Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:01  

September 7 2012, the Harvard Film Archive screened Mr. 420. This is the recording of the introduction by HFA Programmer David Pendleton, Meena Hewett and film scholar Samir Dayal.

David Pendleton  0:20  

–India is a really remarkable center for filmmaking because there's not just an Indian film industry, there are many different Indian film industries, and what we see in this country tends to be just the tip of the iceberg. And so I think that the knowledge of someone like Raj Kapoor is indispensable for understanding contemporary Hindi cinema, particularly the commercial end of it, sometimes known as “Bollywood,” although that term continues to be a controversial one. And even for those of you who are not familiar with contemporary Indian Hindi cinema, I think he also serves as a useful figure for contextualizing Satyajit Ray who is the filmmaker whose career by and large overlapped his, who comes from a very different context as a very different kind of filmmaker. So it helps to give you a sense of the breadth of Indian cinema.

Except for the last two films in the program, which we're showing next Sunday, all of the films are being presented– Well, the last two films are being presented digitally. All the rest of them, including tonight's film, are recently struck 35 millimeter prints. The program is in fact a touring package. And when I saw that we would have the opportunity to present the best known films of Raj Kapoor in 35 millimeter prints, I leapt at the opportunity. I should also point out that the start time for—not this Sunday—but next Sunday's matinee is 4pm. Both of them are starting at 4pm. The poster announces 4:30 for Jagte Raho; it's actually [4:00].

I want to thank the people responsible for putting together the touring package. First and foremost, Noah Cowan, who is the artistic director of the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. TIFF stands for the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Lightbox is their year-round cinematheque that's run by the festival. And the tour itself was organized by the festival in conjunction with the International Indian Film Academy, who collaborated with Kapoor's production company RK Films—that still exists—with the support of the Government of Ontario to select the films, to make the new prints and then to tour them throughout North America. For its presentation here, I especially want to thank Harvard South Asia Initiative. We previously collaborated with them just over a year ago, in the spring of 2011, when the South Asia Initiative sponsored a visit to Harvard, by two great stars of the Indian cinema, Sharmila Tagore and Soha Ali Khan, her daughter. We at the HFA organized the film screenings that were part of this visit, and I think we felt on both sides of the collaboration, that the collaboration was not only successful, but actually enjoyable, which is not always the case, but we're happy to be working with them again. And so I wanted to thank those individuals at the South Asia Initiative who helped with this program. That would be Jenny Bordo, Programming and Outreach Officer; Meena Hewett, Associate Director for the South Asia Initiative; and Nora Maginn, the Program Coordinator.

Just two final notes before I turn it over to our other speakers… Tonight’s film is three-hours long, in the grand Hindi tradition, and the print does indicate an interval about halfway through, so we'll take a seven to eight minute pause at that point. And finally, please make sure, if you have any electronic devices only that might make any noise or shed any light, please make sure that those are turned off. Please don't text while in the theater. If you need to text please do so outside or wait till the interval.

And now to introduce tonight's special speaker, I have the great pleasure to introduce the associate director for the South Asia Initiative whose name I just mentioned, Meena Hewett. Please thank Mina, by the way, for her support.

[APPLAUSE] 

Meena Hewett  4:04  

Thank you, David, for giving us the opportunity to co-sponsor this event. Just pardon my appearance but rain or shine we wanted to get here. So here I am. And just a brief note about the South Asia Initiative. We are a university-wide unit that brings [together] different schools here at Harvard, bringing our faculty and students who are working on issues related to South Asia together to think of multidisciplinary ways of addressing various issues that the region addresses and faces. We have six topical areas that we're focusing on largely: it’s urbanization, social enterprise, South Asia without borders, which mostly focus on the arts, culture, the humanities. We focus on water and climate change. And then lastly, we focus on Muslim societies in South Asia. So those are our focus areas and what we do with these areas is we identify faculty—whether they're from the School of Public Health or someone from the urbanization school, like the Design School. For example, we just had a seminar on Tuesday that focused on Mumbai toilets. And we had students and faculty from the School of Public Health who went and studied one of the slum dwellings in Mumbai and looked at the conditions of toilets and how it's affecting the public health of people who live there. But also what were the issues that were affecting the successful use and operation of the toilets. And simultaneously, we had a faculty Rahul Mehrotra from the GSD, who has designed toilets in one of the slum dwellings in Mumbai. And he was talking about the design perspective and what works and why it works. And so it was a very interesting synergy between these two different schools, different disciplines looking at a common problem. So that's sort of, in brief, what South Asia Initiative does. And with that, I want to move on because as we know, it's a three-hour movie.

