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Most people know Karan Johar as the man behind Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Student of the Year. The filmmaker. The talk show host. The person who has shaped Hindi cinema's commercial landscape for three decades.
Very few people know that before any of that, he was a teenager on a Doordarshan science fiction show about time travel and a mysterious alien from the Andromeda Galaxy.
The show was called Indradhanush. It aired in 1989. It ran for exactly 13 episodes. And it is one of the most quietly remarkable things Indian television has ever produced.
What Doordarshan looked like in 1989
To understand why Indradhanush was such an unusual thing, you have to picture what Indian television looked like at the time. Doordarshan was the only channel most households had access to. The programming was dominated by mythological serials and family dramas. Ramayan had just finished its historic run. Mahabharat was still airing. The idea of a science fiction show aimed at children, one that dealt with computers, time machines and extraterrestrial visitors, was genuinely radical for that moment.
Nobody was making anything like it. Which is exactly why it landed the way it did.
What the show was actually about
Indradhanush followed a young boy named Shrikant and his group of friends, who together build a special computer system that functions as a time machine. Then an alien arrives, from the Andromeda Galaxy, no less, and suddenly Shrikant and his friends are caught up in a situation that goes far beyond anything they expected when they started tinkering with computers in the first place.
Each episode was packed with mystery, adventure and the kind of science fiction storytelling that Indian television simply was not doing at the time. Children watched it obsessively. Adults who stumbled onto it found themselves sitting down and staying put. It was ahead of its time in a way that only becomes clearer with distance.
The show holds an 8.1 rating on IMDb today, which for a 13-episode Doordarshan serial from 1989 is extraordinary. That rating is not nostalgia talking. It is genuine appreciation from people who have gone back and watched it and understood what the makers were attempting.
The boy playing Shrikant
Karan Johar was 14 or 15 years old when he played the lead role of Shrikant. He has spoken about it himself, that Indradhanush was his first real experience in front of a camera. His acting debut. The first time he understood what it felt like to perform for an audience he could not see.
He was not a star then. He was a teenager who got a role in a Doordarshan serial that most of his peers would have found interesting simply because it involved aliens and time travel. Nothing about that moment suggested he would go on to become one of the most powerful and influential figures in the history of Hindi cinema.
Teenage Karan Johar in a scene from Indradhanush, the 1989 Doordarshan science fiction serial about time travel and aliens. (IMDB)
The cast that nobody realised was historic
Here is the part that makes Indradhanush genuinely remarkable in retrospect. Look at who else was in it.
Urmila Matondkar appeared in the show before she became the actress who would define a generation with films like Rangeela and Satya. Ashutosh Gowariker was in it before he directed Lagaan, a film that went to the Oscars and changed how the world looked at Indian cinema. The show was directed by Anand Mahendru and also featured Sagar Arya, Vishal Singh and Jeetendra Rajpal.
A young Urmila Matondkar in a still from Indradhanush, the 13-episode science fiction show that aired on Doordarshan in 1989. (IMDB)
None of them was famous yet. None of them knew what was coming. They were just a group of people making a science fiction serial for children on India's only television channel, trying to tell a story nobody had told before.
13 episodes and gone
The show ended after 13 episodes. No dramatic finale was planned. No continuation was announced. It simply stopped and Indian television moved on to other things.
Why it ended so quickly has never been fully explained. Budget constraints, scheduling decisions, the general uncertainty of early Indian television production, any of these could have played a role. What is clear is that the show left its audience wanting more and never got the chance to deliver it.
Why it deserves to be rememberedIndradhanush did something that almost no Indian television production of its era attempted. It looked at children as an audience capable of engaging with complex ideas like time travel, alien intelligence, the ethics of technology, friendship under pressure and trusted them to keep up.
The fact that a 14-year-old Karan Johar, a pre-fame Urmila Matondkar and a future Oscar-nominated director Ashutosh Gowariker all appeared in the same 13-episode science fiction serial on Doordarshan in 1989 is the kind of footnote that film history deserves to make louder.
It was not just a children's show. It was a glimpse of what Indian television could have been if it had kept going in that direction.
Thirteen episodes. 8.1 on IMDb. And a cast that went on to change Hindi cinema forever.
Not bad for a show most people have completely forgotten.
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