THE SHOWMAN IN LOVE
Madhu Jain
Being in love seemed to be important to Raj Kapoor, one of the few Indian stars to ever talk frankly about his obsession with the female form, and the breast in particular. The themes of love and innocence (keeping it, losing it, believing in it) are central to his oeuvre.
‘He was like a lion in front of a prey. The way he looked at a woman, the way he looked into her eyes—no woman could turn away. Jhuka nahin sakthi thi ankhen.’
—B.J. Panchal
B.J. Panchal was Raj Kapoor’s photographer for thirty-five years. Like the thespian’s shadow, the man and his camera followed him everywhere, on the sets and off them. After hours, too. Panchal is old and ailing, but his memory is sharp as if it all happened just yesterday as he sifts through hundreds of photographs he has taken. There’s Nargis, incandescent in Moscow, as she gazes into Kapoor’s eyes at the time of the Awara blitzkrieg, oblivious to the world around her; Vyjanthimala mesmerized as her eyes lock into his during the Sangam days, like a snake in the snare of a snake charmer; Padmini, voluptuous; Lata Mangeshkar, all coy and coquettish in his cottage. There were others besides his famous women in white, the anonymous many who formed part of his eclectic court in his cottage. They came in all ages, sizes, backgrounds and dispositions. A few even started donning white, as if they were adherents of a cult of the guru of romantic love.
Those blue eyes got them all—for a while at least. The great showman was also the ultimate seducer. Raj Kapoor had outsize passions, and was not afraid to live them. His affairs were not in camera, unlike those of his contemporaries. He would often tell his close friends that he wanted his epitaph to read: ‘Here lies a man who only wished to love.’ And like many of the world’s great seducers he worked his way through the defences of even the most reluctant with large measures of charm, genius and guile. He wooed his heroines with hyperbole and flowers. The women didn’t stand a chance, according to screenwriter Ali Raza: ‘Pagal kar deta tha. (He would drive them mad.) He had the ability to make a woman feel that there was nobody like her.’ Tanuja, who spent many of her growing up years near the Kapoor home in Chembur and was one of the privileged few with whom he shared not only his Black Label but also confidences, says, ‘Women were crazy about him. He was a romantic. He brought romance into their lives, and women want romance. He was more about romance than about sex.’
Romantic love lies at the core of his films. The iconic R.K. logo says it all. A man, his hair a bit wild, his body taut, holds a violin in one hand, his arm stretched downwards in line with his body. In his other arm he holds a woman arched backwards in a pose of sublime submission. The logo recreates this epiphany of passion of the scene in Barsaat when Nargis, overwhelmed by the plaintively lovesick strains of Raj Kapoor’s frenzied violin, rushes to him and falls into his arms. Over the years the original, more fleshed-out figures metamorphosed into these stick figures. Countless films copied that scene but failed to recreate its magic. The legendary chemistry between Raj Kapoor and Nargis made this the epitome of screen passion in Indian cinema history.
However, the truth of it may have been more complex. An element of mystery surrounds the R.K. logo. Was there a third, invisible presence there, between the lines, so to speak, of the logo? Raj Kapoor used to say that a white sari draped both Nargis and Lata Mangeshkar in his logo. Nargis was the physical manifestation of his object of love; Lata was its aural avatar. Nothing is very simple with this Kapoor: the truth is layered and open to interpretation. Some in the industry maintain that R.K. did not stand for Raj Kapoor alone. Perhaps it was a secret code between the two when both were at the height of their partnership—both romantic and professional.
R.K. Films was really a Nargis–Raj Kapoor banner. She was a partner, alongside him at the helm of R.K. Films for much of their golden years together. They were to make sixteen films together, beginning with Aag in 1948 and ending with Jaagte Raho in 1956. Six of these were made under the R.K. banner. Others in Raj Kapoor’s coterie may even have resented her influence on him and on the management of the studio. Mamaji [Vishwa Mehra, Raj Kapoor’s relative and Man Friday at R.K. Films] says that she was ‘quite bossy’, often ordering him about. P.K. Nair recounts an incident when he visited the studio during the filming of Jaagte Raho. ‘When I was on the sets she was virtually directing a scene. There was a multi-storeyed building with a spiral staircase. Nargis was involved with the preparation of this scene. Raj Kapoor was running in one of the corridors, while she was giving instructions to the light people. She became important in the running of the studio.’
