The wonder years: A tribute to the legendary Raj Kapoor, in his centenary year
We’re still joining the dots on the massive impact he had. He gave the world an early glimpse of what India could do, and be. And then was just suddenly... gone
“Awaara hoon…”
The lilting, melancholic tune immediately unfurls in one’s mind.
What was it about this movie that made it so unforgettable? What was it about Raj Kapoor?
In his centenary year, we’re looking back at the incredible legacy he built in his lifetime, and the hole he left when he was gone.
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It makes sense to start in Russia.
On his first visit to the Soviet Union as prime minister of India, in 1955, Jawaharlal Nehru was greeted by crowds of thousands singing “Awaara hoon…”. At a state banquet later in his trip, Russian prime minister Nikolai Bulganin ended his speech with a few lines from the song.
The 1951 film Awaara had been released in Russia in 1954, and was the year’s biggest hit in that country.
On the face of it, this is a film about a young man’s (Raj Kapoor) estrangement from his father (Prithviraj Kapoor), his attempts to escape the ghosts of his family’s past, his tussles with regret, and the inexorable pull of love, both familial and romantic.
But Awaara was about so much more.
It was an invitation to reconsider how one viewed poverty, purpose, loneliness and pain.
It was Raj Kapoor introducing the world to his lovable, Chaplinesque tramp.
It was a cinematic, perhaps even melodramatic, socialist manifesto.
And when the tramp fell in love, it introduced the world to the luminous chemistry of a remarkably talented young filmmaker and the effortlessly talented and ineffably beautiful actress who would be his muse and co-star, Nargis.
She was 16 when they first met. He was 21, and soon to be married to Krishna Raj Kapoor. She would go on to marry the dashing Sunil Dutt. But that was later.
Through the 1940s and early 1950s, Raj Kapoor and Nargis would make 16 movies together, their love immortalised in the RK Films logo: him holding a violin, her arched backwards, in a still from their 1949 love story, Barsaat.
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Back to the tramp… Awaara was released as Brodyaga (The Vagabond), in Russia. That same year, it was dubbed and screened across China.
It swept across screens in Turkey, and would be remade there, over and over, through the ’60s and ’70s. The acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhangke was so taken with the film that he wove it into the opening of his 2000 movie. Platform, about a theatre troupe trying to find its footing as socio-economic change sweeps across China, opens with characters watching Awaara in a local theatre.
The tramp was a hit in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean.
A year before Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, it exploded onto the world stage, offering new perspective on what India could do, and be. It was an early soft-power tool; Kapoor’s was the first Indian entertainer’s name spoken as a byword.
Before “Amitabh Bachchan” and “Shah Rukh Khan”, it was “Raj Kapoor”… and the rallying cry: “Awaara hoon...”.
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The story of the tramp, his father the stern judge, his ghosts and his childhood love was written by journalist and screenwriter KA Abbas, who described himself as a “non-party Communist (and) Socialist”.
He wrote it with Prithviraj and Raj Kapoor in mind, and was so set on them starring in it that he refused to sell the script to Mehboob Khan, who wanted to cast Dilip Kumar instead.
Kapoor had made his debut in a starring role a few years earlier, in Neel Kamal (1947). The following year, he launched RK Films, and made his directorial debut with Aag (1948; about a failed law student struggling to become an actor). He was still only 24.
In his autobiography, Abbas would say of Awaara: “It had all my scenes and dialogue, but it was embellished by Raj Kapoor’s own comedic touches, songs and dances which Raj made pertinent to the story.”
This fine balance between mainstream masala and stark social realism would become a hallmark of the movies Kapoor directed and produced in these decades.
“Awaara had everything. It had the theme of class distinction. It had the greatest juvenile romantic story wrapped in the poverty that the post-Independence era had inherited. With a song on his lips and a flower in his hand, he went through all the ordeals that socio-economic disruptions could bring about,” Kapoor would later say, in …The One and Only Showman, a biography by his daughter, Ritu Nanda. “Awaara celebrates the innocence of the Republic, newly born, learning to cope with the difficult world”.
