A love for all seasons

Continuing my tribute to RK Films, a look back at the banner’s first success, Barsaat (1949). What was its place in Raj Kapoor’s life and career, and in Hindi cinema?

A moment between Raj Kapoor and Nargis from Barsaat (1949) -- Raj Kapoor's first hit as a filmmaker -- became first the poster (left) and then the RK Films logo (right)

Raj Kapoor’s second film as a producer-director was Barsaat (1949). His father Prithiviraj had been the hero of all the Prithvi Theatre plays he directed over 16 years. Raj Kapoor, too, cast himself as his own protagonist from his directorial debut Aag (1948) until Mera Naam Joker (1970). That penchant for playing the hero may have been connected to the semi-autobiographical quality he brought to his cinema.

The central tension of Barsaat is between the philosophical worldviews of two friends, Pran (Kapoor) and Gopal (Prem Nath). They are educated young men of the same class background, both babus from the city who end up romancing naive girls from the mountains. Kashmir is never named, but the clothes, the women’s jewellery and the shikara rowed by Reshma (Nargis) establish Barsaat as part of a long history of Hindi films in which the unhappy state has figured as a beautiful playground for mainland heroes, “pardesis” who love and leave. The metaphorical weight of that cinematic history is undeniable, especially as we watch it in August 2019, when what seemed an innocuous theme 70 years ago has come home to roost as an Indian ‘national’ claim on Kashmiri territory and women.

But to return to the film’s more frontal concerns: the two men stand for very different things. Pran is a sensitive violin-playing poet, waiting for his one true love, while the pragmatic Gopal has a girl in every port – taking his pleasure where he can and never looking back. As one of the film’s multiple brilliant songs went, “Main chanchal madmast pavan hoon, ghoom-ghoom har kali ko choomoon”. If wind was one metaphor for moving unapologetically on, a flowing river was the other: in the words of scriptwriter Ramanand Sagar, later of Doordarshan Ramayan fame, Gopal describes himself thus: “Bas dariya ke lehron ki tarah guzar gaya, laut ke phir us ghaat ka khayaal tak nahi aaya.”

Prem Nath had already played foil to Raj Kapoor in Aag, where Kapoor’s character Kewal describes Prem Nath’s artist Rajan as a worshipper of the body rather than a seeker of the soul. In Barsaat, too, Nath’s Gopal is a man of lusty appetites while Kapoor plays a true romantic, who believes love must contain pain as much as pleasure: “Jismein ansoo nahi hote, woh saccha pyaar nahi hota”. Barsaat cemented the persona Raj Kapoor had already begun to create with Aag: that of a man in love with love.

But while he constantly berates Gopal for saying that love is only lust by another name, Kapoor's romantic hero is not quite the pure disembodied lover he wishes to be. Raj Kapoor had placed that quandary about loving ‘inner beauty’ versus physical attractiveness upfront in Aag, with the hero saying his life might have been different if he hadn’t been so attracted to beautiful girls. There, Kewal went to the extreme of disfiguring his face as a test of real love. Here, in Barsaat a year later, Kapoor seems more at ease with his own vanity, letting his on-screen lover Reshma (played by his off-screen lover Nargis) refer to the depths of his blue eyes (she talks of them in Aag, too, but there her attraction is punished).

These were themes that lasted through Raj Kapoor’s life: vanity, physical beauty, lust versus love, body versus soul. A man of average height in a family of tall Pathans, he was always insecure about height: he once said he knew when Nargis was going to leave him because she came to see him wearing heels. His pride in his blue eyes was also legend: Madhu Jain’s book on the Kapoors tells of how he finally scheduled a long-needed eye surgery because the surgeon also had light eyes. Only a man who knew the value of those eyes personally would safeguard them from harm. Jain also mentions that Kapoor wanted to make a film called Soorat Aur Seeratstarring Lata Mangeshkar as a disfigured heroine with a magic voice. Many years later, he came back to it in Satyam Shivam Sundaram.

Perhaps these are irresolvable questions. Barsaat came down emphatically on the side of one true love, the film’s Nargis-Raj Kapoor track suggesting the almost miraculous power of loyalty and longevity. It also made the Nargis-Raj Kapoor jodi the stuff of legend, their undeniable passion enshrined forever in the film’s posters, and later even more permanently and publicly, in the RK Films logo. The man who holds his woman and his violin in the same passionate embrace, suggesting that his art and his love were inextricably linked, may have been an accurate depiction of Raj Kapoor’s relationship with Nargis. And yet Barsaat was also the work of a man who had married his wife Krishna in 1946, a woman who sold her jewellery to help him make Barsaat. He met Nargis four months after, and had entanglements with other creative muses after her – Padmini, Vyjayanthimala and Lata Mangeshkar among them – but he never left his wife.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Aug 2019.