It is easy to forget that when Nargis and Raj Kapoor met, she was a star, a veteran of eight films by 1948. She was twenty and one of the stars from the camp of movie moghul Mehboob Khan. Raj was twenty-two, new to the world of celluloid, yet to direct his first film. When she agreed to act in his debut film, her mother Jaddanbai insisted Nargis be given top billing over Kamini Kaushal and Nigar Sultana. In deference to Prithviraj Kapoor, her mother agreed to a fee of just Rs 10,000 for her daughter. However, Nargis’s brother Akhtar Hussein insisted it be raised to Rs 40,000. And it was.
Aag was the tentative beginning of a partnership and on-screen pairing that recalls the chemistry of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, the resonance provided in the case of both by their long and intense affairs. Both actors were married and unwilling to leave their respective wives. But by the time Barsaat was being made, Nargis was totally committed to Raj Kapoor. Midway through, she pegged her future to his. She began to put her heart and soul—and money—into their films. Nargis even sold her gold bangles when the studio was short of funds. She acted in films of other producers (Adalat, Ghar Sansar, Lajwanti) to fill the depleting coffers of R.K. Films. One could say that she was the fledgling Mother India of R.K. Films.
Raj Kapoor has famously—and rather callously—said that his wife was the mother of his children and Nargis the mother of his films. Ironically, she was also his ‘wife’ in the world of cinema, within the cordon sanitaire of the studio. Dara Singh tells an amusing story about his visit to R.K. Films. ‘I went there with a pehalwan friend. It was summer. Nargis and Raj were sitting there. She was cutting mangoes. Rajji told her that there was no need to cut the mangoes, he is a pahalwan and will swallow it whole. Chus lega.’ Nargis was also his Girl Friday (apparently, Nargis clipping Raj Kapoor’s nails was not a rare sight). When his children came to the sets, she would spoil them with presents.
According to Shashi Kapoor, Nargis was the ‘life of R.K. He made films after her. But there was a strange electricity in the air when she was there. She would visit the sets even when there was no scene and give him aam ras.’ She veered between playing Mother Hubbard and Madame Boss in the studios and on location. When they were filming Aah on a lake near Nasik, Raj Kapoor invited his cousin Colonel Khanna to join them. Reminiscing about those days, the Colonel says: ‘I went down to see him. We went hunting each evening. Nargis used to sit behind us in the jeep and keep giving us sandwiches and drinks. We would return at three or four at night, after which she would go round in that tented colony and ask people why the generators were still on. She was very conscious of wastage. She would tick them off in the jungle.’
The obvious chemistry between the two was more than skindeep. It was a meeting of minds as well. Nargis was Raj Kapoor’s friend, muse, partner-at-work, actress, lover, love. She was involved in all aspects of Raj Kapoor’s films, from the conception of an idea to its final execution. Well-read and familiar with international cinema, her inputs during the countless brainstorming sessions in the cottage were significant. Scores of ideas were tossed around, many of them hers. T.J.S. George quotes an interview she gave to Filmfare in 1954 in his book. ‘Before I started working with Raj, my ideas were bottled up. There was no one with whom I could discuss them freely. With Raj it was different. We seem to have practically the same views and ideas, the same outlook on all subjects.’ Interestingly, unlike the prevalent Bollywood etiquette, she doesn’t refer to him as Rajji. Raj Kapoor had, in another context, said, ‘She understands me and I understand her.’