Raj or Raju the tramp would reappear, in darkening shades — adrift, disenfranchised, on the run and wrongly accused of violent crimes — through the ’50s, in Shree 420 (1955), Jagte Raho (1956), Anari (1959; directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee) and Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai (1960).
He remained lovable and idealistic, yearning to belong, but struggled harder to navigate an increasingly materialistic world.
Kapoor’s final tribute to the tramp was Mera Naam Joker (1970), a story told in three parts, about the life of a clown through adolescence, early adulthood and middle-age. A decade on, Raju was uninterested in social justice and heroism; he was brooding and lonely.
This time, it was Kapoor who approached Abbas. He had watched a Czechoslovakian circus troupe perform and wanted to know: could he write the story “of a tear and a smile”.
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If Awaara was an early leap by a rare talent, Mera Naam Joker was a fearless closing chapter.
In production for almost five years, the movie was nearly-four-and-a-half-hours long and played in theatres with two intervals. In addition to Raj and a young Rishi Kapoor (then 18), it featured Dharmendra, Manoj Kumar, Rajendra Kumar and Dara Singh. But their combined appeal could not bring audiences to the theatres.
Mera Naam Joker was a colossal failure and almost bankrupted Kapoor, but he maintained to the end that it wasn’t a mistake. He made it just as he had wanted to, he would say, despite knowing that it might not work. The idealism that was no longer on the screen had survived in the man himself.
“R.K. Studio, my house, my wife’s jewellery… everything that I could see was mortgaged! I thought I was finished. Then I looked up and saw that famous R.K. banner and realized that everything is mortgaged but for the name “Raj Kapoor”—and as long as the banner is there, Raj Kapoor will be there. And I am sure that banner will be there always, shining as it shines today,” he would say, in the introduction to the novelised version of the film.
One more thing stood by him at the time: the Russian audience. Mera Naam Joker was released there in 1972, as three movies, and each was a commercial success.
Incidentally, RK Studios would stand in Mumbai for almost 50 years, until it was sold by the family in 2019, to Godrej Properties. The luxury housing project that has taken its place is called Godrej RKS, and has retained the logo.
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Over the decades, the Kapoors would consolidate as a clan; become kingmakers, queens, an ambit of influence in the world of Indian cinema. But that would come later.
At the time of Awaara’s release, anonymity and hardship was still recent memory.
Raj Kapoor’s parents, Ramsarni and Prithviraj Kapoor, moved from Peshawar to Bombay in 1927. The boy saw his father go from an unpaid extra to the star of Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara (1931), India’s first talkie.
At 10, Raj Kapoor faced the camera for the first time, featuring in Debaki Bose’s Inquilab (1935). As he reached his teens, it wasn’t stardom that interested him, though. He was fascinated by the mechanics behind the magic of movie-making.
He worked as sixth or seventh assistant and as clapper boy on a number of his father’s films. He spent hours in editing suites and film-development labs. When his father set up Prithvi Theatre as a travelling troupe in 1942, the teenager assisted with lighting, sets and art direction. (The Prithvi Theatre complex in Mumbai would come much later, in 1978, set up as a tribute to Prithviraj by his son Shashi Kapoor and daughter-in-law Jennifer Kendal.)
The overlap between theatre and cinema that he grew up with would enrich Raj Kapoor’s cinema. A frequent collaborator, for instance, was the poet and lyricist Shailendra, who wrote the lyrics for Mera Joota Hai Japani (Shree 420), Nanhe Munne Bachche (Boot Polish) and Awaara Hoon (Awaara).
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In 1964, Kapoor took another leap. Sangam (1964) became the first Indian film to feature scenes shot abroad; it was also the most expensive movie of its time. The feel-good story of tangled love starring him, Rajendra Kumar and Vyjayanthimala was shot in London, Paris, and Grindelwald and Interlaken in Switzerland.
It ended up being almost four hours long, and was released in theatres with two intermissions, like Mera Naam Joker. Unlike Mera Naam Joker, it was a huge success. It would, in fact, be Kapoor’s biggest blockbuster.
