Come December 14, 2024, one of Indian cinema’s greatest icons, Raj Kapoor (1924-1988), would have turned 100 had he been alive. Kapoor is many things to many people: producer, director, actor, editor, musician, storyteller, and man of many moods. There could be endless debates about his exact contribution to the art and aesthetics of cinema. Still, few can deny that he was the greatest entertainer ever known to Indian films – the great showman, the man who produced and directed classics such as Barsaat (1949), Awara (1951), Shree 420 (1955), Sangam (1964) and Bobby (1973).
To celebrate Kapoor’s birth centenary, a retrospective consisting of ten films produced by Kapoor’s production company, RK Films, is being held across India from Friday, December 13, 2024, to Sunday, December 15, 2024. Besides eight films directed by Kapoor – Aag (1948), his directorial debut, Barsaat, Awara, Shree 420, Sangam, Bobby, Mera Naam Joker (1970), and his final film Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), the package also includes two films produced by Kapoor – Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai (1960), directed by his regular cinematographer, Radhu Karmakar, and Jagte Raho (1956), directed by one of the doyens of the Bengali stage, Sombhu Mitra, and Amit Maitra.
Speaking about the RK 100 retrospective, Kapoor’s grandson Ranbir Kapoor says, “We are incredibly proud to be members of the Raj Kapoor family. Our generation is standing on the shoulders of a giant whose every film spoke of the time that it was made and was the voice of the common man over decades. His stories are timeless, and this festival is our way of reliving that magic and inviting everyone to experience his legacy on the big screen.”
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Director of Film Heritage Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Mumbai dedicated to supporting the conservation, preservation, and restoration of the moving image and to developing interdisciplinary programmes to create awareness about the language of cinema, articulates, “It is an honour for Film Heritage Foundation to join hands with RK Films, the Raj Kapoor family, the NFDC-National Film Archive of India and PVR-Inox and Cinepolis to present “Raj Kapoor 100 – Celebrating a Century of the Great Showman” in a manner befitting an icon of Indian cinema and his towering status through the biggest retrospective yet that will celebrate hundred years of his legacy across the country.”
Kapoor was just 23 when he helmed Aag, the first film under the RK banner. The film looked at three stages in the life of its man, a theatre artist, and the role that a woman played in each of the stages. Nigar Sultana, Kamini Kaushal and Nargis played the leading ladies. It was an early film that referenced the Partition of India and also the first of Kapoor’s many films with Nargis, the two of them going on to become the leading pair of Hindi Films till 1956. Aag was also the first of many of Raj’s films to explore dualities, looking at physical beauty v/s inner beauty. Among his other films, Barsaat looked at love v/s lust, Awara at heredity v/s environment, Shree 420 at honesty/integrity v/s corruption, and Mera Naam Joker at public life v/s private life of an artist, a circus clown.
Kapoor’s finest film is arguably Awara. The film, where the real-life father and son, Prithviraj Kapoor and Kapoor, played the reel-life father and son, was perhaps his greatest ever triumph. The film, particularly the title song, swept through Asia, breaking box office records in the Middle East, being dubbed in Turkish, Persian and Arabic. It was even remade in Turkey in 1964! The film was also extremely popular in Russia, where it was called Bradyaga (Vagabond). The dream sequence, representing the mental turmoil of the hero caught between his criminal boss and his sweetheart, who wishes him to give up crime, is a major highlight of Awara. With huge statues set amongst the clouds, choreographed by the French dancer Madame Simki, the sequence stands out even today as one of the most well-known sequences of Indian cinema!
With Awara, Kapoor also created the Chaplin-like tramp, an allegory for the innocent state of mind of the post-Independent Indian. This image was used again to telling effect in Shree 420, tracing the corruption of an innocent and simple man who comes to the city to make his living. Many of Kapoor’s other films, even those directed by others, look at the naive, simple hero, who is used by a cruel and corrupt society, like in Jagte Raho and Anari (1959).
After advocating social reform for dacoits in Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behtai Hai and the rivetting love triangle Sangam, which he filmed in color and extensively outside India in Europe, Kapoor came out with his magnum opus, Mera Naam Joker, about a clown who laughs on the outside and entertains people but has to deal with heartbreaks in his private life. Reverting to Kapoor’s Chaplinisque image and though brilliant in parts, particularly the first chapter of the adolescent hero discovering love and sex, the film, an admittedly self-indulgent exercise in places, flopped miserably at the box office, shattering him and putting him in deep debt. However, Kapoor bounced back big time with Bobby (1973), a trendsetting teenage romance of young lovers fighting parental opposition that is aped by Hindi cinema till today. His swan song, Ram Teri Ganga Maili, is all about innocence being sullied, the female protagonist a metaphor for the river Ganga – once pure but now sullied by dirt and corruption.
The screening schedule for the films can be found at the following links.
The header photo and the Raj Kapoor 100 poster are both courtesy Film Heritage Foundation.