Awara and the Constitutional question

The Indian Constitution was enacted in 1950 and underwent its first amendment within a year. The year 1951 also saw the release of Raj Kapoor’s Awara. Both the Constitution and Awara are marked by the incredible array of talent that went into their making. If the Constituent Assembly was filled with some of the most erudite lawmakers of the time, Awara brought together a motley crew of creative minds, including Raj Kapoor, Nargis, K.A. Abbas, and Shailendra. Like the formulaic long-lost siblings in Hindi cinema, I see the Constitution and Awara not as unrelated but as intimate events, dramatically entangled in each other’s story. If the challenge of the Constitution involved crafting a normative imagination of the newly independent nation, it responded by instituting the citizen at the nucleus of political imagination. On that count, the Constitution resembles the law-abiding brother, while Awara is akin to the estranged law-breaking sibling, instituting not the citizen, but the denizen at the heart of constitutional imagination.

We are accustomed to turning to the Constituent Assembly debates to discern the authorial intent of the founding fathers and mothers. We rarely look at other kinds of archives to help us make sense of how these legal and constitutional discourses may have been interpreted outside of the domain of experts. How, then, might a filmmaker, writer, or artist read the Constitution—and how might we attune our sensibilities to recognise, within the horizon of constitutional thought, those texts that converse with, dissent from, or even revise it. Raj Kapoor, I argue, is a perfect example of an unacknowledged legislator of the postcolonial world.

In a Films Division documentary (Siddharth Kak, 1987) on him, Kapoor says: “It was just post-Independence and there were a lot of factors that influenced young minds and more so influenced me. Panditji said he wanted every Indian in the country to do something for his nation, to build it up into a beautiful dream, he was a visionary, and we followed him, we tried to. I was in films and I tried to do best whatever I could do through films.”

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Evidence of the fact that Awara was in direct conversation with the vision of the new nation comes from Abbas’ statement that Awara emerged during a period of significant change, when Indian cinema was transitioning from the influence of British imperialism and grappling with the desire for a new social order.

The film addressed themes of class distinction and post-Independence poverty, all the while presenting a compelling youthful romance. While Kapoor remained a hardcore Nehruvian romantic, Abbas was more of a disenchanted lover. As early as 1947, we see Abbas’ disenchantment with Nehru (“Despite his stirring ‘tryst with destiny’ speech, I was not happy with Jawaharlal Nehru”). He began to tire of politics and of his “long love affair” with Nehru (Abbas, 1977) and published a series of articles listing out all the failed progressive and socialist promises Nehru had made in the past. But his disillusionment was akin to the sense of disappointment one feels either at the end of a love affair or when the perfection that one sees in another person is unmasked. Disappointment as an affective state is very different from other strong emotions like hatred; it is not the opposite of love but a continuation of a conversation about love through other means. To turn away from someone you love because you are disappointed with them entails a transformative plea to ask them to amend their behaviour, and it is my contention that this sense of disappointment lies behind a film like Awara. How do we register our disappointment—not as an act of resentment but as a plea for a change of heart, or an amendment of behaviour?

The early constitutional moment was a severely contested one

The early constitutional moment in India was a severely contested one with competing claims and interests often at loggerheads with each other. The desire to build a strong nation state, nurture democratic institutions, and ensure social justice resulted in conflicts between the executive and the judiciary over the interpretation of the Constitution. This led to the first amendment to the Constitution within a year of its adoption. The amendment sought to limit the powers of the judiciary in reviewing legislative and executive acts. The first amendment was the beginning of a long-drawn contest between the three wings of government over the proper meaning and custodianship of the Constitution.

The Constituent Assembly during one of the debates. We are accustomed to turning to these debates to discern the authorial intent of the founding fathers and mothers. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES

It set in place a predictable pattern with the judiciary striking down laws on the grounds that they were unconstitutional, and the legislature responding by amending the Constitution in such a way as to overcome the judicial restraints that had been placed on it. This battle culminated in the Kesavananda Bharati case, in which the courts were asked to determine whether there were any limits on the power of Parliament to amend the Constitution. By a wafer-thin majority, the Supreme Court held that while Parliament had the power to amend the Constitution, it could not do so in a manner that altered the basic structure of the Constitution.

While constitutional amendments have largely been discussed as political choices exercised at an institutional level, I am interested in how we can think of constitutional amendments at a personal level. What does it mean to consent to being a part of a political community, and how can amendments serve as a trope to think about consent as well as its withdrawal? Awara, I suggest, is precisely a text that raises such questions. Awara narrates the story of Raj (Raj Kapoor), a vagabond who grows up in the slums of Bombay after his father, Justice Raghunath (Prithviraj Kapoor), throws his mother out of the house suspecting that she either had an affair with or was raped by a bandit whom he had sentenced to jail (merely because he was the son of a bandit). Raghunath, in the meantime, adopts Rita (Nargis) as his foster daughter, and she falls in love with Raj. When Raj discovers his father’s identity, he tries to kill him but fails and is arrested. Rita comes to his defence as his lawyer. The story begins with the trial and moves between Raghunath’s flashback and Rita’s narration of the story. It ends with Raghunath’s belated and tragic recognition of his son and an acknowledgement of his own prejudice and bias.