The two were a study in contrast. To begin with he was a married man—one of the tragic ironies of his life was that he met Nargis a mere four months after his marriage. Religion separated them: although Nargis’s father Dr Mohan Babu was a Hindu, she was brought up a Muslim. She grew up a Bombay girl in their ground-floor flat in Chateau Marine on Marine Drive in Bombay; his life was more nomadic growing up. She was better educated— a voracious reader (John Galbraith, Kazantzakis, Maulana Azad), she graduated from Queen Mary’s Convent, and had wanted to be a doctor like her father. Raj Kapoor never finished school and only read comics—or, as [film journalist] Bunny Reuben puts it, pornographic books from Olympia Press. He came from a closeknit, respected bourgeois family with tehsildars on the family tree—and an illustrious father who was a friend of Jawaharlal Nehru and who became a Rajya Sabha MP. Her mother was a singer, and her parents were not married. She was the caring sort, always keen to help the less fortunate. His world was his films. Her language would often be punctuated with colourful expletives. He was more circumspect, more indirect when he wanted to snub someone. Eric Segal couldn’t have scripted this love story better; this was a post-Independence Bombay love story.
Their first meeting is now a part of film lore immortalized in his film Bobby. He was looking for a studio for his debut film and because he heard that Nargis’s mother was making Romeo and Juliet in Famous Studios he wanted to know how good the facilities there were. Nargis opened the door, and the rest is history. He introduced himself as the son of Prithviraj Kapoor— he had yet to make a film. Nargis, however, had seen him in Deewar. He left, flustered on finding her alone in the apartment, but as he said later, ‘I did not leave her behind; her memory stayed with me.’ From Chateau Marine he rushed to Inder Raj Anand’s house on Warden Road to ask him to write Nargis into the screenplay: she was an accidental addition.
Less known is Nargis’s reaction to their first meeting, which George describes in his book on Nargis. ‘Narrating the incident to her intimate friend Neelam—her real name was Lettitia—she put it in characteristic terms. “A fat blue-eyed pinkie had visited the house,” she said. During the shooting of Aag, she tells Neelam, “Pinkie has started getting fresh with me.” They were obviously terms of endearment indicating the recognition of someone out of the ordinary.’
Soon Nargis’s family sensed the growing attraction between the two. Since Aag was shot on location in Khandala, a suspicious Jaddanbai went with them. She put her foot down when Raj Kapoor wanted to film Barsaat in Kashmir. There were many scenes between the weary mother and her wilful daughter. On her insistence it had to be closer to Bombay. Eventually Mahabaleshwar became Kashmir. The Kapoor household was also in turmoil, with Prithviraj Kapoor attempting to restrain his son. He soon gave up. However, by the time Awara was on the floor, Nargis’s mother had died and there was no holding her back. She had lost her father two years earlier.
They soon became inseparable. Talking about their relationship, Neelam said: ‘There was nothing that could stop them, nothing that could separate them. There was not a line between them, there were no dots. She was everything that life meant to him. The loves, the quarrels, the tears, the fights, the reconciliations, the oneness—they were like one soul.’
The two became a working pair, travelling to festivals everywhere, including Moscow twice. Recalls Dev Anand: ‘I got to know him rather well when we were in the USSR for six weeks. It was in 1954, the first delegation. We went to parties together, ate and drank together. He and Nargis were in the same room. Whenever we went anywhere, they would play Awara hoon on the piano. Sometimes he would drink too much and had to be pulled out of bed. We would all be waiting for him, and then Nargis would rush off and try to bring him down.’
The partnership went much further than their fabled screen chemistry. What was important was the way the two balanced each other on screen. They brought out the best in each other, one a catalyst for the other. Raj Kapoor’s searing, at times maudlin, intensity was offset by Nargis’s spontaneity; his clowning by her innate dignity. Nargis was her own person. A New Woman of her times, hers was the sensuality of the spirit. A misfit in the mythohistorical mould, Nargis refused to do the coy eyelash-fluttering, sari-pallav-twisting, twittering heroine number. Going against the grain, she wore her hair short, got into pants and swimsuits and refused to wear wigs.
Barsaat launched the greatest romantic pair of Indian cinema, pushing screen love in a new direction. Sacrifice was sidelined when Raj Kapoor stormed in with this ode to love. When I interviewed Manmohan Desai in the nineties, he said, ‘Raj Kapoor revolutionized romance in Bollywood by bringing in possession and the physical.’ The tragic lover became passé. The blue-eyed passionate lover even slaps the girl he loves in Awara. Guilt about passion and love was exiled, and love became the prerogative of the young. Kapoor and Nargis introduced an element of earthiness in their on-screen relationship.
