Atreyee Poddar
Juhi Chawla and Jay Mehta have always existed off-centre in the celebrity universe. She’s one of Hindi cinema’s most beloved faces and he’s a businessman who doesn't prefer red carpets. Jay Mehta is not just like a footnote to Juhi Chawla’s stardom, he's much more.
Jay Mehta comes from old, serious, industrial money. Juhi Chawla’s husband isn’t a startup billionaire or a flashy dealmaker. He runs the Mehta Group which is a multi-generational conglomerate with cement, sugar, packaging and global operations across India and Africa.
Jay Mehta has a tragic past. Jay was widower before he married Juhi. His first wife Sujata Birla passed away in the 1990 Indian Airlines flight crash. People close to the couple have often hinted that this shared sense of loss and perspective is what grounded their relationship from the start.
The marriage was made deliberately invisible. Juhi Chawla married Jay Mehta in 1995, right at the peak of her career and did not tell the world. There were no magazine covers, no wedding photos, no carefully managed leaks. She only went public years later, when hiding it became next to impossible.
Jay Mehta is not just “the husband” in the IPL story. Jay Mehta is a co-owner of Kolkata Knight Riders along with Juhi and Shah Rukh Khan, and by most accounts, he’s the spreadsheet-and-strategy brain behind the glamour. KKR’s transformation into one of the IPL’s most valuable franchises wasn’t accidental, and it wasn’t driven by star power alone.
Jay and Juhi’s relationship runs on friendship, not optics. Juhi regularly refers to Jay as her best friend, and that framing says a lot. They show up together rarely, dress plainly, skip the social circus, and seem aggressively uninterested in being perceived as a “power couple.”