INDIA - MAY 04: Raj Kapoor, Bollywood Actor (Photo by Pramod Pushkarna/The The India Today Group via Getty Images)
Photo: The India Today Group
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As India changed from the Nehruvian era to the age of liberalisation, Raj Kapoor’s films captured the evolving aspirations, anxieties, and aesthetics of the nation.
Photo: NFDC–National Film Archive of India
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Raj Kapoor’s cinematic arc—marked by personal introspection, changing hero archetypes, and shifting visual worlds—mirrors the country’s journey from hope to disillusionment.
Photo: Kamal Singh/PTI
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The wax figure of the legendary Raj Kapoor at the Madame Tussauds Wax Museum at Regal Building in New Delhi on December 1, 2017.
Photo: SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR
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To think of Raj Kapoor is to hear Mukesh convey the truth of Shailendra’s lyrics: social truths, emotional truths, a community’s truth or a nation’s. In the picture, the playback singer Mukesh accompanied by the actor Raj Kapoor.
Photo: Sport and Pastime
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Awara, the biggest Indian box-office earner of 1951, also became a rage in Russia and other Soviet bloc countries, China, Turkey, Africa, and East Asia. In the picture, a cinema hall in Soviet Russia playing the film.
Photo: THE HINDU ARCHIVES
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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: THE HINDU ARCHIVES
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A poster for Awara. If the Constitution resembles the law-abiding brother, Awara is akin to the estranged law-breaking sibling.
Photo: NFDC–National Film Archive of India
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From Awara to Mera Naam Joker, Raj Kapoor redefined heroism as a moral and emotional quest in an unequal, evolving Indian society.
Photo: NFDC–National Film Archive of India
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In its stylised homage to the golden age of Bollywood, Jubilee risks rewriting the political and feminist realities of the 1940s and 1950s film world.
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The web series Jubilee owes much creative debt to the film, but it is also guilty of more than a few distortions masquerading as cinematic liberty.
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Raj Kapoor in Shree 420. Raj Kapoor’s protagonists were unlike anything one associates with “heroism” in popular cinema.
Photo: THE HINDU ARCHIVES
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Raj Kapoor in Aag. In films like Aag and Barsaat, the questions Raj Kapoor asks, about love, lust, identity, are profound.
Photo: THE HINDU ARCHIVES
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A poster of “Awara” (1951). When a Hindi film moves into the magic realm that is the song-and-dance scene, the goalposts shift; in this exalted meter, everything becomes more palatable if done with conviction, and few did it with as much conviction as Raj did. ▲
A poster for “Teesri Kasam” (1966) displayed at a National Film Archives of India exhibition in Bengaluru on December 27, 2013. In the song “Duniya Banane Waale” from the film, Raj Kapoor is as subdued as Waheeda Rehman, as he sings gently for her.
Photo: BHAGYA PRAKASH
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However far Hindi cinema has moved from its older idioms, Raj Kapoor’s song performances remain fresh and accessible to those who seek them out.
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In later films like Ram Teri Ganga Maili, a stilted, staged, sexed presence begins to permeate Raj Kapoor’s cinema. Here, Rajiv Kapoor and Mandakini in a still from the film.
Photo: THE HINDU ARCHIVES
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Raj Kapoor and Vyjayantimala Bali in Sangam.
Photo: The Hindu Archives
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Padmini and Raj Kapoor snapped with Dilip Kumar when he visited them on the sets of Reuben Dubey Productions' "Aashiq" under the direction of Hrishikesh Mukerjee.
Photo: THE HINDU ARCHIVES
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A POSTER OF RAJ KAPOOR AND NARGIS IN ‘BARSAAT’. PAGE 2 2COL. CAPTION:RAJ KAPOOR ETC. ON CREED.
Photo: THE HINDU ARCHIVES
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Shailendra produced Teesri Kasam, a cult classic in which Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman created on-screen magic, but the film’s commercial failure devastated the lyricist.
Photo: NATIONAL FILM ARCHIVE OF INDIA
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Raj Kapoor’s early films, especially Awara, were extremely popular in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia. In 1954, he led a Bollywood delegation to Georgia, where he received a rapturous welcome.
Photo: BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
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Through scams, satire, and song, Shree 420 captures how Bombay’s real estate, bullion, and cooperative housing sectors were stitched into the national imagination.
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Through scams, satire, and song, Shree 420 captures how Bombay’s real estate, bullion, and cooperative housing sectors were stitched into the national imagination.