10 Years Of Kapoor & Sons: The Uneasy, Ongoing Negotiation Of Being A Family

Long before terms like “golden child syndrome” and “narcissistic parenting” became buzzwords in our everyday lexicon, Kapoor & Sons (2016) delivered one of the most familiar and devastating depictions of it in mainstream Bollywood. On the surface, Shakun Batra’s sophomore film is about a dysfunctional family that, like most Indian families, has children who have inherited generational trauma instead of wealth as its ancestral legacy. But in the guise of a mainstream family dramedy, Kapoor & Sons tackled several familiar Hindi cinema tropes and managed to give many of them nuanced, contemporary twists—from sibling rivalry and parental favouritism to philandering patriarchs and sexual identity.

Incidentally, labels like “gay” or “homosexual” were never uttered in the film, even in the confrontation scene where Fawad Khan’s Rahul comes out to his family. Most of the central conflicts in the film had little to do with Rahul’s sexuality. The film humanised his character beyond the confines of identity categories, allowing him to exist as a person first, rather than a type. This decision to portray him as queer, sans labels, was less about isolating his difference and more about normalising and situating him within the same ecosystem of familial dysfunction. After all, shame, neglect, and longing operate within families with a brutal consistency, regardless of gender or sexuality.

However, this refusal to name sexuality outright also operated on other levels. It reflected the distinctly middle-class discomfort around acknowledging or speaking about queerness. And at the same time, it functioned as a kind of self-imposed censorship; a workaround so as to say, offering plausible deniability in a pre-Section 377 India.

Set in the misty hills of southern India, Kapoor & Sons follows the Kapoors of Coonoor. The story begins when the 90-year-old ailing Kapoor patriarch, Rishi Kapoor’s Amarjeet, summons the whole family back under one roof to fulfil his last wish to take a picture with his entire family before he passes away. This brings back two estranged brothers home carrying unequal burdens. Rahul, the elder, is the successful, dependable son, while Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra), the younger who is still struggling to kickstart his writing career, arrives with a simmering sense of inadequacy. Their parents, Harsh (Rajat Kapoor) and Sunita (Ratna Pathak Shah), are locked in a marriage eroded by resentment, financial strain and long-suppressed betrayals. What begins as a reluctant reunion quickly unravels into a series of confrontations, where old wounds of infidelity, favouritism and emotional neglect surface demanding catharsis.

The fragile equilibrium of the Kapoor clan is further disrupted by Tia (Alia Bhatt), a local who becomes both a romantic interest and an accidental witness to the family’s ultimate unravelling. As tensions escalate, the illusion of the “perfect family” collapses, culminating in revelations and repercussions that force each member to confront not just each other, but the versions of themselves they have carefully constructed.

By the time the family finally assembles for that long-awaited photograph, the Kapoors of Coonoor come to terms with the idea that they are less a portrait of ideal kinship and more a living, breathing anatomy of its bittersweet wounds.

It’s All About Loving Your Parents Children

Indian cinema has long reflected a particular hobby of Indian families like it is their moral duty: parental guilt tripping. From Baghban (2003) to even regional stories like Prabhat Roy’s Laathi (1996), Indian films have gone out of their way to extol the virtues of parenthood and denigrate children who ever dared to set any boundaries with their enmeshed families. Our films have utilised the golden child/black sheep dichotomy, often staging it in moral absolutes to tell such stories.

In Deewaar (1975), for instance, the split between the righteous brother and the outlaw is rendered almost mythic—a battle between virtue and vice shaped by maternal allegiance. Similarly, films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) and Hum Saath-Saath Hain (1999) embedded favouritism within melodrama, where the “good son” is rewarded with legitimacy, while the errant ones must either redeem themselves or remain exiled.

But this was the cinema of the pre-Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (2015) era.

Kapoor & Sons not only resists this moral coding, but turns the lens towards toxic parenting that others their own children, pitting siblings against one another and causing long-term psychological scarring. For a change, it is not the “ungrateful” children, but the (sometimes unwittingly) manipulative parents who are under the microscope, forced to confront the fallout of their own actions.

Rahul is the preferred one, the golden child because he is successful and more crucially, he is compliant with the family’s expectations. Like most such children, he grows up into an adult who learns to lie and hide himself better in front of his family than the other sibling. Arjun’s resentment stems from years of being measured against an impossible standard and blatant betrayal—for the longest time Arjun believes Rahul stole his first novel’s idea, only for Sunita to confess later that she gave his manuscript to Rahul because she never took Arjun’s ambitions seriously. Love, here, is unevenly distributed not because one child deserves it more, but because one is easier to love.

This is where Batra and co-writer as well as frequent collaborator, Ayesha Devitre Dhillon’s voices become particularly distinct. Across Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (2012), Kapoor & Sons and Gehraiyaan (2022), they repeatedly return to familiar relational templates, only to recontextualise them. The expected romance gives way to platonic closure, the “ideal” family contains fractures under scrutiny and the modern relationship drama dissolves into moral ambiguity. Their characters are often not allowed the comfort of archetypes; instead, they exist in the grey zones of contradiction, where love coexists with resentment and intimacy with estrangement.

There is also an undercurrent of class anxiety running through the film. The Kapoor family’s financial instability—hinted at through debt, professional insecurity and the pressure to maintain appearances—complicates the idea of the upper-middle-class Indian household as inherently stable. Success, as embodied by Rahul, is not just an emotional currency but an economic one, further entrenching his position within the family hierarchy. Arjun’s struggles, meanwhile, are not merely personal failures, but symptomatic of a system that equates worth with productivity.

Woman Come Fix Me

Alia Bhatt’s Tia, though seemingly peripheral to the central family drama, is also emblematic of a subtle shift in the writing of women characters in mainstream Hindi cinema during this time. Tia is not the sacrificial figure or the moral compass; nor is she burdened with “fixing” the broken family she enters. Instead, she exists with a degree of autonomy that feels refreshingly unforced.

Tia observes more than she intervenes, and when she does act, it is guided by her own boundaries rather than the demands of the Kapoor family’s dysfunction. In another film, her character might have been reduced to a prize in the brothers’ rivalry. Here, she simply gets to exist as her own self, healing from her own past traumas, chasing after her own desires.

A decade on, what makes Kapoor & Sons still stand the test of time is not just that it addressed taboo subjects, but how it did so. It neither offered conventional catharsis nor indulged in complete despair. Instead, it offered something far more recognisable: the uneasy, ongoing negotiation of being a family.