Within his short lifespan of 63 years, Raj Kapoor left behind an incredible cinematic legacy.
Dinesh Raheja continues celebrating Raj Kapoor's birth centenary by looking at seven sequences from his films that have defined Hindi cinema.
Barsaat: The Love Call of the Violin
The heart-thumping immediacy of Raj Kapoor-Nargis' love scenes span the 14 films they acted in together.
Barsaat (1949) is a love story between a simple pahadi girl Reshma (Nargis) who falls for a 'pardesi' Pran (Kapoor).
He is a sensitive soul and believes in true love but grows insecure when his worldly friend (Premnath) mockingly predicts that his love story will fail against parental pressure.
Pran plaintively plays the violin which carries over the mountains to Reshma's home. She comes running and falls at his feet in an ardent avowal of her love.
But Pran is a demanding lover. He plays fervently at night-time too, continuing even when he cuts his fingers on the strings of his violin.
It's a test.
Will she acknowledge the primacy of love over all else?
Reshma is hard put to avoid her parents but finally abandons caution and flees to him. She kisses his bleeding fingers and, in an imaginatively angled shot, swoons in his arms.
This image from Barsaat went on to become the famous RK Films logo with a silhouetted man holding a violin in one hand and a swooning woman in the other. It can be seen at the start of every Kapoor film thereafter.
Awara: The Boat, the Beach, the Slap
One of Hindi cinema's most resonant passion play is in the Awara seaside sequence.
Childhood friends Raj (Kapoor) and Rita (Nargis) reconnect with joy as adults.
However, she is a lawyer and he hides from her the fact that he has become a criminal.
Their outlook is different (she sees the moon in the sky, he notices the dark clouds) but their passion overrides it all on a frolicsome trip to the beach.
While changing, she warns him to behave like a gentleman ('shareef'). When he counters that he is not one, she jokingly calls him 'junglee'. This unwittingly hits home. He twists her arm and brutishly slaps her repeatedly, asking 'Junglee hoon? Awara hoon?'
Her unflinching love leads to his lament: 'Kise maroon, tumhe ya apne aap ko?'
He's torn by self-hatred; angry at the sordid truth of his shameful secret.
The scene cuts to a boat and the love song Dum Bhar Jo Udhar Munh Phere.
At the song's end, Nargis stands on one end of the rocking boat and warns: 'Ek kadam bhi aage badhaya toh kashti ulat kar doob jayegi' before declaring, 'Doob jaane do'.
A directorial triumph for Raj Kapoor, the sequence captures the reckless quality of Rita's love for a man with outsize issues, and indeed of all love before and since.
Shri 420: The Ultimate Seduction, The Ultimate Betrayal
The Raj-Nargis romances resonated with audiences, so their break-up scene in Shri 420 almost rocked the world off its axis.
Shri 420 is a morality tale in which Kapoor's protagonist Raj is torn between the conflicting charms of the virtuous Vidya (Nargis) who is content with his earning Rs 45 at his job at a laundry, and Maya (Nadira) who gives him access to easy but ill-gotten gains.
On Diwali night, Raj excitedly brings Vidya to a swanky night club where he has started making money as a professional gambler and by pretending to be a prince.
But Vidya is repelled by the lies and deception. When she leaves in a huff, Raj chases after her till he is stopped by his boss and by Maya who tellingly breaks into Mud Mud Ke Na Dekh.
Raj folds like a pack of cards. Without a backward glance at Vidya, he joins in the merriment and sings and dances.
It's the ultimate seduction, matched by the ultimate betrayal.
Kapoor's tragicomic tramp became an allegory for the citizens of a newly Independent India who now had the freedom to choose their path for the future.
Sangam: A Letter Fractures A Man And His Marriage
Sundar (Raj Kapoor) is bent over double, crawling on his hands and knees, furtively collecting scraps of paper discarded by his wife Radha (Vyjayantimala). The scraps are from a love letter written to his wife by an unknown ex.