I'd like to introduce Samir Dayal who I have known personally as well. I met him first through our daughters who go to the same school, but I remember him coming over to our house and avidly talking about Slumdog Millionaire, and he was so animated, and he felt so passionately about the movie. But it was also in another vein, where everyone was thinking that it was such a great movie. Samir had some very serious thoughts about why it wasn't necessarily that great a movie. But Samir is the Associate Professor of English at the Bentley College, and he is the author of Resisting Modernity: Counternarratives of Nation and Masculinity. He is also co-editor, with Margueritte Murphy, of Global Babel: Interdisciplinarity Transnationalism and the Discourses of Globalization. And I believe it looks at globalization not just from an economic perspective, but also uses the cultural perspective on understanding problems that come with globalization. Samir is very interested in studies of South Asia, for example, very interested in popular culture and the movies. And he's currently working on a book on Indian cinema as well as global cinema. So with that, please welcome Samir Dayal.

[APPLAUSE]

Samir Dayal  7:45  

Thank you, Meena. I'd like to begin by thanking the South Asia Initiative and the Toronto International Film Festival for making this retrospective possible. Personal thanks to Meena especially, but also to David Pendleton, Nora Maginn, Jenny Bordo, Amy Reese, and others who have provided invaluable organizational support.

Raj Kapoor (1924 to 1988) was one of the leading lights of Hindi cinema during its golden age from about 1940 through the 1960s. He was born in what became Pakistan after Indian independence and partition in 1947. He won many awards including nine Filmfare Awards, two nominations for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and one of India's highest honors, the Padma Bhushan. He was honored with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for contributions to Indian cinema. So legendary was his stature at the end of his career, that the Wikipedia entry on Kapoor, even today, tells a tale apocryphal and melodramatic enough to make a Hindi film director blush. That Wikipedia entry suggests that Kapoor died at the very moment that the Phalke Award was being conferred on him by the President.

Kapoor was no isolated genius. He came from and occupied an important place in the First Family of Indian cinema, and in the world's largest film industry, sometimes producing as many as 900 films a year. His father was the eminent Prithviraj Kapoor. His siblings, Shashi Kapoor and Shammi Kapoor, were major film stars. His children, Rishi Kapoor and Randhir Kapoor, and grandchildren Karisma Kapoor and Kareena Kapoor have been significant presences on the silver screen. Suddenly, he became an icon in his own right, but before that, he was a member of the activist Indian People's Theatre Association, IPTA, formed in 1942, five years before independence. Theatrical instincts and deep ideological commitments, convictions developed in his collaboration with the IPTA, would inform all his work in the cinema.

Although he began in the movies as a humble clapper boy, Kapoor became the paradigmatic auteur. A major director and head of his own studio RK Films and a mega star in other people's films, he enjoyed considerable artistic freedom. He oversaw every detail of the process of filming, including music for which he had a natural ability and talent. This talent remains unusual even among directors of Indian films, with a few exceptions, such as the great Satyajit Ray.

Not only did Kapoor help define Indian cinema’s generic rules, but he also tested their limits in ways few directors could get away with. In Barsaat (Rain,1949), for example, there are two paired shots—and I think these are really brilliant pairings—two paired shots of different women sensually caressing their lovers feet. But in both cases, the gestures signify in complex ways. They are neither merely erotic nor simply submissive.

In other films, Kapoor was even more provocative, presenting female actors in very revealing costume, and in one case, nude. This is really extraordinary if you think about Indian cinema. But the eroticism was never gratuitous. His films were innovative and daring, situated at the crossroads between popular and parallel cinema. His technical achievements and staging, music, picturisation and his interrogations of received social mores, even in an early film such as Awaara (Vagabond 1951), remain cinematic touchstones. When he visited the Soviet Union in 1954, for the release of Awaara there, Kapoor was lionized as Tovarishch Brodyaga, or “Comrade Vagabond.” His films are popular in other parts of the world too, including the Middle East, Africa and China. Boris Yeltsin and Mao Zedong were reputed to have been able to hum melodies from Kapoor’s films… at least at breakfast.

One of the benefits of this retrospective is that it can allow us to seek continuities as well as developments, obsessions, but also contradictions. By way of an introduction, then, I'd like to draw your attention to a few of these continuities and tensions in Kapoor's work as director. One could begin with Aag (Fire, 1948), Kapoor's directorial debut from the very first year after independence. The metaphor of Aag as desire’s fire, reappears in Barsaat. Aag also introduced the persona of the underdog clown or tramp that would burgeoned into perhaps Kapoor's central motif, not to mention the actual term Awaara, which would become the title and pivotal theme of the film Awaara three years later.

