Hindi cinema has come a long way from the hapless mother who oscillates between emotionally blackmailing her son to feeding gajar ka halwa to him. She's no longer waiting at the window with bated breath for her son to return home. The modern Bollywood mother is still sacrificial, but sans the conventional connotation. She works, balances it with life at home, takes some sacrifices in stride, and grieves the others. Kareena Kapoor is a worthy case study to explore how motherhood is depicted on screen today – it's messy, relatable, and undeniably universal.

Kurbaan hui

Kareena's first tryst with motherhood came in Rensil D'Silva's 2009 crime thriller Kurbaan, in which she was paired with her then-boyfriend and now-husband, Saif Ali Khan. A story of love jihad gone wrong, Kurbaan depicted her as a teacher and an American citizen who's lured by Saif's terrorist character in his process to secure US citizenship. When she discovers his true, malafide intentions, it's her impending motherhood that protects her life. She reveals she's pregnant, which prompts Saif's character to show her mercy, against the advice of his brethren.

Kareena, however, doesn't weaponise her motherhood. She dares her husband to kill her and their unborn child since it's a part of her mission. She's also a hopeful mother wishing to bring her child into a far more peaceful and harmonious world. That encourages her to leak information about terrorist plans from her home to undercover 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's too tied to his self-actualisation. He asks her to take care of their child before killing himself to avoid getting caught red-handed.. Kurbaan Hua plays during the end credits, but it's not just Saif who gives up his life for love, but also Kareena who sacrifices her love for the greater good.

Step-by-stepmothering

We never see Kareena with her child in Kurbaan, because she's still probably making up her mind about being a mother, as we see in her 2010 film, Siddharth P Malhotra's We Are Family. She plays the girlfriend of Arjun Rampal, who has three kids with his ex-wife Kajol. Kareena is more of a reluctant friend to her to-be stepchildren than a stepmom. But when Kajol finds out she's terminally ill, she convinces Kareena to fill in for her by assuming the role of a mother to her kids. Kareena makes fatal mistakes, but grows to transition from a free-spirited independent woman to a nurturing, caretaking mother. No one but her didi from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham to handhold her with the mothering.

It takes her jijaji from the same film, Shah Rukh Khan, to rope her in as a full-fledged mother for the first time, to a school-going son in Anubhav Sinha's 2011 superhero film Ra.One. She loses her husband (Shah Rukh) yet again in this film, to a scientific experiment gone wrong. This time, her grief is not hers alone. She shares it with her son, who's too young to process the loss, but too old to be fooled by euphemism. He rebels against his mother's decision to relocate to their homeland as Kareena struggles to raise a child by herself on a foreign shore. Watch her well up, let go of the umbrella in rain, and hold the picture of her and her late husband close to her chest, in the song Bhare Naina.

Becoming a mother IRL

Five years later, Kareena became a mom herself when she gave birth to Taimur Ali Khan. Her early days of real-life motherhood weren't devoid of tension either as her first son went from being trolled on the day he was born courtesy his name to being the internet's darling and a paparazzi favourite. Irony and humour played crucial characters in the first film Kareena signed after becoming a mother – Raj Mehta's 2019 romantic comedy Good Newwz. She played an entertainment journalist struggling to conceive a child with her husband (Akshay Kumar). She goes the IVF route, only to have the sperms get mixed up and her bearing the child of another man (Diljit Dosanjh).

Kareena does a great job of a to-be mother with this pregnancy complication. But it's her monologue towards the end of the film that conveys the lived-in frustration of a would-be mom. We've seen a pregnant Preity Zinta's morning sickness and craving for Ben & Jerry's Belgian dark chocolate ice cream at “paune barah baje” in Salaam Namaste (2005), but never have we seen a leading lady go on a rant about the pains of pregnancy – hairfall, rashes, boils, mood swings, depression, deprivation, and labour pain – and why mothers go through the motions despite all that. Kareena's pain is visceral as she lashes out at her husband for not staying by her side in the nine months.

Single mom era

It's no surprise then that Kareena has gone solo as a mother in her recent movies. In Advait Chandan's Laal Singh Chaddha (2022), she plays a woman so consumed by the idea of marrying rich because of her poor father's alcoholism and violent streak, that she ends up with the exact toxic man she'd been trying to evade. All this while, the exact opposite of that – Laal (Aamir Khan) – was by her side. When she finally seeks him out and has a son with him, she's on her deathbed because of a terminal illness. But as she marries him with the little Laal by her side, she leaves with an assured smile that her son is in good hands.

Kareena can't escape toxic partners in her next, Sujoy Ghosh's Jaane Jaan, either. This time, she swears to protect her daughter at every cost from her abusive ex partner. When he chases them down to a remote village, she ends up killing him in a heated physical altercation. Throughout the movie, she seems like she'd cave in to the confession – but her mother's guilt prevents her from going there. Mother's guilt strikes back in her latest release, Hansal Mehta's investigative thriller The Buckingham Murders, too as she plays a grieving mother and a tough-as-nails cop, who has to probe a missing child case despite her personal ordeal.

Her single mom era is at its peak in this film as there's not even a passing mention of her husband, whether estranged or dead. Her only support system is her father, who reflects that his daughter grew up too fast because her mother died too young. The maturity is consistent in Kareena's portrayal even though she experiences bouts of outburst from her young son's homicide. Her eyes seethe with shock and her hands tremble with frustration especially when she finds out – spoiler alert – that the culprit behind the missing/dead boy case is his adoptive mother. She sees him as a burden and just a means of her husband to extend his bloodline. Kareena's character can't believe that a mother – even if not related by blood – could do it to her own son. Who better than a Kareena to know that a mother must sacrifice – whether it's your partner, your work, your body, yourself, your conscience, or even your child, but never your motherhood itself.

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