With directorial flair, Kapoor visually presents to the viewer how love, possessiveness and fierce jealousy have reduced the brave air force officer to this act of self humiliation.
This tense sequence begins when Radha coquettishly asks her husband to choose a piece of jewellery from her cupboard. As he does so, a letter flutters loose.
Kapoor frames his composition so that Radha watches in her vanity mirror with escalating panic and horror as her husband reads aloud the love letter from her ex.
Vyjayantimala's expression pointedly conveys that she knows her world is crumbling around her.
For Sundar, his wife Radha and he inhabited a hermetically sealed romantic world that had room for just the two of them. But now a shadow has entered in the form of an ex-admirer of his wife.
Despite her desperate pleas and avowals of love, he can't let go of the past. This well-conceived scene is the dramatic pivot of the film.
Mera Naam Joker: Death Doesn't Stop The Show From Going On
Raj Kapoor's quasi-autobiographical epic that famously tanked at the time of its release, Mera Naam Joker veers choose to self parody and melodrama at times but has benefited from subsequent re-assessment.
It has the entertainer playing Raju, a clown who hides his circus job from his mother because the circus had claimed the life of his father. His mother learns of his secret, however, and collapses when she sees him perform on the trapeze.
In a poignant sequence, a distraught Raju comes off stage to learn that his beloved mother has been declared dead. And in the very next minute, he hears the cue for him to reappear on stage. Heartbroken, he remains rooted by his mother till his boss (Dharmendra) announces that the hansta gaata Raju will indeed be on stage next.
The joker goes on stage and executes the emotional cartwheels necessary to perform pranks and make his audience laugh. His boss reminds him of the age-old showbiz adage: The show must go on.
Kapoor stayed true to this belief when he overcame the failure of the film as well as the end of his career as a leading man by bouncing back big with his next directorial venture, Bobby.
Bobby: Mujhse dosti karoge?
At the age of 49, Raj Kapoor got a creative facelift. For the first time, he didn't cast himself as his film's protagonist. Instead, the director chose two newcomers, son Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia, and turned them into overnight sensations with Bobby (1973), a young love story set against the clashing ideologies of the rich and poor.
The couple's first conversation is one of the most memorable meet-cutes in the rom-com universe.
Poor little rich kid Raja (Rishi Kapoor) goes to visit his childhood governess. He is enchanted when the door is opened by a stunning beauty (Dimple Kapadia), the very girl who he had earlier fallen in love with at first glimpse. She has been cooking so she absently runs her hand through her hair leaving a streak of besan. He is entranced.
By the time his governess has finished fussing over him, the girl has returned. She cleans up well!
'I am Bobby. Mujhse dosti karoge?' she invites, as she sits cross-legged on the arm-rest of a chair, revealing a long, bare pair of legs.
The country's young male populace surged forward, but Rajesh Khanna had beaten them to it and was already married to Dimple by the time the film released. It didn't stop this scene or the film from going down in cinematic history.
Ram Teri Ganga Maili: When The Woman Proposes
Kapoor continued to couch caustic social comment amidst young love stories even in the action-dominated 1980s. He helmed his final film, Ram Teri Ganga Maili, with a lead character who was in step with the times.
Like flint and stone, like match and tinder, city-bred Naren (Rajiv Kapoor) and nàive mountain maid Ganga (Mandakini) share an instant fiery connection. Their courtship ritual is starkly different with Ganga taking the lead and kissing his freezing nose.
When her brother fixes her match to another, Ganga asserts 'Usse maine toh nahin choona' and straight up proposes to Naren. She is emboldened by a tradition in their mountain community that allows women to choose their groom on one full moon night every year. Naren acquiesces and they hug.
This leads to Ganga sealing the deal by declaring it to all in the chartbuster song Sun Sahiba Sun in which she tells Naren, 'Karle Qubool Mujhe Hoga Bada Punn'.
At the age of 61, Kapoor's creative license didn't need renewal.