In addition to such thematic vectors, continuity is also threaded through Kapoor’s films more subtly. For instance, a song from Awaara reappears twenty-eight years later, as a melody played by the wedding band at Roopa’s wedding in Satyam Shivam Sundaram, 1979, creating a musical link between films with related clusters of themes. In Mera Naam Joker (Call Me Joker, 1971), one the women who loves the protagonist Raju, reminds him of an old song, again from Awaara. But in this film, Kapoor also goes a step further. In extraordinary fantasy sequences, he interpolates actual snippets from his own earlier films, particularly Shree 420 (Mr. 420, 1955), thus conjuring a visual intertextuality with Mera Naam Joker. This intertextuality is not just adventitious. Although presented in Mera Naam Joker through fantasy interludes, the song and dance sequences comment on the diegesis, supplementing or embellishing it. Indeed in all Kapoor’s films, the fantasy sequences taken individually are units of considerable interest, some quite brilliant. Particularly impressive of the title song sequences in Awaara, and “Mera Juta Hai Japani”—which you will see tonight—the famous ditty from Shree 420.

Music, then, and the fantasy sequences more generally are important connective threads in Kapoor’s oeuvre. Tracing these threads is not just a significant obsession. It connects communities of ordinary fans, many of whom avidly consume popular Hindi films and songs as moveable feasts and related passions. It is also a pleasure that we can participate during this retrospective. Often the song sequences are consumed as independent segments as songs and video clips by Hindi film fans. And as with most popular film soundtracks, the songs are played individually on the air or distributed legally and illegally. The credit for the musical and dance elements however, must go less to the director and more to singers, lyricists, set designers and choreographers—including Lata Mangeshkar, Mukesh, Asha Bhosle, Manna Dey, Hasrat Jaipuri, the Russian Madame Simkie and especially Shankar Jaikishan.

But the art in Kapoor's artifice should not be given short shrift. Among his most unwavering commitments was to craft [in] the art of cinema. And these commitments are also filaments of continuity throughout his career. Kapoor’s art direction can be astonishingly inventive. One of the most remarkable examples occurs in Satyam Shivam Sundaram, for which he created an entire waterfall, complete with rocks and pool on his own estate in Loni. There is also a tremendous flood in the film, one of the most believable in Indian cinema, in part because there was a real and devastating deluge that almost submerged the set. Undeterred, Kapoor insisted on incorporating the flood into the mise-en-scène, capitalizing on what today's journalists might have called a “perfect storm” of events.

Kapoor’s films often promote the social value of art. In Aag, painting and the theater of forms of art at the very core of the film, which Kapoor wants us to see as a work of art about art. Barsaat similarly foregrounds the power of music. The protagonist Pran plays a melody on his violin that irresistibly draws Reshma to him at the risk of scandal from a very traditional father's home across the lake. This popular melody is also what reunites the lovers after a forced separation.

Though lighting, costume and special effects are important in Kapoor's directorial repertoire, music as a form of art enjoys pride of place, not just as a neurological function, but also as an auratic function. If Kapoor can be called an artistic author, he is equally a didactic director. His cinema is a cinema of ideas. Kapoor's early black and white work constitutes an homage to the Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica, and recalls Orson Welles and Frank Capra. Several of his films also evoke German Expressionist cinema, but also gesture towards Fellini's La Strada. One of his most enduring commitments was to a social pedagogy, and cultural commentary encoded in the very entertainment his films consciously pervade. His films’ popularity and tendency to melodramatic access should not occlude, but rather highlight the trademark yoking of the two contradictory ambitions: entertainment and public education. This was a defining challenge not only for Kapoor’s films, but also for the whole subcategory of the Hindi social, something I have written about elsewhere. Kapoor blends burlesque with a deep concern with issues of class and the legal system in Awaara, or in Boot Polish, 1954. Other films turned on a denunciation of political corruption and gender hypocrisy, as in Ram Teri Ganga Maili (Ram, Your Ganga is Polluted, 1985), while also cramming the plot with song and dance attractions.

But his most effective vehicle for social commentary remained his carefully cultivated underdog persona as an Indian Charlie Chaplin, a counterpart of the trickster figure or the Shakespearean fool, an outsider within the culture, who speaks the truth that might otherwise be unpalatable, or difficult to express. This motif and figure was the durable linchpin of Kapoor’s oeuvre, beginning with the vagabond or savage of Awaara, but also finding successive incarnations in the mischievous and eponymous tramp of Shree 420, or the tragic clown of Mera Naam Joker. Significantly Mera Naam Joker, which was a box office flop when first released, went on to become not only the most profitable film of his studio RK Films, but it also remained the director’s own favorite film.