Fire in the Belly

My Mirror column:

The demolition of RK Studios last week marked the end of an era. That era began with Aag, released 71 years ago this August

Raj Kapoor’s first film under the RK Films banner, released on August 6, 1948, wasn’t a commercial success. Perhaps with good reason, for it was in many ways a raw work, an early and rather theatrical expression of the sensibility of the man who would come to be known as India’s ‘great showman’. But Aag (Fire) also contained several elements that would often recur in Raj Kapoor’s early films: melodious, soulful songs, grandly choreographed stage sequences, a hero out to forge his own path in the world, and Nargis.

I watched Aag as a child, under the encouraging influence of my Nani and her RK-loving sisters. But although it features an adorable ten-year-old Shashi Kapoor daydreaming in history class (and at one point, even putting on a show of Bilwa Mangal, complete with a fake moustache), Aag really isn’t a film meant for ten year olds. All I remembered of it all these years was its opening scene. The just-married hero enters the room where his new bride is seated on the bed, bejewelled and veiled. There is some banter on his part about her ghoonghat getting longer; she laughs bashfully in response. We see him approach her, slowly working up to unveiling her face as traditional Hindu suhaag raat heroes must. He does, she lifts her eyes shyly to look at him for the first time – and lets out a scream. The reversal that Raj Kapoor engineers here is memorable – making all the verbal build-up about the woman's face, while it is the man’s face, burnt by fire, in which the story lies. Between that perfect bit of cinematic deceit and the almost gothic horror quality of the scene, Aag’s remains one of Hindi cinema’s most interesting suhaag raat scenes.

A ten-year-old Shashi Kapoor, as a child actor in Raj Kapoor's directorial debut Aag

Watching the film last week, though, I was struck by other things. The genteel hero estranged from his father, who leaves his comfortable home and is penniless in the big city, first appears in incipient form in Aag. The figure who would grow into the Raj Kapoor tramp archetype in later films like Shree 420 and Awara is seen in Aag in a short sequence that is a turning point in the narrative. The film’s runaway protagonist Kewal Khanna (Kapoor) walks into an apparently empty theatre, delivers a teary soliloquy about having left home, and is instantly embraced as friend and partner by the theatre’s owner Rajan (Prem Nath), who has been sitting silently through Kewal’s monologue and is impressed by his passion, for life and for theatre.

Kewal’s speech is interesting, because it is essentially a call for the young Indian to be allowed to decide his own future rather than follow in the footsteps of family. What makes it more interesting, though, are the possible biographical extrapolations. Like the fictional Kewal Khanna, Prithviraj Kapoor had been a young man from a bourgeois Punjabi family who failed his first year law exam and decided to leave Peshawar for Bombay to start a new life on the stage. But unlike in Aag, where the angel who invests in Kewal’s future is a theatre owner who’s male and Hindu, the 22-year-old Prithviraj was picked out of a line of extras at Ardeshir Irani’s Imperial Studios by Ermeline, the Jewish star of Bombay’s then silent film industry. Struck by Prithviraj’s physique and Greek-god good looks, Ermeline decided she had found the hero of her next film, Cinema Girl. Prithviraj never returned to the extras queue.

The story of Prithviraj’s entry into the world of acting, as Madhu Jain tells it in her wonderful book The Kapoors, is filled with supportive collaborators and encouraging mentors like Ermeline, Ardeshir Irani, Sohrab Modi, KA Abbas and various others from the IPTA (the Indian People’s Theatre Association). Earlier, during his undergraduate years, his theatre dreams had been nurtured by his professor’s wife from Peshawar’s King Edwards College, an Englishwoman called Norah Richards. To this delightfully mixed world of the colonial Indian city, Prithviraj Kapoor eventually added his own contribution in 1944: Prithvi Theatres.

Raj Kapoor, as Prithviraj’s eldest son, necessarily underwent an apprenticeship in the theatre. But the elder Kapoor was a hard taskmaster, instinctively socialist in his staunch egalitarian treatment of all troupe members – rather than the feudal Indian father who might spoil his own children or give them more. He was apparently worried that Raj was naalayak; Jain suggests that those who knew him believe he wanted Raj to “have a proper education, followed by a proper job”, though he had himself rejected that path. 

Odd as it may seem, then, the anguish of Aag’s hero was not just that of Prithviraj’s battle against his father – but also of Raj against his.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Aug 2019.