The director–actor relationship was equally special. Nargis was never as luminous as when caressed by Raj Kapoor’s camera. In Aag she does look awkward, as if she’s just stepped out of a postpartition Manto play like Khol Do or Kali Salwar with her hair wild and unfocussed gaze. But from Barsaat onwards there is a subtle transmogrification of the screen Nargis: her face often looks as if it has been lit by the rays of the moon. The camera lingers on her profile, gingerly exploring the landscape of her face, incandescent with an inner glow. The inner beauty more than made up for her unconventional looks: until then Nargis was not considered a cinematic beauty in the league of Devika Rani or Madhubala. Kapoor’s use of close-ups wrapped his star in an aura of mystery and glamour, akin in a way to the German-born director Steiglitz’s framing shots and close-ups of Marlene Dietrich. His use of softly spoken dialogue lent a degree of intimacy seldom seen in Hindi movies. It was almost as if the audience was eavesdropping.
Eventually, however, the spell he cast on Nargis began to weaken. The magic began to gradually seep out of their relationship. Initially, when her brother Akhtar Hussein used to tell her that Raj Kapoor was sidelining her in his ‘hero-oriented’ films, she would snap at him. She refused to believe that Raj Kapoor was using her to become famous. Her brothers tried to convince her that he gave her the bit roles while he hogged the limelight. But when she went to Moscow, she began to believe that they may be right. Nobody really asked for her there. In fact, many thought that she was Mrs Raj Kapoor. It was bad enough with Awara, but when she went the next time for Shree 420, it was more of the same. Her ego was hurt. It was the beginning of the end. Here she was, the star whose name on the marquee brought in the crowds, being relegated to second fiddle. Unable to stomach the adulation—canonization almost—of Raj Kapoor, Nargis abruptly left Moscow.
Nargis was also beginning to get restless. She longed to become a wife and a mother—Mrs Raj Kapoor. So important was the sanctity of marriage for Nargis that she apparently even cornered Morarji Desai, then Home Minister in Bombay and asked him for his advice on how she could legally marry the actor. Kapoor was a Hindu and already married. Neelam later told Bunny Reuben that Raj Kapoor used to keep telling Nargis that he would marry her. Her patience ran out when she realized that Raj Kapoor would never leave his wife. Nor was she happy with her roles for the R.K. banner. Nargis wanted to play more spirited characters, more in tune with her confident personality. In fact, she was quite unhappy with her docile and ‘unglamorous’ role in Shree 420. Says Ali Raza: ‘Nargis finally left because she had reached that manzil in life when emotions have to be left behind and instincts take over. The biological clock was ticking. She was desperate to settle down. The Mother India fire happened. But it would have finished anyway. Both had reached a stage of exhaustion in their relationship.’
The exit was quiet—and final. There were no retakes. Nargis did not even let on what she was going to do. Normally she used to ask Raj Kapoor before she accepted any film outside the R.K. banner. When she decided to work in Mother India, everybody knew it was over. The writing was on the wall. Just a few months earlier Nargis had refused to act as an old woman in a film Raj Kapoor was planning to make. Kapoor told journalist Suresh Kohli in an interview in 1986: ‘She betrayed me again by refusing to play an old woman in the script I had bought from Rajinder Singh Bedi … She said it would spoil her image and the next day went and without telling me signed Mother India. What would you say to that, Sir?’ She did not hesitate to ‘age’ all those decades for Mehboob Khan. Nor did she dither over her decision to marry Sunil Dutt in March 1958—after he famously rescued her from a fire while the film was being made. Their marriage was a secret until Mother India was released: since she played his mother in the film it would not have gone down well with the audience had it become known she was his wife in real life.
Raj Kapoor was devastated. Caught up in his work, he had no inkling that Nargis was going to leave him. He broke down and cried in front of his friends and colleagues when he found out that she had married Sunil Dutt. Raj Kapoor took it very badly: he would reportedly burn himself with cigarette butts to check if he was not dreaming, wondering how she could have done this to him. In his book, George writes: ‘After Nargis left, the showman brooded, mourned his loss, and wept. Never the Devdas lover onscreen—he always got the girl there—he became one off it, for a while. The long drinking binge began. He began to weep like a child, using almost any shoulder to weep upon, repeating his sad tale like the ancient mariner. There was a deluge of tears in the cottage.’
