Forever Youthful: Rishi Kapoor

After Dev Anand, the legendary Peter Pan of the Indian screen, Rishi Kapoor has perhaps had the longest innings as a romantic hero.

Rishi Kapoor has scored, as he likes to reiterate, a quarter century as a leading man and romantic lover -– from Bobby in 1973 to Karobaar in 1998.

And he’s obviously not done yet: he plays a middle-aged hero in love in Pyar Mein Twist (2005).

He went the Kapoor way of all flesh in the eighties. But the audience, especially women, accepted him, double chins and expanding waist notwithstanding. His fans willingly suspended their disbelief in accepting a hero in his mid-40s wooing women half his age, and a quarter his size.

Was it his fair, babyish face? The cast of his fine features configured to spell sweetness and inspire trust? Rishi Kapoor came across as the nice boy who wasn’t just led by his raging hormones but loved with his soul as well. He danced like a dream, effortlessly. The star-crossed or tragic lover label fit him well, especially in films like Laila Majnu.

He also came at a time when screen romance was about love, and not obsession. For schoolgirls and undergraduates in the seventies and early eighties he was a romantic icon, the ultimate ladies man. He symbolised a sense of masti and youthful energy, not to forget those magic-dancing feet. The Emergency and its aftermath, bringing in its wake cynicism and anger, took place after he was already established. It didn’t trip him.

So while Randhir Kapoor and many other actors did not survive the action era or the juggernaut of Amitabh Bachchan, post-Sholay, Rishi Kapoor kept going, and going, like the tortoise, past the young teenyboppers with rippling biceps sprinting in short bursts before being pushed off Bollywood Boulevard.

He acted in several memorably popular films with Bachchan -– from Manmohan Desai blockbusters like Amar Akbar Anthony, Naseeb and Coolie to Shashi Kapoor’s Ajooba. Like his uncle he, too, was complementary to Amitabh Bachchan, their screen affability and ‘niceness’ offsetting the lanky actor’s edgy intensity.

Bachchan weighs his words carefully like a grocer but is surprisingly spontaneous while talking about Rishi Kapoor: ‘Chintu is a natural actor. He is one of the finest of our actors and has a certain individuality of his own.’

Raj Kapoor wrote bits of his life into his films, more often than not realizing his fantasies in and perhaps through them. In two of them -- Mera Naam Joker and Bobby –- he made his middle son his alter ego. These were Rishi Kapoor’s first two films. In both films the character he plays has a name that recalls his father’s: Raju in Mera Naam Joker and Raja in Bobby. The choice of name is particularly significant in the first film, which is Raj Kapoor’s most autobiographical one.

Interestingly, other directors too have chosen names beginning with the letter R for Rishi Kapoor’s screen personae – Rajan, Raja, Rohit, Rajesh and Ravi appear to be favourites.

In Bobby, twenty-one-year-old Rishi Kapoor plays a love-besotted teenager. Not only did Raj Kapoor choose a name that resembled his own, he forged a screen persona for his son that would fit him like a glove for over two decades.

Love in this film is an end in itself for the irredeemably romantic, often star-crossed, young lover. Love for this baby-faced hero is the highest ideal, worth crashing the barriers of class, caste and religion, and even dying for. In this modern-day Indian avatar of Romeo and Juliet with a Kapoorian twist, Rishi is rich, handsome, young and a Hindu. Dimple Kapadia is also young, sensuously beautiful, but poor and Catholic.

This new romantic pair who embodied youth and zest captured the imagination of the Indian audience. The duo was like a breath of fresh air because both were acting their ages. Well, almost: Dimple Kapadia was 15 and Rishi was 20 going on 18. Until then, actors well into their 20s and even 30s like Dharmendra and Jeetendra were acting as collage boys and dancing around trees.

Mera Naam Joker, which preceded Bobby, had been a colossal flop. Raj Kapoor had put all his money and much of himself in what he hoped would be his magnum opus. Its failure hit him and his family hard: the Kapoor coffers emptied and his indomitable spirit hit an all-time low.

