What happens to iconic film heroes once their historic roles are behind them, they are past their peaks, and new icons enter the stage and take their place? Think of Ashok Kumar and K.L. Saigal of the 1940s, Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, and Guru Dutt of the 1950s-1960s, Dev Anand and Rajesh Khanna of the 1960s-1970s, and Amitabh Bachchan of the 1970s-1980s. They are not remembered for all the roles they performed but for a set of performances that went on to embody and bring to life a certain persona that then became them. Retrospectively, a certain set of characteristics or roles combined to define their star persona: the self-torturing artist, the carefree wanderer, the diehard romantic, the rebel with or without a cause, and so on.
Such star images remain frozen in time, as markers of a period gone by, sometimes revisited or invoked as new imaginations and desires enter the stage. In retrospect, the persona and oeuvre of the great stars coalesce into the zeitgeist of an era, embodying the angst and the hopes, the dreams and the anger of a particular period in history. If every Third World text is a national allegory, every successful star is a national hero or villain in some way or the other.
Raj Kapoor was one such iconic star. Most other stars needed scenarists and directors to sculpt their star personas through time and several film narratives. Raj Kapoor played both the authorial roles, that of actor and director, and sometimes, that of producer and editor too. So the control he had over his star persona was, in a way, absolute. This spilled over to, or was used in, films by other directors of the period too.
Raj Kapoor’s creative life as an actor-director lasted for more than four decades. Looking back, one can see certain definite thematic and stylistic shifts in his oeuvre. His directorial repertoire can be split into four phases, beginning with the black-and-white period, which includes Aag (1948), Barsaat (1949), Awara (1951), and Shree 420 (1955). It was followed by a second phase with the first two colour films he made: Sangam (1964) and Mera Naam Joker (1970). The films in the third phase of his directorial career include Bobby (1973) and Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978), followed by the last phase, which featured Prem Rog (1982) and Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985). Only in the first two phases do we see Raj Kapoor playing the double roles of actor and director. In the next two phases, he restricts himself to direction, with other members of his clan like Rishi Kapoor, Shashi Kapoor, or Rajiv Kapoor playing the protagonists.
If Bobby and Satyam Shivam Sundaram were paeans to love, Prem Rog and Ram Teri Ganga Maili were love stories that raged against social evils. | Photo Credit: NFDC–National Film Archive of India
His iconic films as director where he played Chaplinesque roles belong to the first phase: they are remembered for their cinematographic brilliance, evocative songs, and great acting performances, especially by the romantic pair of Raj Kapoor and Nargis. The second phase has two films that mark the end of his association with Nargis, whose mercurial presence mirrored and illuminated his black-and-white characters. Sangam, a triangular love story, and Mera Naam Joker, a farewell to the Chaplinesque tramp roles, mark, in many ways, the end of the iconic period of his career. Sangam can be read as a rumination upon his on- and off-screen love affair with Nargis, a love won outside and lost within. Mera Naam Joker was a sort of ode to both his loves, to women and to the footloose, romantic persona. If Bobby and Satyam Shivam Sundaram were paeans to love, Prem Rog and Ram Teri Ganga Maili were love stories that raged against social evils.
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Much has been written about the undercurrents (and overcurrents) of national “imagi-nations” that animate Indian film narratives during different periods in the history of the nation: films of the post-Independence decades; those made after the debacle in the war with China; ones that mark the entry of the Angry Young Man after the dark Emergency days; films exuding the new hopes and global aspirations that accompanied new economic and globalisation policies of the 1990s; films that came after the Babri Masjid demolition and the rise of communal politics where a new set of narratives, heroes, and villains emerge, and so on. Where do Raj Kapoor films fit in? Do they belong to a particular period? How does his persona and his oeuvre reflect the times?
