Raj Kapoor’s hundredth birthday fell on 14 December this year and to celebrate the auteur’s centenary a nationwide retrospective of his ten iconic films will be screened from December 13 to 15. Raj Kapoor remains the legend who gave a new definition to cinema purely as entertainment. He almost always played the hero in his films produced under the RK banner but he took great care to mould the women characters from his personal perspective.
Shoma A. Chatterji takes a look at some of his leading ladies and some on the fringe as well.
Beginning with Nargis and ending with Mandakini, Raj Kapoor created many women characters in different hues, whether as heroines or as ‘side characters.’ In his earliest films, it was Nargis who played Raj Kapoor’s lady love – from Aah to Aag through Barsaat, Awara, Sri 420 and so on. The entire screen image of Nargis was carefully designed by Kapoor himself. He styled her look from his personal perception of what defined a beautiful woman. So, the school teacher he had a gigantic crush on, which we were witness to in the first part of Mera Naam Joker, formed the basic model of Nargis’ screen image – a pristine looking woman dressed completely in white, without showing skin, and highlighted as a beautiful woman through clever backlighting by his cinematographer which created a halo around her head. This posed a striking contrast with the Chaplinesque image of the ‘vagabond’ hero which is the English translation of the word awara. In the long dream sequence, however, we find Nargis and Raj Kapoor both wearing Western costumes for glamour and glitter.
Take a look at young Nadira in Shree 420 as she holds a cigarette on a long holder and wears a shimmering gown with a décolletage and it never feels that her image is marginalised in any way. This deserves special mention in the immortal song-dance number Mud mudke na dekh mud mukde which brought Nadira into the limelight and also featured as the leading lady in Mehboob’s Aan opposite a young Dilip Kumar.
Even in the last RK film featuring Nargis in a cameo, Jagte Raho, for the first time in her RK portrayals she is dressed in a red-bordered white sari, her hair wet from a fresh bath, a typical Hindu housewife. She offers him the simple hero, mistaken for a thief, offering him water to drink. It was the last time that the iconic pair was seen together.
Once Nargis stepped out of the RK banner for good, leaving behind the famous RK logo picked by Raj Kapoor himself from a scene in Awara, Raj Kapoor first chose Vyjayantimala for the female lead in Sangam, a triangular love story with Kapoor and Rajendra Kumar playing the two men who place her in the horns of a dilemma. We find a perceptible change in the manner in which Vyjayantimala’s screen image was constructed – extremely glamorous, wearing different costumes and even performing a kind of ‘item number’ with the song Main kya koru Ram, mujhe buddha mil gaya which remains a hit till date.
With Padmini making her debut in RK’s Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai, the leading lady in a film directed by Raj Kapoor’s pet cinematographer Radhu Karmakar, heroines became sexier and more voluptuous. Padmini’s getting wet became a trend we discover later with Mandakani in Ram Teri Ganga Maili though Kapoor himself was not an actor here perhaps realising he would no longer fit into the image of the screen hero he had created himself.
Madakini in RTGM was given a sad backstory of evolving from a life as a sex worker but it did not succeed due to weak script. She was also photographed under a waterfall wearing a white sari minus a blouse which became a point of hot debate for encouraging voyeurism but it garnered high viewership, anyway.
The woman’s body in his films became much more the focus of the camera in later RK films than the character she played in the film. It was as if Raj Kapoor was determined to present a completely different image of the woman, more glamour less intellect, who could never be compared with the barrister Rita in Awara, dressed in a white sari and fighting her case in defense of Raju she was defending with her adoptive father (Prithviraj Kapoor) who was the judge and also, the biological father of Raju.
The way Zeenat Aman was almost half-dressed in Satyam Shivan Sundaram as Roopa, the daughter of the village priest half of whose face is burnt completely covered with her dupatta. But the half-covered face is compensated by making her wear such short ghagras and cholis that village girls would never dream of wearing. The character of Roopa is quite sketchy and weak and she does not dare to confess to her husband that the girl he married, whose face remains half-covered, and Roopa, the priest’s buxom daughter, is the same woman.
Bobby perhaps is the sole exception in which the teenager Bobby is just like a teenager and is dressed and behaves like a teenager. The Aruna Irani dance number is beautiful during the opening scenes of the film while the characterisation of the young boy’s fiancé portrayed brilliantly by Farida Jalal gets an extra edge as a mentally retarded young girl always playing with her doll. Bobby also marks the historic debut of Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia as the teenage lovers who fall in love despite the caste-class-language difference and it remains one of RK banner’s biggest hits of all time.
Ironically, Mera Naam Joker with a solid female cast of Simi Garewal, Padmini and Russian ballet dancer Kseniya Ryabinkina with good characterisations, turned out to become perhaps the biggest flop in the history of Raj Kapoor’s films though years later is is hailed as a masterpiece of the auteur. (TWF)
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