Fast-forward almost a decade and Kapoor changed tacks again. His seventh film as director was the very-’70s teen romance Bobby (1973), which launched Dimple Kapadia and featured Rishi Kapoor in his first starring role.
If it seems light, frothy, and not exactly a work of art, it’s because it wasn’t meant to be one. After more than two decades of setting new benchmarks as an auteur, Kapoor set out to make a crowd-pleasing money-spinner that would go the rest of the way towards making up for the losses he suffered on Mera Naam Joker.
Kapoor was almost 50 at the time. Bobby would be such a massive hit that he would repeat the formula, albeit with an interesting twist: Using the woman protagonist’s perspective, he made Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978), Prem Rog (1982) and Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985).
Three years later, he was gone, dead at 63, from complications linked to asthma.
He had always said: “Whenever I die, take me to my studio, for it is possible that amidst the glitter of all the lights I may get up again and shout, ‘Action, action’.” And so his final journey made its way past RKS. He didn’t get up. He didn’t shout “Action”.
He had been working with Abbas again at the time, on something the latter had written nearly 14 years earlier. It was a love story called Henna that asked if a border could ever really divide a people who had been one.
It might have been more of a Raj Kapoor film than his last few ventures had been. In the end, his eldest son Randhir stepped in to finish it.
If he couldn’t fill the Raj Kapoor-sized hole his father’s death left in the production, one can hardly blame him.
There has been a Raj Kapoor-shaped hole in Indian cinema ever since.
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INDUSTRY SPEAK
Meenakshi Shedde, film critic, curator, and India and South Asia delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival
“Prithviraj Kapoor had an unwavering belief that good theatre was integral to our culture; that we needed to practise it and pass it on to our children. That’s what made him go from town to town with the Prithvi Theatre travelling troupe, performing Shakespearean plays. When you grow up in an atmosphere where your father is promoting high culture with this kind of fiendish determination, your priorities in life are bound to be different.
“While Raj Kapoor wasn’t the only filmmaker making films that tapped into the fervour of nation-building, he very cleverly made sure his films weren’t arthouse, by incorporating great music and romance.
“Combining stories about a common man befuddled by the vagaries of the world with great song and dance is what made him popular around the world. It is also interesting to me that, even today, in New York and London and Toronto and really around the world, people will queue at Raj Kapoor retrospectives and pay money to watch films made by an Indian filmmaker whom Indians rarely bother to watch anymore.”
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Imtiaz Ali, filmmaker
While Raj Kapoor was a filmmaker with a strong sense of aesthetics and music, what always came first for him was the story, and there was always a social perspective to these stories. He collaborated with some great writers, including KA Abbas and Kamna Chandra (Prem Rog). Watch his early interviews and one sees him talk about his collaborators with so much love and compassion.
He clearly brought out the best in everyone he worked with. In a lot of ways, his films, whether Shree 420 or Bobby, were a record of the times in which they were made. Pay close attention to the smaller characters and one sees that they are stand-ins for the rest of society, linking the central story of the film with the world at large.
This rootedness was an important aspect of his filmmaking. It’s what makes the sweeping drama relatable; makes it art.
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Omar Ahmed, scholar, writer and international curator of South Asian cinema
If we look at the inconsistent and at times dire state of popular Indian cinema today, Raj Kapoor’s films take on even greater creative import. They exemplify what is possible within the realms of mainstream filmmaking.
What set him apart from his contemporaries, including Bimal Roy, Mehboob Khan and Chetan Anand, were his multi-faceted abilities. His output as an actor and producer must also be considered seriously, alongside the films he directed. In many ways, his role as a producer was equally indicative of his imposing creativity. Boot Polish and Jagte Raho may have been helmed by different directors, but they bore the unmistakable authorial signature of Raj Kapoor.
Like Guru Dutt, he helped to pioneer and elevate the picturisation of songs into an art form. One only has to study the Tere Bina Aag Yeh Chandni song sequence from Awaara to see the ways in which songs, when integrated seamlessly into a narrative, can come to serve a broader thematic, artistic and aesthetic purpose.
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