Raj Kapoor’s creative life began immediately after Independence, and he signed off when the television era was making its beginning and the Nehruvian mixed economy idea/ideals were in their last throes. One can look at Raj Kapoor’s directorial oeuvre through the visible shifts in the four phases mentioned above. The personas of the heroes and heroines, the pace of the narrative, the visual rendering of the songs, and even the look and feel of the frames undergo change. Although certain themes like Oedipal conflicts and love that transgress class barriers and the resultant struggle against the establishment continue, they assume different shapes and directions in all these phases.
One of the figures that we see in his early films is that of the vagabond: one who is constantly on the move, extremely vulnerable to circumstances, innocently open in his engagements with the world, takes on diverse occupations and identities, and holds within himself both altruistic as well as criminal potential.
In the films following Mera Naam Joker, the last film in which Raj Kapoor played the hero, the differences become pronounced. The same kind of family conflicts, love adventures, and Oedipal tensions continue, but they are explored and resolved differently. The heroes are much younger, and they fall in love with nubile, innocent girls from the underclass, or from idyllic village settings, faraway from the corrupt city. Although the cry from Awara—“I don’t want this hell, I want flowers, I want music and I want love”—persists in later films too, there is a generational shift in the hero’s approach to his tribulations. Father figures and family begin to play a more dominant role in the later narratives, influencing to a great extent how the hero confronts and resolves conflicts within and without.
The last scene of Ram Teri Ganga Maili is testimony to the immutability that concepts like family honour, corrupt politics, and accumulated wealth have gathered in the post-Independence decades. | Photo Credit: NFDC–National Film Archive of India
Curiously, in the last three phases, the presence of the city also recedes from the narrative surface and love drama. In Bobby, it is a brief interlude of the hero’s escapade to Goa that turns into a confrontation with kidnappers. Varanasi and Calcutta, the cities in Ram Teri Ganga Maili, are spaces of sin and corruption, in stark contrast to the faraway villages the heroine lives in. If in the early films, the hero came to the city to find life and make a living, the hero of the later films arrives at the idyllic village either after completing his studies in town (Prem Rog), or accidentally, during a study tour (Ram Teri Ganga Maili), or as part of his profession (Satyam Shivam Sundaram). Unlike the heroes of Shree 420 or Awara who try their hands at different trades and assume diverse identities, the new heroes are amenable to neither external nor internal transformation.
In the later phases, rural innocence and idyllic locales begin to occupy centre stage. The city streets and courts that were the sites of love and justice in Raj Kapoor’s early films are replaced by temples and gods in the later films. Such a spatial shift also limits the director’s exploration into the inner life and imagination of his heroes. As a result, such surreal dream songs as “Tere bina aag yeh chandni” (Awara) give way to landscape-based or heroine-centred songs set in rural landscapes or Himalayan valleys (Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Prem Rog, Ram Teri Ganga Maili). The air of mystery that accompanied the erotic charge in the visualisation of early heroines (especially those played by Nargis) is missing here, with the body of the heroine becoming the sole focus. The early heroines, too, invited our gaze but also often returned our gaze; their bodies were on display, but they were suffused with a certain kind of self-awareness or sense of self, unlike the heroines of Satyam Shivam Sundaram or Ram Teri Ganga Maili, who are only there to be looked at and devoured.
Almost three post-Independence decades separate the heroes of Raj Kapoor’s first films—Kewal of Aag, Raj of Awara and Raj of Shree 420—from their heirs in the later films, Raj of Bobby, Rajeev of Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Dev of Prem Rog, and Naren of Ram Teri Ganga Maili. If the heroes of the early films belonged to the Nehruvian era, full of hope, ready to break away from their khandaan (clan), rebel against their fathers, and walk out into the wide world to chase their dreams, the later heroes seem to have a lot to lose and are hesitant to break out.
