THE dancers in white perform against the backdrop of a clover-shaped archway and what looks like a suspension bridge, as they stand on the ledges of a cylindrical tower before descending a steep incline into a thick cloud of smoke. Cameraman Radhu Karmakar uses this waist-deep cloud, created with dry ice, throughout the duration of the song. The set had a near-3D effect. Hitherto, mostly painted backdrops were used for sets.
After this intro of about eighty seconds, the camera picks out Rita (Nargis) in a flowing robe on a desolate full-moon night. She is standing next to a pillar atop a staircase. As the camera focuses on Rita and the staircase via a tilt-up, the rhythm is momentarily broken at around ninety-five seconds into the introductory piece to the song, from where the prelude to the song starts. Rita, sitting on the steps, dressed like a Greek Goddess, emotes to Lata Mangeshkar’s ‘Tere bina aag yeh chandni’. She is pining for her lover and her body language is theatrical and stylized, probably intentionally, in sync with the track’s theme.
Just after ‘Tere bina’, in an abrupt contrast, there emerges a giant demon with vampire teeth and scary eyes. Raj Kapoor’s hands whip up to his head, as he wrenches his face away from the horrible reality – a life of poverty and rejection. As Manna Dey’s wail reaches a crescendo, Raj Kapoor turns and flees from the ugliness of his troubled childhood, past the dancing flames of fiery death, skulls, and away from skeletal hands rising from the ground. Lyricist Shailendra’s message is unabashedly romantic, an expression denouncing the gifts of materialism through unfair means – ‘I don’t want this hell. I want love,’ pleads the Awara. Raj is a thief by profession but the money from his misdeeds can’t even buy him bahaar. This ninety-second Manna Dey track has but six lines of lyrics, but his plaintive moan lends the sequence an almost serrated chill. ‘Yeh nahi hai yeh nahi hai zindagi’ was Manna Dey’s first-ever playback for Raj Kapoor.
Cut to Raj coming out of the nightmare into white smoke and a massive bust of the trinity – Brahma, Vishnu and Maheswar. The medley swings to ‘Om namah Shivaya’, a verse that would become the signature scene (with Prithviraj Kapoor praying) of every subsequent RK film. The chanting of ‘Om namah Shivaya’ bridges hell with heaven and Lata sings the anthemic ‘Ghar aaya mera pardesi’.
Raj crawls up the celestial stairway to find Rita skipping downstairs and offering him a hand. The mandolin prelude by David, a Goan musician, has over the years become easily identifiable as the introductory music and has featured in remixes quite prominently. Multiple rows of musicians played cowbells to support the mandolin. The backdrop now captures trees lit up with blinking lights and Rita entreating him to not leave her. In the first of the two codas, Rita and Raj dissolve into thin air at the foot of a giant Nataraja. The sequence signs off on a reality check. It shows a giant Jagga (K.N. Singh), Raj’s foster father, towering over a puny Raj.
Awara has been analysed as a film and for its medley. We would rather laud the director, art director and choreographer for their attention to detail in its picturization, which placed this song sequence several years ahead of its time. However, the choreography is a bit of a let-down as Nargis looks wooden and awkward in her dance steps.
The dream sequence of Awara, one of the first in Hindi films, is notable for its surrealistic feel and hypnotic quality. It could be inferred that Raj probably drew inspiration from sequences in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Dali’s bizarre drawings for the dream sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). The end result, however, is uniquely Indian, having no precedence in Indian cinema and probably not emulated. The grandeur, the vastness, the eerie feel, the interplay of light, shadow, darkness, the images of hell with the demonic structures, the visage of heaven with the mists of clouds, the staircases resembling the Odessa steps of Battleship Potemkin (1925), the spiral path leading to the unseen heaven, the demons inciting terror in the heart of the wayward hero, the angels dancing to the tune meant for gods, the near-transcendental voice of Lata, the piercing tone of Manna Dey, the detailing in the arrangement by Shankar–Jaikishan and their team, all create a stunning impact.
The range of poetry demanded in this medley spanned starry romance to dark reality to spirituality and then to the ‘homecoming’ to the heroine. It would have been more challenging than writing for three discrete numbers, because in this case, Shailendra had to narrate a story in three segments. ‘When Raj sahab recited it to his team, they were all excited about it,’ Bablou Shailendra, son of the legendary lyricist, talks about what spurred the RK team those days.
‘There has been no recording like this one,’ said music assistant Dattaram in an interview with a group of Shankar– Jaikishan fans. ‘The recording began at 9 a.m. and ended at 6 a.m. the next day! There were at least 150 musicians and forty or fifty chorus boys and girls.’ ‘Ghar aaya mera pardesi’ was inspired by an Arabic song, ‘Ala Balad El Mahbub’, by Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum. According to Dattaram, ‘When it was the turn of recording the section “Ghar aaya mera pardesi”, it was almost midnight.’ During the recording session, Raj Kapoor was not satisfied with the rhythm arrangement and they wanted a dholak player who could play the rhythm as planned by Raj and Shankar–Jaikishan. ‘Flautist Sumant Raj overheard this conversation and suggested to Raj that he knew of a dholaki player. I endorsed it saying that dholakis spice up the tamasha sequences. Hearing this, Raj asked Sumant to go in his [Raj’s] car to pick him up and come straight to the studio.’
In just thirty minutes, an unusually tall and dark man named Lala Gangawane (Lalabhau) entered the recording room, carrying a small dholaki. Dattaram said, ‘I was scared when I caught sight of Lalabhau, a tall figure clad in white and drenched in sweat. We made him sit and offered cold drinks to him. After the score was explained to Lalabhau, Lata-ji was called. We began recording at around 2.30 a.m. after rehearsing for an hour. Lalabhau poured his heart out in the song, he played every possible variation, every possible nuance and the result was pure magic.’
Awara was Shankar–Jaikishan’s second film with Raj Kapoor and consolidated the gains of Barsaat (1949). But why is this song chosen to be among the top 50 when ‘Awara hoon’, ‘Dum bhar jo udhar muh’ and ‘Hum tujhse mohabbat karke’ would be considered classy in any era, and ‘Tere bina aag yeh chandni’ and ‘Ghar aaya mera pardesi’ may well have passed for a present-day MTV music album in which black and white had been used to create a retro effect?
It was Hindi film’s first ‘music video’.