Singing Hindi in the Rain
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.
"Raj Kapoor and the Golden Age of Indian Cinema" at MoMa includes “Shree 420,” starring Kapoor, right, and Nargis.
By RACHEL SALTZ
Published: January 5, 2012
It’s one of the most famous sequences in Indian movies. And, not surprisingly, it’s a song. A Chaplinesque tramp with holes in his shoes, too-short pants and a slightly goofy hat skips down a country road and sings these lines in Hindi: “My shoes are Japanese/These pants are English/On my head is a red Russian hat/But still,” he says, pointing to his chest and delivering the kicker, “my heart is Hindustani.”
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.
Raj Kapoor in “Awaara” (1951).
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive
Kapoor's frequent co-star Nargis, here as a country girl left behind in “Barsaat” (“Monsoon”), from 1949.
Indian International Film Academy
Kapoor with Kamini Kaushal in “Aag” (“Fire”), from 1948.
That heart belonged to Raj Kapoor, and his song — a simple statement of patriotism in a globalizing world — struck a chord with audiences in the young Indian republic when it appeared in “Shree 420” (1955). And not just in India; it was a hit in the Middle East and the Soviet Union too. Some middle-aged Russians can still sing it.
Kapoor (1924-88), called the Great Showman — no small tribute in an industry besotted with showmanship — looms large over the Indian film landscape. But how to explain him and his work to those who didn’t grow up with Hindi movies?
As an actor, Kapoor was a leading man who played poets and misfits and lovers. With the actress Nargis, he made up one of Hindi movies’ great romantic couples. And he could be comic too, as in “Shree 420,” in which his everyman tramp is not above the old slipping-on-a-banana-peel gag. (No one is spared: Nargis takes a tumble too.)
As a director and producer, eventually with his own studio, Kapoor lived the auteur’s dream. In a mostly formulaic and conservative industry, he made inventive, personal films that were entertaining and accessible but also something more. Socially conscious and Socialist-inclined with nation-building themes, they resonated in — and maybe even helped to define — a newly independent India busy inventing itself.
For those who have never seen a Hindi movie or are curious about Kapoor, the Museum of Modern Art’s well-chosen eight-film series Raj Kapoor and the Golden Age of Indian Cinema, opening on Friday, is an excellent place to start, focusing mainly on Kapoor’s heyday, the late 1940s to ’50s. And for those already familiar with Kapoor, the series offers a rare opportunity to see his films as they should be seen: on the big screen, in new 35-millimeter prints.
With its restless hero and inventive visuals, “Aag” (“Fire,”1948), made when its director-producer-star was just 24, announces a new voice on the scene that all but shouts, “Look at me!” Filmed in gorgeously stylized black and white — pools of darkness are broken by shafts of light, and eyes glow out of faces cast in shadow — it combines expressionism and homegrown melodrama to tell the story of a soulful upper-class young man (Kapoor) who breaks with his conventional family to pursue a career in theater.
Living on his own terms, the hero searches for truth and beauty and long-lost love. But this isn’t just his story, he says, it’s the “story of youth.” He knows that “creating your own destiny isn’t easy” — are you listening, young India? — yet prefers a path full of obstacles to the comfortable life he would lead in his father’s house.
Set in Kashmir, “Barsaat” (“Monsoon,”
Kapoor is paired with Nargis, and while there’s no kissing — this is Hindi cinema, after all, which had a long-running ban on it — Kapoor the director finds ways to give their scenes an erotic charge beyond the actors’ obvious chemistry. Watch as he rubs her head or grabs her hair or calls her to him with the siren song of his violin. (She even licks his fingers, calloused from playing.)
In “Awaara” (“The Vagabond,” 1951), perhaps his best movie, Kapoor tries out for the first time his tramp persona, though briefly, in the title song. Both song and film were enormous hits abroad, especially in the Soviet Union, where bands serenaded Nargis and Kapoor with the tune when they visited; in China, Mao was said to be a fan.
Here Kapoor’s not a pampered upper-class fellow, but a fatherless boy, Raju, raised in the Bombay slums, who falls into a life of crime. Written by K. A. Abbas (who also wrote “Shree 420”), the movie mixes mythological themes (the story of Raju’s parents, told in flashback, echoes the epic the Ramayana) with social ones: Can a good man come from the gutter? Can the cycle of poverty and crime be broken? Can a man be judged by who his father is — or isn’t?
There’s also a class-crossing love story, another favorite Kapoor theme, as Raju falls for Rita (Nargis), a lawyer and the ward of a magistrate who just happens to be the father who cast out Raju and his mother. (Kapoor’s real father, Prithviraj Kapoor, a distinguished stage actor, plays the magistrate.)
If “Awaara” is his best movie, “Shree 420” (“Mr. 420”), a clown-rags to well-tailored riches tale, is probably his most emblematic. Looking for work, his outsider tramp lands in the big city, Bombay, where he finds a home along a footpath with other poor people and falls for a schoolteacher, played of course by Nargis. Their moonlit, rain-soaked love song, delivered as they wander along the footpath, the city glittering just beyond, is a justifiably famous four-minute distillation of movie magic.
The tramp, though, becomes corrupt, a city-slicked swindler. (The number in the title refers to the section of the Indian penal code that deals with cheating and fraud.) But he’s redeemed at the end, making common cause again with the poor and powerless as they rise up to agitate for the simple right to housing.
The MoMA series also includes two later color films made at a time when Hindi movies were becoming Bollywood — the term was coined by journalists in the ’70s — and Kapoor was struggling to recover his place in the industry. “Meera Nam Joker” (“My Name Is Joker,” 1970), a maudlin working through of the tramp and clown themes, was a colossal flop. An older, puffier Kapoor looks ill matched with his young leading ladies. But “Bobby”(1973), a teenage love story starring Dimple Kapadia and Rishi Kapoor (Raj’s son), was a colossal hit that ushered in a vogue for tales of young love.
Bollywood movies today don’t look much like the Kapoor films from what MoMA calls the Golden Age. But the Kapoor dynasty stills flourishes. Raj’s brothers and sons have been stars, and now two of his grandchildren, Kareena and Ranbir (they’re cousins), are hard at work in the family trade. Both are actors, but both — is anyone surprised? — may have a not-so-secret dream: to direct.
“Raj Kapoor and the Golden Age of Indian Cinema” runs from Friday through Jan. 16 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.
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