in the scene at the restaurant.

In another scene, when Aman finds out that Naina and Rohit have found out about his illness, he goes to Rohit first instead of Naina even though he claims to love Naina. Rohit says to him, “You lied to me. You love Naina. You lied.” Aman responds by saying, “I don’t love Naina.” ¹⁷ This is innocuous-sounding enough, and yet, still not quite considering what has been said so far. Without the homophobic gaze that sees homosexuality connotated everywhere, these lines would be purely innocent. However, it is because of that gaze that the audience begins to reinterpret these lines as something akin to them confessing to each other, albeit through a process of negation (“I don’t love Naina,” instead of perhaps, “I love you”) so that their homosexual relationship can remain in the realm of connotated.

In a different part of his essay, Miller says, “….excit[ing] a desire to see, it inspires a fear of seeing; the object of voyeuristic desire is precisely what must not catch the eye.” ¹⁸ What seeing Aman and Rohit’s relationship play out on screen tells us is that the practice of looking excites in us not only a pleasurable yet paranoid suspicion, but also a fear that we know what we are looking for when we look at them. I claim that even before we begin looking at other men or for signs of homosexuality through the look passed by those men, we already have a fair inkling of what we are expecting. However, before our expectation of something more to follow on the screen actually takes shape, we are already scared about that expectation taking root in us. This is why there is a “fear of seeing.” We fear that our expectations will turn into reality, as we keep hoping for it in KHNH. This fear then presupposes the wishful thinking that our expectations will turn to reality, which then begets another unsettling question: if we wish to see something that may or may not be denoted in the literal sense of the word, are we the true voyeurs? If we see sexuality and sexual attraction in places where it is never truly denoted, are we the true perverts? 

This essay then challenges the diegetic idea of Kal Ho Naa Ho being a heteronormative love story where the boy gets the girl by focusing on the relationship between the two men and triangulating their desire. By using Sedgwick’s idea of the homosocial-sexual continuum in tandem with Miller’s theory of connotation and denotation, the paper shows how queerness does not always need to be ontologically referential. Instead, it can be embodied by the way we look and what we see on the screen.