Nor was the Kapoor home in Chembur spared the tears. Talking about this dark period in her husband’s life, Krishna Kapoor told Reuben: ‘Night after night he’d come home drunk … He’d come and collapse almost unconscious in the bathtub weeping bitterly. Night after night. Do you think I thought he was weeping for me? No. Of course not. I knew he was weeping for her.’ The weeping continued next door in the home of Vinny Ahuja. ‘He used to come and sit here and cry inconsolably,’ recalls Ahuja.
Says a friend whose shoulders got wet with all those tears: ‘Nargis was his only true love. He never spoke against her publicly. He blamed her brothers for driving a wedge between them.’ In private, he often babbled on about what he termed ‘a great betrayal’. It wasn’t an amicable goodbye. Raj Kapoor talked at length to Suresh Kohli about the ‘betrayal’. It was in 1974, almost twenty years after Nargis’s exit. Yet, the showman talked about her as if it had just happened the week before. Kohli, then chief editor with Sterling Publishers—they had just brought out a novelized version of Bobby—wanted Kapoor to write his autobiography. During the course of the conversation, Kohli mentioned that columnist Devyani Chaubal wanted to write his biography.
His remark was the trigger, and all the bitter memories began to pour out. ‘Raj Kapoor said, “What does she know? She will write about whom I went to bed with. Kya bataun—what should I tell?” Then he took out a framed letter from a drawer. It was pieces of paper glued together, with two or four of the pieces missing. He had glued it together. Rajji said: “The world tells me I let Nargis down. It was she who betrayed me. Sahib, isne woh kiya tha. We were going out to a party. It was getting late. I went to her and she had a paper in her hand. I asked her what it was. She said kuch nahin, kuch nahin. And tore the letter and walked out. When we reached the car I said rumaal bhool gaya hoon and went back. The maid had already swept it away and put it into the waste paper basket. I picked up the waste paper basket and put it in my cupboard. The next day I joined the torn pieces together and saw that it was a proposal from a producer. She did not tell me about it. This was her first act of betrayal. I put this sequence just the way it happened in Sangam.’ The proposal was from producer– director Shahid Latif, who was then married to the writer Ismat Chughtai, according to Kohli.
Raj Kapoor then went on to talk about subsequent ‘betrayals’ to Kohli: ‘Raj Kapoor had acquired the rights to Phagun, written by Rajinder Singh Bedi. Nargis kept delaying the shooting. She kept telling him that she was not ready for the role. And then she went off quietly to Kolhapur where they were filming Mother India. Rajji told me: “When I confronted her, she said that she did not know what the story was. Wah, picture ka naam Mother India hai, and she did not know … Nargis’s driver came from Kolhapur and said Baby has asked for her heel ke sandals. I said le jaiye. The driver came again, this time for the baaja (harmonica). I then realized that it was all over. Heels, baaja, and Sunil Dutt was six feet tall.”’
If the two met accidentally, the encounters were largely silent. Nargis was neither sentimental nor bitter. Interestingly, she even confided in Kohli: ‘She told me that when she went to a party she was shocked to see him and thought: Maine is Ganapati se ishq kiya tha? (How had I fallen in love with this portly man?)’
Their last film together—particularly the last shot of Jaagte Raho—turned out to be symbolic. Nargis plays a jogan, a devout woman who has renounced the world (a role she was not keen to do) who finally quenches the Raj Kapoor character’s thirst. Ironically, the memorable and haunting song Jago Mohan pyare plays while she pours water into his mouth. Nargis had been his inspiration, a pillar of R.K. Films, his partner, but now here she was in the robes of a jogan, and not his leading lady. The film flopped at the box office: the audience missed the electricity between the screen pair.
That last scene was a real fade-out. Years later at her funeral, Raj Kapoor preferred to be the outsider, part of the general public. Rashmi Shankar [a family friend of the Kapoors] recalls going to Nargis’s funeral with Raj Kapoor. ‘There was such a crowd. Everybody kept telling Rajji to move up front. But he stayed behind and told me to just sit down where we were. “Yahin se toh guzrenge,” he said, and then added, “All my friends are going.” He had his dark glasses on and remained one of the crowd.’ It was almost like a melodramatic end when the lover returns just as his beloved is going around the nuptial fire.