The colonial continuity question

If there is one institution that embodied the dilemma of the colonial continuity question, it was law exemplified in the institution of the judiciary. It is not surprising that the police and the judiciary came to stand in for colonial continuity and that the postcolonial period saw merely a transformation of the Criminal Tribes Act into the Habitual Offenders Act and subsequently the Goondas Act. How can we prepare ourselves for a new constitutional order based on ideas of equality and fraternity if our political and legal sensibilities have been shaped by years of racial bias and class discrimination? In what manner can we claim recognition as equals and what risks of misrecognition are implicit in the movement to the new order? This concern with the nature of the new sovereign was a theme that ran through a number of Raj Kapoor’s films.

His real name, Raj, which he also retains for most of the characters that he plays, is itself a reference to sovereignty. In Kapoor’s Shree 420 (1955), when Raj arrives at the footpath basti (slum) below Seth Sonachand’s mansion, he introduces himself to the pavement dwellers. On hearing his name, they say: “Are ye apna Raj aagaya… hume pata tha ek din hum bhookon nangon ka Raj ayega” (See, our reign has come... we knew one day the hungry and the naked would rule).

Awara can be read as a series of tests that Judge Raghunath has to face—of memory, of responsibility, of acknowledgement. Raghunath’s repeated failure to pass these tests has less to do with a literal failure of memory and more with his inability to take responsibility in a public manner for his flawed beliefs and convictions. If Raghunath’s education is the education of the sovereign within the film, then how do we see the role of the film itself as an education for the new sovereignty constituted by “We the People”?

A poster for Awara. If the Constitution resembles the law-abiding brother, Awara is akin to the estranged law-breaking sibling. | Photo Credit: NFDC–National Film Archive of India

At its core, Awara engages itself with a vision of reform or amendment, and Raj’s initial battle against his social context is waged as a reformist project in which the vagabond may be brought within the social order. But the film unsettles this presumption, asking us to think about reform not as a one-way street but one in which it is the sovereign rather than the vagabond who must change.

The final plea

At the end of the film, when Raj is finally allowed to represent himself, or to speak for himself, he makes a moving plea that shifts the narrative account of an individual to the voicing of a collective suffering. He says:

“At least after being branded a killer, I have obtained enough freedom to be able to have my voice heard by the law. If I had been heard before, then I would not have been here… I have been a vagabond from childhood, a killer, and now an accused. You can sentence me to death, but do you imagine that punishing me will get rid of the vice-like grip that crime has on society? I don’t want to tell you my life story, but I do want to say that I did not inherit the vice of crime from my parents. I got it from the dirty gutter that flows through the slums that I grew up in, and which are still flowing, and the seeds of crime are still germinating there. And the thousands of poor children growing up around these gutters fall prey to this disease. Don’t worry about me, but do think of those children, and your own children, lest there comes a day when your children, and your children [the camera pans across the courtroom, finally ending with Raghunath], and your children have to stand in my place and prove that they have honest genes. I was innocent once like your children, and my mother used to dream that one day perhaps I would be a lawyer, then a magistrate, and finally a judge, like my father. I know what the verdict of this court will be, and I am willing to accept any punishment for my crime. That is my atonement. But I am still waiting for the verdict of another court. I want to know, Judge Raghunath, what is the decision of your heart? What does your heart say?”

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What begins deceptively as an account of the reform or amendment in the behaviour of the criminal is converted to a plea for a reform or amendment of the law, which we can term Awara’s amendment. If the Constitution has at its core the idea of the citizen, Awara inserts the denizen and the constitutional underclass into a political vision of constitutionalism and instructs the sovereign about its consequences.

Constitutions are driven by multiple aims such as the recognition of the rights of citizens, the allocation of power between institutions of the state, and the development of an agenda for governance distributed across multiple grids of power, rights, and duties. There is thus inherent within the Constitution an ethical obligation imposed on power. But as the legal scholar Upendra Baxi says, constitutions rapidly move from being “moral autobiographies of nation states” to texts that are driven by state formative practices and the will to power at the cost of any other value.

Awara asks the Constitution what “keeping a promise” to the constitutional underclasses may mean and locates the Constitution as a site of memory and amnesia. The Constitution as a formal text and the history of constitutional interpretation by the judiciary is only one aspect of constitutionalism. The challenge is to bring into perception a wide range of texts, practices, and cultural struggles that have amended the Constitution, and on that count, Awara must count as the first filmic amendment to the Constitution of India.

Lawrence Liang is a professor at the School of Legal and Socio-Political Studies, Dr B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi. He works on the intersection of law, culture, and technology. This article is derived from a chapter in his forthcoming book on law and justice in popular Indian cinema.