Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2: Keeping Up With The Viranis

It's all about loving (their) family! Manik Sharma revisits the small-screen saga that was, along with its matriarch-to-be, the arbiter of middle-class morality.

Manik+Sharma

Aug 05, 2025

Equal parts frustrating and fascinating: The return of Smriti Irani as Tulsi in Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2

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IT’S DUSK. A time of the day when most households in India settle into the rhythm of resigning themselves to the lull of night. But in the Virani household, this same hour is rife for devolving into cult-like congregations. The foyer overflows with people. From a distance it looks like a small mob has overtaken the floor. You could mistake this for question hour in the Lok Sabha, but here some work might still be accomplished — like deciding who’s wearing the ugliest dress, or who makes the most pointless observations. Almost 25 years on, we are back amidst generational specimens that held the country’s gaze. Not a lot has changed; which is both baffling and bold.

Smriti Irani, a year after she quietly exited active politics — without really denouncing it — returns to the titular role that made her a household name. More than a name, it made her an ethical plank. The mother-sister-bahu figure who somehow saddles the worlds of responsibility and reverence, of servitude and leadership, compassion and correctness. And most importantly, a certain strident Indianness: conservative, modest, value-based, and familial. Here is what has changed in this sequel: Everyone’s older (obviously). On no other face is this ageing more apparent than Tulsi’s. Even that iconic introduction is briefly interrupted by a moment in which she looks into the mirror forlornly, saturated and deadened by years of shouldering the demon that Indians have since learned to divorce as the first moment of reckoning — a joint family.

But here is what has changed about India since the show last came out: Love has gone online, joint families are a thing of the past, and the notion of morality has withered away to make way for an intense form of aspiration. There is a strange dissonance to what the show evokes, and what the country now seeks to affirm. Neither are islands yet, but these are worlds drifting away from each other. It’s what makes Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi a relic that is also, strangely, timely. Relic, because it harks back to the old tropes of TV: crucial moments are prefaced by CGI-spawned thunder and lighting. A strong drought threatens all kinds of foliage in the Virani household. The very effects that made the original so meme-ready also make it out-of-sync with today’s visual grammar. The relevance though may float in from the upgrades the show might be willing to accommodate.

Tulsi’s crisis of self-worth — previously positioned as her rank in a large household — has now shifted to her self-image. Compared to Mihir (a sparkling and fit Amar Upadhyay), she’s overweight, visibly wrecked, and far too slow for her doting husband. He is the mirror she can neither look away from nor look into for the things it tells her about herself. It’s a curious but promising update: the neglected yet valourised mother figure, who must contend with her own decay while she keeps the sheets, the ‘feels,’ and the food, all fresh. The biggest crisis of the first couple of episodes is Tulsi’s daughter having taken a lover (it’s 2025, but still). Her youngest son is — in a hat tip to the news of the week — caught drunk driving. Both are urgent, relatable issues in some stretched sense of make-believe. But in Kyunki… cultural conflict is often swept aside by the gallantry of the sisters who rhyme — maa ka pyaar and sanskaar. The two band-aids that fix family, home, city, and apparently even country.

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Of course, a lot of people will watch this show to remind themselves of the first time they were wronged. To most millennials, Kyunki represents the early stab of the knife that turned Indian morality from symptom to prescription. Kyunki after all, isn’t just about bickering saas-bahus it’s also about the grounding of the middle class into the self-defeating aesthetic of modesty. Do right by others, it says, constantly; pay your taxes, love the ones you are given, and punch — eloquently — downward. In a coincidence worth evaluating, in the week that Kyunki returned to our screens, Dhadak 2 — a totem of modern love across caste boundaries — hit theatres. Make of that what you will. There are signs that this version of Tulsi could — albeit reluctantly — fight for recklessness, for womanhood, for the right to love. But the show won’t deviate from the formula that helped it mount the ‘mother’board for a young country in search of advice as opposed to enlightenment.

A lot of what happens in this new version of Kyunki feels like fan service. Irani still has a strange charm, but the first few episodes race through emotional exchanges, awkward glances and those reassuring vamp stares (for where would we be without them?) as if under the pressure of the streaming age. In 2025, you must compete with the audience’s ability to hold their gaze between five different screens. Which is why storms brew, unacknowledged, in the first episode itself. Conflicts arise like gastrointestinal episodes. Tulsi is on her toes putting out fires, before she can even romanticise the countless lamps that seem to be the only ones willing to listen to her in peace.

To which effect, you’re forced to wonder if Ekta Kapoor would have been better off tearing the old handbook and creating a self-effacing spoof instead. Imagine Tulsi walking into that bazaar of chit chat in the foyer and asking every man-child to f-off, or handing everyone a Zomato coupon every time she is reminded she cooks like a dream, or tell Mihir what a prick he is for keeping himself chiselled even as she withers away like their unspoken sex life. Or maybe author the bestselling ‘Screw Your Sanskaar’ and leave the Virani household for a global book tour that culminates in a political career shaped and eventually extinguished by her feminism. Some stories exist because they need to be told. Others, because there is nothing better to watch on TV. The return of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi feels like a bit of both.

Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2 is streaming on JioHotstar. JioHotstar is now available with your OTTplay Premium subscription.