The Nargis chapter closed like a heavy door, slamming shut the most intense and creative phase of his life. Nargis had been the centre that held his working life for a decade. Raj Kapoor now needed another heroine. Padmini, one of the famous Travancore sisters (the other two were Ragini and Lalitha), was a natural successor. When Raj Kapoor fell ill after Nargis’s sudden departure from Moscow, Padmini happened to be there. The south Indian actress nursed him through his cold and high fever. Raj Kapoor even told a few close friends that he made Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai as a thank you gesture to Padmini. Or was it on the rebound from Nargis?
The voluptuous dancer–actress had hovered in his field of vision. When shooting for Chori Chori in Madras, Padmini had been on another set in the same studio. Nargis, it seems, did not miss a flicker of interest in the southern belle. Her biographer George quotes a ‘piquant’ remark Nargis made in 1957 to a writer–director about Raj Kapoor’s fascination for the exotic. ‘Madhu [Meena Kumari’s screen name as a child actress was Madhuri] could offer three lakhs for Amrohi’s love. Raj does not need money. He wants variety and the south is providing that.’ Observes [actor] Simi Garewal: ‘He had a thing about south Indian women. We used to joke about it. Everybody knew about his weakness.’
Padmini and Raj Kapoor got to know each other well during the Youth Festival in Moscow, where she had gone with her sister Ragini. Padmini was acting in Abbas’s Pardesi, a co-production with the Soviet Union. The two sisters were bowled over by the Russian adulation of the director and star of Awara. Kapoor was mobbed like a pop star: his clothes were torn, girls fainted at the sight of him and the Russians sang Awara hoon and Ichak dana, bichak dana whenever they saw him.
Padmini didn’t stand a chance. She was a leading star in the south when Kapoor worked his charm and lured her to Bombay. The Madras film industry was up in arms when she headed north. She had been a popular star of Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu cinema, including several devotional films. Apparently, this screen goddess of the south received many threatening letters when she became a Raj Kapoor heroine. So did Kapoor, from producers and directors who feared that she would no longer be available for their films and, worse, that she was going to become the ‘second Nargis’. Padmini’s mother, Saraswathi amma, was equally apprehensive about the effect of Raj Kapoor’s seductive charms on her daughter, just as Jaddanbai had been about Nargis. Hawklike, she watched over her daughter, scolding her more than once for any perceived intimacy with Kapoor. She almost dragged Padmini from Jabalpur where the famous waterfall song sequence O basanti pawan pagal (Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai) was being filmed. The clever showman was indefatigable: he turned on the charm for both mother and daughter. The R.K. machinery was set in motion, wooing the two ladies with whatever they wanted.
Padmini’s induction as an R.K. heroine in Jis Desh Mein … in 1960 marks a significant departure in the films of Raj Kapoor. Until Jaagte Raho his films were not overtly sexual. In the postNargis era they are: the journey from sensuality to sexuality was a short sprint. Raj Kapoor’s camera lingers longingly on Padmini’s curves and cleavage, the way it used to explore Nargis’s face. He may have put Nargis in a swimsuit, slapped her and pulled her unruly locks of hair, but she was never a sexual object in his films. In Jis Desh Mein … the camera has turned voyeuristic: it seldom strays from Padmini’s ample body, especially her large breasts which the cut of her choli and the embroidery on it accentuated.
She is also the prototype Raj Kapoor draped-in-a-wet-sari heroine: the zenith (or nadir depending on the readers’ point of view) was Mandakini in Ram Teri Ganga Maili. Padmini oozes sexuality in the song sequence when, suddenly aware of the fact that she is in love with the character played by Raj Kapoor, she jumps into a pond and swims, exposing large expanses of luminous flesh as she keeps getting in and out of the water like a drunken mermaid. Her face is a study in sensual arousal, her eyes full of dreamy longing. She wears a black sari wound tightly round her body. There is no blouse. And, of course, there’s a waterfall. Padmini looks like a woman who has stepped out of a Raja Ravi Varma painting. The Travancore painter invented the wet-sari look in his canvases, which Kapoor later immortalized on celluloid.