Kapoor is not satisfied just to comment on the mundane and sometimes unpleasant reality. He also wants to offer a simulacrum of what is elusive in that reality: love, beauty, happiness, and pleasure. It is this tension that animates the brilliant dream sequence in Awaara, but also the dramatic conflict of Satyam Shivam Sundaram introducing Zeenat Aman. This beautiful actress plays the role of an unfortunate woman Rupa, whose face is horribly disfigured by a burn. Her lover, played by Shashi Kapoor, is confronted with an almost Socratic phenomenological conundrum. How can a woman be both blessed with a beautiful voice and cursed with such inauspicious deformity, evidently the stigmata of divine displeasure? Kapoor asks his viewers to re-examine their received ideas of beauty and fate. But the real psychological interest of this conceit emerges when, with a kind of perversity Hitchcock might have savored, the hero disavows the reality and insists on superimposing his fantasy on the reality, hallucinating a perfectly formed Rupa—with whom he has trysts under the waterfall—whose name could be translated as beautiful, but also as form while rejecting the deformed, but real Rupa, who is already his wife. It's really quite crazy.

Given his commitment to social realism, it is no surprise that capoeira is obsessed with class. Thus, in Barsaat, Kapoor highlights class differences to dramatize the conflict between village and city, the local and the cosmopolitan, but also their cohabitation in Indian modernity. Similarly, in Awaara, class struggle is refracted as the main impediment to the love between the main characters. It is also an analogue for the dialectical opposition between indigenous cultural identity and Western influences. Mera Naam Joker, too, turns on the problematic of class difference, Raju is the son of a circus clown who inherits his father's profession. Playing the clown himself, Kapoor delivers a social critique about the lies society is founded on and the lies that ordinary Indians must live to struggle against poverty and hunger. Raju admits lying to gain entry into the circus where he's employed, and his testimony is deeply moving to the Soviet visitors to the circus. He is found guilty of being humane. We might say then that Kapoor's broadest commitment is to being thus guilty of humanity. Plus difference is sometimes imbricated with ethnic or even racial difference, as in the blockbuster Bobby, 1973, where a rich Hindu business man's son falls in love with a servant's Goan Christian granddaughter. Similarly, in Mera Naam Joker, the eponymous Joker falls in love serially with three women from different class ethnic or racial backgrounds, including a North Indian Christian, and even a Russian woman. Hilariously, but meaningfully, Raju, the Indian Joker is mistaken for a Russian. Kapoor pointedly uses this device to communicate his message of transnational solidarity in a time when postcolonial India's Nehruvian orientation was more to the Soviet Union than to the United States. This no doubt contributed to Kapoor’s being welcomed in the Soviet Union as “Comrade Vagabond.”

Another important cluster of topoi in Kapoor's films emerges as complex representations of masculinity and femininity in the new India. His images of the modern Indian male and explorations of relationships between men—and one critic has called these relationships “homosocial,” not homosexual. These are structurally critical in the films, the rake and the sincere lover, the law abiding citizen versus the vagabond.

Kapoor’s representation of women was, if anything, more complicated, sometimes approximating a protofeminist sensitivity, but in other moments verging on sexual objectification, or prurience. Indeed, one critic suggests that Kapoor manifested the carnality of a schoolboy. He did seem to delight in tempting the censor with his highly sexualized representations of women in a range of films. Yet his broader ambition was to interrogate social institutions and arrangements such as marriage, patriarchy, the dysfunctional family, and the policing of sexuality. In Mera Naam Joker, for instance, he introduces the character of Meena as a single woman who must masquerade as a boy to protect herself from a misogynist and patriarchal culture. But the most complicated female presence in Kapoor’s work and life was always Nargis, the actor with whom he had an intense on and off screen relationship.

This retrospective, which incidentally looks forward to the approaching 25th anniversary of Kapoor's passing, promises to be a treat for cinephiles and lovers of Indian cinema, but also a fascinating cultural introduction to others. Tonight's film is Shree 420. The title derives originally from section 420 of the Indian Penal Code, under which felonies such as theft and deception are prosecuted. In common parlance, though, this number has become a catchphrase referring to any kind of mischief. Generically, then, this is another manifestation of the wise, tragic or otherwise complicated clown figure that was so dear to the director’s heart. For Kapoor, this fool taught laughter, not against life, but for and with life. In this spirit, I hope you will enjoy this film and the rest of the retrospective. Now on with the show. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

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