Kewal walks out of his home to pursue the dream of theatre; Raj of Shree 420 is a graduate who joyously walks into the city with only a bundle on his shoulders; Pran in Barsaat will do anything in his pursuit of pure love; and Raj of Awara, despite childhood tragedies, is capable of taking life as it comes, defying both his father figures (Judge Raghunath and the dacoit Jagga). For this post-Independence generation, that came of age in the new nation, the world lay wide open in front of them. They strode ahead firmly, believing that one only needed will, honesty, and hard work to make it in the world (read, make the nation). But for the post-1970s generation of the later films, the heroes have much more to lose, especially the wealth that their fathers have amassed in new India.
Raj Kapoor addressing a gathering of Army jawans at the North East Frontier Agency region. | Photo Credit: The Hindu archives
The shift is most evident in the energy and verve, tone and tenor of the songs from these periods. The songs of the early black-and-white films exude an enigmatic charm: they are songs of exuberance and joy, addressed to the world at large. Both the lyrical content and address of the later songs are either of personal longing or didactic in nature. For instance, a song situation like “Hum tum ek kamre me bandh ho” of Bobby is unimaginable in the early films. Compare it with the song “Pyar hua ikraar hua” from Shree 420 or “Dekh chand ki oar” in Aag that are sung in the open, with the lovers out on the city streets lashed by rains.
One also finds instances of strong male bonding in the early films: Pran and Gopal in Barsaat, Kewal and Rajan in Aag, and Sundar and Gopal in Sangam. The bonding is marked by a certain playfulness and camaraderie that remain warm despite differences of opinion and world view. In all these relationships, what connects them is the love interest: in Aag, the aspiring playwright Kewal sacrifices his love for the sake of the theatre owner Rajan, as does Sundar for Gopal in Sangam. The woman is the gift one man bestows on the other, for which he is ready to sacrifice or hide his own feelings of love. In the later films, the hero is devoid of such friends and has no alter ego to converse with.
Movie buffs clicking selfies in front of New Delhi’s iconic Regal Theatre. In 2017, to mark its closing down, the theatre screened Raj Kapoor’s Sangam and Mera Naam Joker as its last shows. | Photo Credit: Kamal Singh/PTI
There is a certain lightness and a feeling of freedom that characterise the early Raj Kapoor characters, whether it is the theatre-obsessed artist, the lovestruck youth, or the tramp in the city. They are ready to put the past behind and find a future in the present. In many cases (Barsaat, Shree 420), the past does not figure at all; if at all childhood exists, it is devoid of nostalgic charge. Raj Kapoor’s early heroes are busy dreaming; they also take the present lightly, which for them is only a path to the future. The way in which they conduct themselves in the world—at home, on the streets, with their lovers—has a tentativeness that eludes hierarchies and order.
Despite the poverty and the class difference, the world they inhabit is open and unpredictable, and hence full of possibilities. In the case of the heroes of the later films, the supremacy of the father and the legacy of the family weigh far too heavily on them, restricting and binding them, despite their attempts to run away (Bobby, Ram Teri Ganga Maili); in many cases, the family catches up eventually to co-opt the runaway lovers into its fold.
If the mother in Awara is ready to bear the brunt of single parenting and poverty and fight her way back to life, the mothers in later films have become too subservient either to their husbands (Prem Rog, Ram Teri Ganga Maili) or to their pleasures and vices (Bobby). In earlier films, even when the rebellious lovers returned to the family fold, the events that led to the return were transformative for both, while in later films, the family becomes immutable. The last scene of Ram Teri Ganga Maili, where the lovers walk away from the family, stands testimony to the immutability that “family honour”, corrupt politics, and accumulated wealth have gathered in the post-Independence decades.
One of the signature features of early Raj Kapoor films was the mercurial presence of Nargis. She plays the defiant young woman lawyer defending her vagabond lover in an all-male court in Awara, the committed teacher of street children in Shree 420, a lonely yet courageous woman—a refugee with no family—who chooses her career and lover in Aag, and a committed lover who is ready to take up any challenge to realise her love in Barsaat. Raj Kapoor and Nargis were very much part of the film lore of the times, peppered by gossip and hearsay.
