Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao: A timeline of their Bollywood romance

Bollywood actor Aamir Khan and wife Kiran Rao have stunned fans after they announced their divorce after 15 years of marriage. We take a look back at how they first met and went on to become one of Bollywood's most beloved celebrity couples.

First encounter: The very married Aamir Khan was a superstar at the time and producing a film back in 2001 that would one day go one be one of the most successful films of his career. It was during the very isolated shoot of ‘Lagaan’ in Kutch and Bhuj that the then 38-year-old actor first met Kiran Rao, who was assistant director to filmmaker Ashutosh Gowariker. According to stories, sparks flew almost immediately but it would be another three years before the relationship would get serious when the Bengaluru girl would move into Khan’s Pali Hill flat in Mumbai.

Divorce from Reena Dutta: Khan and Dutta’s college romance and marriage of 16 years came to end in 2002. It was during that phase in his life that Rao became a close friend. “In that moment of trauma, her (Kiran’s) phone came and I talked to her on the phone for half an hour. And when I put the phone down, I said, ‘My God! I feel so happy when I talk to her.’ It struck me in that instant that when I am talking to her I am so happy,” Khan had once shared about how he fell for Rao with a Chinese news channel.

Hush-hush wedding: The couple were wed in 2005, with a court marriage taking place on December 28, followed by a two-day celebration in Panchgini, a hill resort about 250km from Mumbai in the Western Ghats. While Khan refused to divulge details of the wedding, his father Tahir Hussain did spill the beans saying his celebrity friends, including Salman Khan, Ashutosh Gowarikar, Ketan Mehta, Rani Mukherjee, Preity Zinta and others were in attendance.

Welcoming their son: On December 1, 2011, the couple welcome their newborn son who they named after the freedom fighter and independent India’s first education minister, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. “Hey guys, most excited to share with y’all that we have finally chosen a name for our baby boy... Azad. Azad Rao Khan. I left the final choice to Kiran, and she has named him after my great granduncle Maulana Azad,” Khan revealed on Facebook at the time. “Azad means free or liberated. We want to thank everyone for their warm wishes and blessings, and needless to say we are absolutely overjoyed and feel most blessed. Much love.” The boy was born through IVF to a surrogate mother. He was Rao’s first baby, but Khan had a son, Junaid, and a daughter, Ira, from his first wife, Reena Dutta.

Courting controversy: In 2015, the couple faced backlash after Khan spoke out against the growing intolerance he was seeing in India and his wife had even suggested that they should probably leave the country. “As an individual, as part of this country as a citizen, we read in the papers what is happening, we see it on the news and certainly, I have been alarmed. I can’t deny. I have been alarmed by a number of incidents,” he said while speaking in New Delhi at the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards. The actor said he also feels that the sense of insecurity and fear has been growing in the past six or eight months. “When I chat with Kiran at home, she says ‘Should we move out of India?’ That’s a disastrous and big statement for Kiran to make. She fears for her child. She fears about what the atmosphere around us will be. She feels scared to open the newspapers every day. That does indicate that there is this sense of growing disquiet, there is growing despondency apart from alarm. You feel why this is happening, you feel low. That sense does exist in me.”

Political backlash: Under fierce criticism from the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies over his remarks on intolerance, Khan soon asserted that he stood by what he had stated and that neither he nor his wife had any intention to leave the country. The couple stuck to their words, drawing praise and criticism from quarters for holding their ground with dignity. In his statement, Khan said: “First let me state categorically that neither I, nor my wife Kiran, have any intention of leaving the country. We never did, and nor would we like to in the future. “Anyone implying the opposite has either not seen my interview or is deliberately trying to distort what I have said. India is my country, I love it, I feel fortunate for being born here, and this is where I am staying,” he said at the time, adding: “I stand by everything that I have said in my interview. To all those people who are calling me anti-national, I would like to say that I am proud to be Indian, and I do not need anyone’s permission nor endorsement for that.”

Stories of an affair: Shortly after Khan’s ‘Dangal’ released in 2016, stories of an alleged affair with co-star Fatima Sana Shaikh (pictured left) started to do the rounds. The rumours swirled for close to two years before Shaikh finally addressed it during an interview with Filmfare magazine in 2019, saying: “Earlier, I used to get affected. I’d feel bad. Because I’ve never dealt with anything of this sort at such a big level. A bunch of strangers, whom I’ve never met, are writing things about me. They don’t even know if there’s any truth to it. People reading it assume that I’m ‘not a good person’. You feel like telling that person, ‘Ask me, I’ll give you an answer’. It disturbs me because I don’t want people to assume wrong things.”

File for divorce: On July 3, Rao and Khan officially announced they were divorcing. In a joint statement, the couple said they would continue to co-parent their nine-year-old son Azad, but had come to the decision to split after a trial separation. “In these 15 beautiful years together we have shared a lifetime of experiences, joy and laughter, and our relationship has only grown in trust, respect and love. Now we would like to begin a new chapter in our lives — no longer as husband and wife, but as co-parents and family for each other,” the statement read. “We began a planned separation some time ago, and now feel comfortable to formalise this arrangement, of living separately yet sharing our lives the way an extended family does. We remain devoted parents to our son Azad, who we will nurture and raise together.”