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Raj Kapoor – The Filmmaker

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Back to Legends – Raj Kapoor
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Raj Kapoor in 1964, while shooting for Sangam in Ooty

That he was a filmmaker first and an actor later cannot be doubted. He himself said, “My becoming an actor was an accident, I have always wanted to be a filmmaker.” As a filmmaker, Raj Kapoor’s USP was also perhaps his greatest flaw. For, unlike his peers Guru Dutt, Mehboob Khan or Bimal Roy, Raj Kapoor had no clearly defined philosophy in his films, except perhaps the philosophy of love. Though his films always had a social message, it was a slightly unrealistic and slightly superficial one. He believed that

the inequalities in society could be resolved by a romantic optimism and never really delved deeply into them.

He saw himself firstly as an entertainer and that’s what he was as a filmmaker — a supreme entertainer. His tendency to romanticise poverty, cruelty, inequality showed an evasiveness as a filmmaker. He used these issues as a peg for his films but they remained just pegs. There were no real solutions offered by him. He believed that people came to the cinema to be entertained and that’s what he was doing — entertaining them. He did not consider cinema an intellectual medium, yet believed that it could become the medium of change. But through emotionalism and sentimentality. And that is the level at which his films worked best.

Despite his almost naive romanticism, he was not only considered the greatest entertainer by his audiences but in terms of box office figures, it was seen that he was perhaps the only filmmaker whose distributors remained with him throughout his life and career. No mean achievement in the fluctuating world of films! Filmmaker Shyam Benegal, the master of realistic cinema, once analysed Raj Kapoor’s work with: “His probing (of issues) never quite takes on radical dimensions, remaining satisfied with platitudinous happy endings.”

In Raj Kapoor’s films, women are often treated as the focal points as seen in Barsaat, Sangam, Mera Naam Joker, Bobby, Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Ram Teri Ganga Maili and Prem Rog. But his women were still passive beings, either waiting for their man (Barsaat), sacrificing themselves (Sangam) or becoming victims of society (Ram Teri Ganga Maili and Prem Rog). In Mera Naam Joker, the women became the temptresses who seduced the poor hero. In Bobby, the heroine was the epitome of youthful sex appeal for whom the hero would surmount any obstacle. Despite that, these women always suffered more or less in silence or symbolised the need to change the norms of society.

Raj Kapoor often spoke of how women in India were deified as ‘Mata’ (mother) on the one hand and ill treated on the other. According to him, women should be put on a pedestal. Only, his pedestal suggested a superwoman who had no need for self-gratification; that was the man’s prerogative. The woman was higher than that. She was the ‘Devi’ who transcended all mundane desires. His love for women dressed in white, in his personal life, perhaps reflected this attitude.

Satyam Shivam Sundaram was actually an expression of Raj Kapoor’s recurrent motif – the supremacy of inner beauty over physical beauty. In his films, he wanted to keep proving that inner beauty was more fascinating. But somewhere down the line, his fascination for the female body overshadowed and contradicted his ideal. And during the course of his film making, he did became known for his unnecessary exploitation of the female form. His first film Aag dealt with this theme, so did Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram.

Many saw his voyeurism, his obsession with the female form as “the carnality of a schoolboy”. But beyond this criticism, he remained forever the romantic optimist, attributing it to the atmosphere of the post-independence years. “We began our work in an age of optimism. The Republic was new, and the rulers were new to leadership,” he explained once.

His films can be considered ‘masala’ films of the best kind; films which had tried and tested themes, loads of emotionalism and sentimentality, loads of traditions rooted in our culture, loads of relationships based on the Indian value system and magnificent music. And he spared no efforts in achieving this. He worked at a leisurely pace sparing no costs. This was helped by the fact that he had a studio of his own. Perhaps he’d constructed the studio because it suited his temperament to not have time limits and finances dictate his way of working.

Simi Garewal recalls during the making of Mera Naam Joker, “His whole scale was very big and the time element was never important. He never had that jaldi kaam khatam karo attitude like other people. He had a studio at his disposal so he could take his time over shooting. Everything was done in a rather leisurely manner. And he was a perfectionist.”

“For example, in Mera Naam Joker, when we’d go location hunting, the whole team would travel together. We finally reached a place in Mysore, which had a little river — that’s where Chintu and I did the famous river scene. It seemed fine to me. But he told his crew `alright, make it’. I didn’t know what ‘make it’ meant. We came back four days later to shoot and the place looked completely transformed. The crew had sprayed the leaves, made them greener, added some darker red colours, spruced up the whole place and it really looked different. This was the first time I had ever seen anyone playing with nature and it really struck me.”

“Another incident also happened in Mysore, during the last alaap of the song Teetar ke do aage teetar… He wanted the teacher to lead this whole group of students over the mountain, with a fabulous sunset at the back. Every single day, I would do this whole run up the hill with all these kids following me — there’d be generator trucks being moved, lights being moved, everything would be set up. And then he would say, ‘Haan theek hai….. kal karenge!’ because he wasn’t happy with the sunset! This went on for fourteen days until he got the perfect sunset he wanted.”

“He would also shoot a lot of footage. In the Padmini episode, he shot a lakh-and-a-half feet of footage. People didn’t do that. I was working simultaneously with Satyajit Ray, who was so precise and abstemious with his footage that the maximum he’d exposed for the full film was thirty thousand feet. That was quite a contrast and it was quite interesting to compare the two.”

That was Rajji’s working style. He made you feel good — that was something I learnt from him. If you are feeling good about yourself, your voice opens up, you talk well, you emote confidently. He would pamper the artiste a lot and make you really feel like a queen. When you worked with him, you became part of the RK family.”

“I remember, at that time when we went to Pune for shootings, his farmhouse wasn’t really done up. The entire unit, including me, would be sleeping on bags spread out on the terrace. I had never done this sort of thing before. I remember how much fun we had going over to someone else’s mattress and sitting and chatting for long hours. It was a memorable time. It had never happened before and can never happen again.”

Nanda looks back upon her experiences with him fondly: “He was a fine filmmaker. When he was directing me in Prem Rog, I had just three scenes in the film but the way he crafted them allowed me ample scope to show my talent. It used to be a joy to watch him act out each character’s scenes in their individual styles. He gave each artiste, however big or small, the same love and respect. In fact, the way he pampered his artistes was very heartwarming. He made a fantastic host both as a producer and at his parties. The warmth with which he treated you made you feel alien in other environments. If the press visited his sets during Prem Rog, he would tell them — these young people (Rishi Kapoor and Padmini Kolhapure) are not my stars. My stars are Shammi Kapoor, Tanuja, Nanda.’ His love really reached out to all of us.” – Lata Khubchandani

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