Raj Kapoor@100: The Woman's Director

Dinesh Raheja views Raj Kapoor's cinema through his women, while celebrating his birth centenary on December 14.

In Raj Kapoor's swan song, Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), the distraught female protagonist Ganga has just had her sari torn from her by a roomful of lecherous men and been forced to perform the title song when the room is rent by the cries of her baby.

Ganga rushes to soothe her child before bitterly resuming the song. This has even the villains casting their eyes downwards and looking shame-faced.

There's a similar scene in Kapoor's directorial breakthrough, Barsaat (1949). A depressed Kapoor is pushed into the company of a seductive prostitute by his rakish friend (Premnath).

His angry contempt for her profession is met with stoicism until she hears her child wail inside her hovel. She runs to the ailing baby, and a remorseful Kapoor empties his wallet next to her feet, which he touches as a mark of respect.

The above two films in Raj Kapoor's oeuvre are 35 years apart, but Kapoor's cinema consistently commented on the place of women in society in a sensitive, humanistic manner.

Not only did the 10 films directed by Raj Kapoor have great roles for women, but they also portrayed emotions from the female perspective.

Yes, Kapoor's famously male gaze often projected his leading ladies as sensuous objects of desire, particularly in the way Zeenat Aman and Mandakini were outfitted in Satyam Shivam Sundaram and Ram Teri Ganga Maili.

The woman below a waterfall can feel like an all-too-familiar visual idiom in the Kapoor aesthetic.

However, what is also true is that women were primarily portrayed in his films as human beings deserving of respect and sympathy. Kapoor approached cinema from a humanitarian outlook which demanded that he take into account the feminine point of view in his films' themes.

And the director sharpened his focus as the times grew more progressive. Ram Teri Ganga Maili and Barsaat serve as effective bookends to Kapoor's career because both films are about mountain maids losing their innocence, but the film-maker's vision had evolved.

Barsaat earned Kapoor a place on the table alongside the great directors of the Golden Age of Hindi cinema.

To be sure, Barsaat pivots around its two leading ladies (Nargis and Nimmi) who play pahadi women living in the mountains but who fall in love with rich city gents (Raj Kapoor and Premnath).

Significantly, Shankar Jaikishan's superhit soundtrack had 10 songs of which an incredible nine featured Lata Mangeshkar and seven were female solos.

But the struggles of the characters played by Nargis and Nimmi is depicted through the prism of their times.

Ganga (Mandakini) is much more proactive against her travails.

Firstly, Kapoor shows her as having the agency to propose marriage to the man she loves (Rajiv Kapoor), and to boldly declare her love while singing Sun Sahiba Sun by asserting 'Koi Haseena Kadam Pehle Badhati Nahin, Majboori Dil Se Na Ho'.

And later an intrepid Ganga symbolically sets out on a thousand-mile journey across India to locate her husband and obtain her son's legitimate rights.

Kapoor's films in the 1970s and 1980s enforced his reputation as a 'Woman's director'. In Prem Rog (1982), the director defied prevailing beliefs about the place and position of a widow in our society.

Son Randhir Kapoor says his father narrated the kernel of the film's story as the relationship between a young widow and the patriarch of the family she is married into.

Sure enough, the film centres around teenaged Manorama (Padmini Kolhapure) and her victimisation by outdated practices after her husband's death.

Rishi Kapoor is the silent lover who battles for her dignity. And Shammi Kapoor is the head of her family who finally re-evaluates his worldview to accommodate a more progressive stand which supports Manorama's remarriage.

Whether it is Prem Rog's Yeh Galiyan Yeh Chaubara or the title songs of Ram Teri Ganga Maili and Satyam Shivam Sundaram, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Lata Mangeshkar's voice articulated the soul of Kapoor's films.

She represents Kapoor's longest collaboration with any creative entity, male or female. Lata's voice is absent only in Mera Naam Joker (1970) because the two dynamos fell out over Lata's displeasure at being persuaded to sing Sangam's naughty ditty, Main Kya Karoon Ram.

Lata's omnipresence in most of Kapoor's film soundtracks is indicative not only of the respect he accorded the singer but also of the importance he gave to conveying his films' keynote concerns through musical numbers filmed on his leading ladies.

This is perhaps never more evident than in Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978) in which Kapoor employs various songs to capture a conventionally disadvantaged woman's search for her romantic idyll.

Roopa (Zeenat Aman) is rejected by her husband because of her scarred face but courted by him when she covers her face and identity and sings like an angel.

Though only partly successful creatively, Kapoor bravely posited, through Roopa, the idea that romantic love is based on forging an emotional connect, not on a woman's physical beauty.

The many vagaries of love were also explored by Kapoor in Bobby (1973), which boasted of the leading lady playing the title role.

When Kapoor was casting for Bobby, he was on the back foot. Mera Naam Joker had just flopped spectacularly and his career as an actor was over.

But Kapoor's reputation as a director was still unassailable and then superstar Rajesh Khanna was willing to headline an RK film.

Instead, Kapoor chose to start Bobby and cast his novice son Rishi Kapoor opposite another newcomer Dimple Kapadia much against the advice of close associates.

But Dimple proved to be a diamond in the rough, adept at portraying young love with unusual depth and intensity. She became the blockbuster film's biggest sensation.

Even when Kapoor directed himself in his earlier classics, the female roles were always central to the story.

In Sangam (1964), when both the heroes (Kapoor and Rajendra Kumar) seek to resolve the romantic triangle by sacrificing their love, the furious leading lady (Vyjayanthimala) stands up for herself and explodes: 'Tumhein kisne haq diya hai ke tum donon milke meri zindagi ka faisla karo?'

A strong woman with unwavering morals, maybe a bit over-idealised, was what Nargis also played so effectively in both Shri 420 (1955) and Awara (1951).

Shri 420 was but a battle between the conflicting influences exerted over Kapoor's protagonist by two women, the symbolically named Vidya (Nargis) and the tellingly named Maya (Nadira) by whom Kapoor is temporarily dazzled.

In Awara, made early in the post-Independence period, proto-feminist ideas coloured Kapoor's artistic vision when he presented Nargis as Rita, a lawyer who defends the criminal leading man Raj (Kapoor) in court.

Ram aspires to Rita's love and respect. He literally ascends up a flight of stairs in a cloudy sky to meet her in the song Ghar Aaya Mere Pardesi.

She represents his dream, she's the centre of his attraction, his guide, his directing principle.

Perhaps the last sentence can be said for Kapoor's relationship with all his female characters. The woman was the pole star of Raj Kapoor's cinema.