Khan's take on the angst in marriage is yielding big bucks at the box office. The film opened to full houses across the country and Bollywood is predicting a "bumper hit". Khan and his onscreen wife Rani Mukherjee are perhaps too pretty to be "every couple" but they take us to the realm of a relationship Bollywood routinely avoids: matrimony. Thanks to Sooraj Barjatya's spectacular success, much of the last decade has been spent with extended families. The Undivided Hindu Parivar was absolute. Romance meant teeny-boppers in designer clothes. Marriage was reserved for the end titles and everybody, Pomeranian included, lived happily ever after.

FAMILY RETAKE: In Chalte Chalte bickering follows love

"Ever after" is not a given in Bollywood anymore. In several recent films, happiness wears thin in the grind of urban life. Chalte Chalte looks at the friction caused when a brash middle-class engineer marries an upper-class perfectionist woman. "None of the issues are over-dramatised," says Khan. "It is the little things of life. And we don't take sides."

In the small budget Khwahish, post-marital problems are sorted out by cancer. The film, which made news for featuring 17 kisses, also managed an average box-office run. In Khwahish, the young urban couple discover each other emotionally and physically-on the wedding night they make love and then have a great time blowing up condoms-and also that sometimes love is not enough.

Meanwhile, Dharmesh Darshan is canning Bewafaa-starring Anil Kapoor, Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor, Sushmita Sen, Manoj Bajpai and Shamita Shetty-about marriage and infidelity. "It is about betrayal at all levels," says Boney Kapoor, who is producing the Rs 18 crore plus project. "We are looking at a modern marriage and modern situations."

For a darker take on relationships, there is Kaante director Sanjay Gupta. He is currently scripting Radio Rapchick (slang for making love) about five couples at different stages of unhappiness. He calls it a "little experiment, which will not feature skin in songs but actually have couples in bed, talking about their sex lives". Gupta's big experiment will be Musafir, a noir drama "about one unhappy marriage and three unhappy illicit relationships".

UNFAITHFULLY YOURS: Darshan's Bewafaa is about a modern marriage and infidelity

Sudhir Mishra's Indo-French co-production Hazaron Khwaishen Aisi is a more art-house take on one woman-many men situation. And Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Bollywood's high priest of complicated love stories, is doing pre-production work on an ambitious period drama, Bajirao Mastani. The film, starring Salman Khan and Kareena Kapoor, tells the true story of the famous 18th century Peshwa, torn between his wife and his strikingly beautiful mistress, Mastani.

This is not a Bollywood debut for marital complications-earlier too films like Abhimaan, Kora Kagaz and Aap ki Kasam dealt with the subject. But in the 1990s, Barjatya's looming presence banished marriage from Bollywood's vocabulary. "We ignored post-marriage themes because that was the convenient route," says director Shaad Ali, whose essay on matrimony, Saathiya, was a silver jubilee success in Mumbai and Delhi.

Stars also shied away from playing married characters onscreen. Director Hansal Mehta, who will start shooting Shaadi.com, about an urban marriage, in October, says some stars told him that "playing married men would typecast them as older actors".

In his novel Intimacy, Hanif Kureishi writes, "Marriage is beautiful. A terrible journey, a season in hell and a reason for living." Bollywood is slowly rediscovering that.