Another sartorial signature of Raj Kapoor’s was his fascination for the white dress. In Bollywood: A History, Mihir Bose writes: “He always dressed his leading ladies in white, as a symbol of his love. For a Hindu, and Raj Kapoor was a devout Hindu, white was the colour of mourning, and the colour widows wore at the moment of their husband’s death.” This sartorial signature also undergoes a transformation in the post–Mera Naam Joker films: though both his heroines in Satyam Shivam Sundaram and Ram Teri Ganga Maili briefly wear diaphanous white clothes in the bathing scenes, they soon shift to colourful “ethnic” attire. In Prem Rog and Bobby, which feature heroines from two different backgrounds, their clothes remain colourful.
A Raj Kapoor commemorative stamp was issued by India Post in 2001.
There was also a certain kind of “worldliness” that defined the early heroines. They defied their fathers, fought for their heroes, and plunged into the torrents of life and love, often before, or more daringly than, the hero. The later heroines are ethereal, wither and wilt in the face of reality, and need the hero to save them. Such evacuation of inner life or self of the woman, also a ploy to accentuate her rural innocence, turns love into something blind and self-effacing, or unworldly. For instance, in Satyam Shivam Sundaram, the engineer-hero Rajeev’s love is blind—literally and metaphorically—to the full face of his object of love, forcing her to assume a split identity to assuage his vanity/dread.
The ethereal love and its conflicts that animate the later films turn the narrative into a series of dramatic moments of dialogic or physical confrontation, without the tender tentativeness and charming vacillations that marked the early lovers and their engagements with the life/world.
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What gives that magical charm to the love scenes of Barsaat, Awara and Shree 420 is also the way the camera lingers over the lovers’ faces, gestures, and movements, oblivious of narrative urgency. Human drama unfolds against the backdrop of the changing tones of the sky, shifting forms of clouds, and the glimmer of flowing waters. Such moments of silence, tentativeness, and ambiguity (remember the scenes of romantic rendezvous from Barsaat or the street scenes from Shree 420) are rare in later films. Close-ups are used only to heighten the drama and seldom to linger on human expressions and subtle gestures. The story takes over, and the story is in a hurry. It does not spend time to grapple with the imponderables of love like in Barsaat or the pains inflicted by a scarred face as in Aag.
Take, for instance, the exchange in Barsaat between Pran and Reshma, where Pran ruminates poetically on the idea of love: “There will be a time when love will make itself felt like the pricking of a thorn. It is unpredictable. It appears suddenly like the first flower of spring. And when that time comes, do you know what happens? Everything in the world takes on a different meaning. We begin to see the depths of oceans in someone’s eyes and want to drown in it. The moon becomes a bindi on their forehead, and we see the tears of the skies in it. Moonlight streams down, wanting to touch the dust of their feet.”
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 Credit: SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR
One seldom comes across such ruminations later. The lovers of the early films are also marked by deep inner conflicts. As the film scholar Gayatri Chatterjee writes in her analysis of Awara, they are haunted by “feelings of inadequacy, of frustrated anger and cynical mockery”. In later films, the challenges of love are predominantly external (family honour, caste, religion, class divide) or are curable (like the hero’s fear of scarred faces in Satyam Shivam Sundaram).
Can one read the internal history of the nation or its shifting dreamscapes through films? If so, what does Raj Kapoor’s journey from Aag to Ram Teri Ganga Maili tell us? The youthful hopes and optimism that one sees in the early films gradually shrink; the dreams about the future recede, and the overwhelming shadows of the past and the brute power of wealth crush young dreams and loves.
All Raj Kapoor films were love stories, and there was always a chasm that separated the lovers. Earlier, the lovers could cross that chasm and imagine a world beyond. In later films, the horizons shrink, the beyond is not in sight, and the chasm entraps the lovers. Does this history of love that one finds in Raj Kapoor films, one that gradually loses sight of the beyond, the daring to dream of another world, portend something about the eras that followed?
C.S. Venkiteswaran is a film critic and documentary filmmaker based in Kochi.
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