Bobby was a make-or-break film for him. He discarded his old aesthetics, even his grammar of cinema, turning a new chapter with a measure of violence. The film had to be about youth and for the youth. He had to get the young into the cinema halls with something new. ‘Modern’ became the new mantra. The film had to look different. The Kapoor palette changed.

As did Rishi Kapoor. He became, as film journalist and rediff.com columnist Dinesh Raheja writes on rediff.com, a ‘male kitsch fashion plate of the 70s Bollywood’s. In Bobby, he wears outsize sunglasses, more appropriate for aviators than teenyboppers. His clothes are incredibly loud and quite over the top: blue, strawberry or wine-coloured bell-bottom trousers, even velvet flares. He sports striped shorts and shirts with blue and lavender stripes.

Since Rishi Kapoor was portraying a rebel who defies his arrogant and rich father, he is also fitted out in a black leather jacket and gloves. Zipping up his metallic zipper with a forceful gesture comes across as an act of defiance. Raj Kapoor usually recognised the signposts of change and had an uncanny knack of picking up trends before other cineastes. He also accessorised his son with a motor scooter that had inordinately long metal handles and mirrors on both sides that could reflect his son’s face. The reviving scooter symbolised youth, energy and modernity—and the macho male.

Bhanu Athaiya, the costume designer who was later awarded an Oscar for her work in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, designed Dimple Kapadia’s wardrobe. Bobby (Dimple Kapadia) is a fisherman’s daughter but she wears Western clothes that appealed to the emerging middle-class youth culture -– blouses tied high above the waist, mini, orange bikinis, her trademark polka-dot Ellie May short blouse and the flowing scarves with which she tied her glorious ponytail (yet to acquire its crowning glory state). Actresses till then did wear trousers and ‘modern’ dresses but they were more for ‘hippy’ women like Asha Parekh than for hip youngsters.

‘Bhanu Athaiya elevated definitions of style bringing middle-class hipness [sic] to a new level, making youthful sexiness and rebellious looks daringly acceptable. It was savvy exploitation of nubile flesh draped in occidental clothes, an update from the more indigenous exploration of Padmini’s blouse-less sari-draped body in Mera Naam Joker.

Was modernity only skin-deep, or dress-deep, in Bobby? The film certainly made teenage rebellion fashionable. But ultimately the film is quintessential Raj Kapoor. The Rishi Kapoor character is a rebel, but with a cause. A socialist heart beats here: after all the film is scripted by K A Abbas. Rishi Kapoor turns against his capitalist father and wants to marry a girl from the other end of the social spectrum Her father is a fisherman, marvelously portrayed by a garrulous Premnath. Pran is impressive as Rishi’s father, and you can’t help thinking of Veronica’s father in Archie comics -- Raj Kapoor’s favourite staple reading material. Photographs of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi hang on the walls of Raja’s bedroom.

Bobby has more action than Raj Kapoor’s earlier films. The two lovers run away on the motorcycle. And after being chased for a long time, finally jump off a cliff into the sea. Had Raj Kapoor gone with his original ending the credits would have begun rolling at this point. But the resemblance to Romeo and Juliet ends here. After much prevarication he opted for a happy ending: the pair is rescued by their fathers. In a delicious twist to the tale, Premnath saves Rishi Kapoor and Pran saves Dimple Kapadia. In the end it is love-all and all’s well that ends well, like another Shakespearean play.

There was mass hysteria when Bobby was first released in 1973, with teenagers sporting shirts with Bobby written on them. The actor was mobbed like a rock star.

But more importantly, the Raja character in Bobby soon became a blueprint for many of Rishi Kapoor’s subsequent roles. It wasn’t just the fair and lovely babyish face with its pair of lovelorn eyes: unlike his father’s famous blue eyes that flashed intensity and passion, his brown eye radiated puppy-love, warmth and sensitivity. An air of innocence and credibility followed him like a halo. He effortlessly became the character on screen, getting under its skin without the overload of method acting.

Baptised as a singing and dancing romantic hero by his director-father, this scion of the Kapoor khandaan had love as his mission in life. Rebellion had to do with reasons of love, not state.