Why ‘Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’ is the perfect show for an India afraid of the future

The current wave of sequels, reboots, and revivals in Indian popular culture is not merely a matter of commercial strategy. It reveals something deeper about the cultural imagination at this moment.

When a show such as Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi returns nearly two decades later with the same characters and the same mythology of domestic virtue, it prompts a question: what has changed – and what has been suspended?

There is, of course, the obvious economic rationale. Reboots offer built-in audiences. Familiar characters reduce the risks of failure. But repetition at this scale suggests more than financial caution: it suggests a certain cultural fatigue.

This fatigue is not a lack of output but a narrowing of ambition. The stories being told are no longer grappling with the present or gesturing toward the future. Instead, they are recreations of once-successful formulas, designed not to provoke but to reassure. It is a fatigue of imagination, where the capacity to ask new questions is substituted by the recycling of old answers.

A mythic past

If the early 2000s offered these stories in the context of a rising, aspirational India, where satellite television was expanding and middle-class identities were shifting, their reappearance today feels curiously static. We are not building on past narratives but...

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