Rani Chandra moved into Bannerman Road, Ealing, to live opposite Sarah Jane Smith and her son Luke. The Chandras took on the house which had once been home to their friend Maria Jackson. A budding journalist, Rani soon became involved in Sarah's adventures - the first of which involved a sinister clown who was terrorising children. This proved to be the personification of an alien entity, brought to Earth on a meteorite fragment.
Initially Sarah was reluctant to involve another young person in her often dangerous struggles against alien incursions, but quickly came to befriend Rani. So too did Luke's friend Clyde Langer, though he had an issue with the fact that her father, Haresh, was their new headmaster. Her mother, Gita, was a florist.
Rani often struggled to keep her parents from finding out about her new life centred across the street - especially as they usually involved the near neighbourhood or the school itself.
The Chandras had previously lived in the seaside town of Danemouth, where a close friend of Rani had been Samuel Lloyd.
Whilst Sarah was away one weekend, Rani found a pendant at the school which gave its wearers the power to control others. She left it in Sarah's attic, but Clyde allowed his estranged father access to the house and he became possessed by it. Rani, Clyde and Luke called upon Maria - now living in the US - to help track him down.
An entity known as the Trickster - part of the Pantheon of Discord - made repeated attempts to destroy the Doctor through Sarah, and one of these involved tricking her into visiting her home village, when she was still a baby and her parents were still alive. Trapped there, the future was altered - but Rani and Clyde were protected from the changes by one of the Trickster's own devices. In the new timeline, Gita had no daughter.
Gita was later abducted by Mrs Wormwood - really a disguised alien Bane. She was working with a Sontaran renegade to free an ancient power. On this occasion, Rani got to meet and work with Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart.
An encounter with a Judoon officer resulted in Rani and Clyde being punished by being confined to Earth. During this incident, Haresh and Gita were actually confronted by the aliens and questioned by them. Rani pretended to refuse to believe them.
Samuel came back into Rani's life when he contacted her from the children's home he was now living in. He told her about strange activity at the local funfair, which was currently shut down. Having fallen out with Sarah - feeling she treated her like a child - Rani decided to go and investigate on her own. Samuel had tricked her into coming, as an orphan alien named Eve was living in the fairground, protected by its caretaker, Harry. Eve sought only people to play with - controlling their minds to force them into riding the attractions. The others traced her and were able to reunite Eve with her mothership - and she left Earth with Harry and Samuel.
In an alternate future, in 2059, an elderly Rani told this story to a young man. She lived alone in Sarah's old house, a virtual recluse.
The young man turned out to be the son of Eve and Samuel, and the future timeline was restored - with Rani now surrounded by grandchildren.
Rani then got to meet the Doctor himself, nearing the end of his tenth incarnation, when the Trickster used a dying man - Peter Dalton - to ensnare Sarah using an engagement ring capable of hypnotising its wearer. Once married, she would feel compelled to give up her activities. Rani, Luke and Clyde were cut off from Sarah at the wedding venue - trapped in a pocket of time out of synch with the rest of the universe. The Doctor arrived to stop the ceremony.
Rani and her friends got to see inside the TARDIS once the Trickster had been defeated.
After a visit to a haunted house, Rani then encountered the Slitheen and their cousins the Blathereen.
Just before Luke went off to university, he began suffering from nightmares. Soon Rani and the others became part of these dreams. Rani found herself anchoring a TV news broadcast.
After another meeting with Androvax - who had previously escaped from Judoon custody - Rani met the Doctor again, this time in his eleventh incarnation. She had gone with the others to a UNIT base in Snowdonia to attend the Doctor's funeral service. This was all a ploy by a corrupt UNIT officer, in league with the vulture-like Shansheeth, to steal the TARDIS. On this occasion, Rani also got to meet the Doctor's former companion Jo, and her grandson Santiago.
Soon after, Rani and Clyde woke to find themselves apparently the only people left on Earth. They encountered a pair of giant robots who were searching for something. They then came across one other person - a schoolboy named Gavin. It transpired that he was an alien prince, and the robots had been sent to take him home to ascend the throne of his world. After everyone was returned, Sarah told them both that they had not been taken away from Earth due to the Judoon grounding them.
Whilst banned from leaving Earth, Rani could travel in time. A quest from a mysterious shopkeeper sent her to Tudor England, where she found herself a lady-in-waiting to the doomed Lady Jane Grey who had just been crowned Queen of England.
She and Clyde were then duped into changing their allegiance away from Sarah to a new alien-fighter named Ruby. It turned out that she had incapacitated Sarah in order to feed off her, and was an alien herself, recently escaped from a space capsule.
Sarah came to adopt another child - a girl named Sky who had originally been created by an alien race as a weapon of mass destruction.
Clyde then became cursed by an ancient alien artefact, which caused everyone to turn against him - including his own mother and Rani.
Rani and Clyde went undercover as journalists, writing for an over-60's lifestyle magazine, in order to investigate a computer company run by Joseph Serf. They discovered that his miraculous new laptop - the Serfboard - had nothing special about it at all. Serf had actually been killed in an accident and his business manager was using alien slave labour to create a hologram of him - one with hypnotic powers to fool people into thinking the technology was better than it was.
The aliens - Skullions - were freed and taken back home, with the business manager their captive.
As they grew older, Rani and Clyde would come to have romantic feelings towards each other.
Played by Anjli Mohindra, Souad Faress (Older Rani)
Appearances: SJA 2.2 The Day of the Clown (2008) - SJA 5.3 The Man Who Never Was (2011)
- The Chandra family were brought into The Sarah Jane Adventures after the actress playing Maria - Yasmin Paige - decided to leave and concentrate on her education.
- Unlike Luke, and Sarah herself, all of Rani's encounters with the Doctor took place in The Sarah Jane Adventures. She hadn't yet arrived on Bannerman Road during the events of The Stolen Earth.
- Had the series continued, more would have been made of the blossoming romance between Rani and Clyde - nicknamed "Clani" as a couple.
- In spin-off material, the older Rani does become a journalist, and still gets involved with aliens.
- Mohindra later appeared in the Doctor Who story Nikola Tesla's Night Of Terror, under heavy prosthetics as the Skithra Queen.
- She also provided the voice of the Mechonoid leader in the animated Daleks serial, part of the "Time Lord Victorious" multimedia event.
- In 2025 she married Sacha Dhawan, who played the Master opposite Jodie Whittaker's Doctor.
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