Bada Naam Karenge review: Weighed down by kitchen-sink politics, this Rajshri series is plain creaky

Watching this nine-part show, run by Sooraj R Barjatya, the Rajshri scion who got back maryada and sanskriti back into Hindi cinema in the mid-90s, is a conflicting business.

It makes you wonder at the time and place we live in: have we moved forward at all from the 1994 Hum Aapke Hain Koun!, in which it was perfectly acceptable to offer a freshly-widowed bhai’s hand to his sister-in-law, and where the big temple-going joint family is kind-but-dismissive to its minority characters?

Or did we make the forward move — Ratlam Junction, made famous with Jab We Met’s ‘main-toh-apni-favourite-hoon’ spirited Geet, finds a prominent place here — only to return to era of the elders-and-betters-knowing-best-most-of-the-time, and the young had better behave, or else?

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Or even more depressingly, was that brief interlude of youthful freedom which keeps rearing its head every decade or so, an illusion? Is this who we always were: a conformist society which insists on instant obedience in the name of respect?

Bada Naam Karenge movie trailer here:

In 2025’s ‘Bada Naam Karenge’, the meet-cute between Ujjain girl Surbhi Gupta (Ayesha Kaduskar) and Ratlam boy Rishabh Rathi (Ritik Ghanshani), is sweet and sanitised. Later in the series, Surbhi tells Rishabh ‘ab sasur apni samdhan ke liye harmonium to nahin bajayenge’, or words to that effect, a straight-up reference to that scene in ‘HAHK’: sure, harmoniums may be outmoded even in Tier 3 towns (this is an actual phrase someone uses here), but everything else, except the pesky pomeranian, is intact.

The big house, traditional-business aesthetic tethering tauji-taiji-mummy-papa-bua-phoopha, the lectures that frowning tauji (Kanwaljit) is ready with at the drop of a hat, the tension between the taiji (Alka Amin) and the bua (Anjana Sukhani), and Rishabh’s parents (Rajesh Jais and Chitrali Lokesh Gupte), whose reasons, generated by the crafty phupha (Rajesh Tailang), we come to learn by and by.

Rishabh himself is a model young man, ‘agyakari’ to a fault, wanting to use his B school degree to promote the family business: their ‘mithai-ki-dukaan’ is famous in all Ratlam, and he wants to make it famous everywhere else too.

The poor girl-rich boy class distinction in Barjatya’s ‘Maine Pyar Kiya’ turns up in the creation of Surbhi’s more modest dwelling, with her professor father (Jameel Khan) , mother (Deepika Amin) and elder brother (Gyandendra Tripathi), always aware of the ‘ladka’ belonging to the ‘bada ghar’.

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‘Bada Naam Karenge’ is yet another meta reference to an older movie, the mega-popular ‘Papa kehte hain’ song from ‘Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, which is, ironically, a film which celebrated romantic rebels. Here the title speaks to Rishabh making a name for his family, and for the nice, decent, ‘susheel’ girl he has given his heart to, ‘susheelta’ being the most important feature of what society, even today, insists in a girl. She is studying to be a virologist, but apart from telling us this, nothing is mentioned of what she wants to do, other than getting married. And the conflict which arises between the two families, which threatens to disrupt the potential future of the youngsters, feels unbelievably outdated.

Pushing past the constraints of their character arcs revolving around ‘maan-sammaan’ and ‘apmaan’, the ensemble does their job well. There is a distinct sweetness between Surbhi and Rishabh, and they make an effort to not make it cloying. He gets a chance to get his point-of-view in, through which he tries to right the wrong done unto his aunt by his family, and the girl’s father is given a couple of lines, celebrating his daughter, which makes us feel that he is with the times. But it really is so little.

Bada Naam Karenge cast: Ritik Ghanshani, Ayesha Kaduskar, Kanwaljit, Rajesh Jais, Alka Amin, Jameel Khan, Deepika Amin, Rajesh Tailang, Anjana Sukhani, Chaitrali Lokesh Gupte, Gyanendra Tripathi