Raj Kapoor makes her a sexual object in Mera Naam Joker as well. The screen sizzles in the song Ang laga ja balma when she sheds her male disguise and puts on a sari for the first time in her life. A flesh-coloured sari is draped tightly over Padmini, once again without a blouse. When she goes looking for her hero–joker in the middle of the night she is drenched in torrential rain. Even today, with less scissor-happy censors and more body flaunting, most directors can’t approximate the eroticism of Raj Kapoor’s song sequences.
Obviously the on-screen chemistry between Raj Kapoor and Padmini worked. Jis Desh Mein … did very well at the box office. Its success restored Kapoor’s self-confidence. After Nargis’s sudden departure he had begun to believe that he was finished as a filmmaker: Jaagte Raho had been a miserable flop. He was so unsure of himself that he put down Radhu Karmakar’s name as the director of Jis Desh Mein … Kapoor may have had a sense of indebtedness to Padmini—this was the second time she had bailed him out. In fact, she also acted with him in Aashiq, a film produced by Bunny Reuben and V.K. Dubey. However, the film was never completed. Midway, Padmini got married to a doctor and moved to the United States.
Padmini was just an interlude: the actress came at the right time into Raj Kapoor’s life but she did not fill the void of professional and emotional intimacy that Nargis had left behind. Theirs was a nice, somewhat placid relationship, without any emotional tempests. The two remained friends even after she married and went away.
It was time to look for another heroine. Buoyed by the success of Jis Desh Mein … , Raj Kapoor wanted to make Sangam. Once again he turned to the southern comfort zone, this time to Vyjanthimala. Raj Kapoor’s wooing of the actress, who was rumoured to be tenuously connected to the Mysore royal family, is even more diabolically interesting that any courting he did onscreen. One of the obstacles was Dilip Kumar: Vyjanthimala had been romantically paired with him in many films—Naya Daur, Madhumati, Paigham, Ganga Jamna to name a few. The two Pathan actors might have been thick as thieves, but they were ardent rivals as well. It had happened before. Nargis and Dilip Kumar had been a star pair in several films. Later, Kapoor had even prevented Nargis from acting with Dilip Kumar. And now it was happening with ‘Paapa’, Vyjanthimala’s pet name.
Her grandmother–guardian Yedugiri had already snubbed Raj Kapoor when he had wanted the voluptuous, saucer-eyed south Indian belle to act in Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai. Vyjanthimala was no less indifferent when the two were acting together in Nazrana. Raj Kapoor, however, was wilful and seductive enough to know how to move the world in the direction he wanted. B.R. Chopra tells a wonderful story. ‘Once Raj, I and Vyjanthi were on a plane from Delhi to Madras. I was doing Naya Daur at the time. I was sitting next to Vyjanthi. Raj came up to me and said: “Chopra, you come and sit in my seat and I will sit in yours.” Vyjanthi was upset with me and said: “Why are you leaving me?” I told Raj: “You want to sit next to her? What about your wife?” He replied: “This is for the artist, not the woman.” He sat next to her and before you knew it, he was reading her hand. “Let me see your future. There is some relationship and love here.” He went on saying things like that. I asked him: “Kya dekh raha hai?” He answered: “Chopra, for once don’t ask me.” Later, when I went to Vyjanthi to fix some dates for another film I wanted her to act in, she said that she was making a film with Raj.’ Raj Kapoor’s way of showing gratitude to him was quite unique. According to Chopra: ‘In Sangam, they used my portrait.’
Vyjanthimala tells the story differently. ‘Nobody got me away from anyone. I had done Nazrana with him. He was planning to make Sangam. He saw me as Radha and asked me if I would be his Radha. I told him to talk to my grandmother. Then the telegram “Bol Radha bol, Sangam hoga ke nahin” arrived. I sent one back: “Hoga, hoga, zaroor hoga.”’
Once the tall and cherubic-faced actress with the trademark big mole on her cheek and the fluttering eyelashes stepped into the R.K. arena, things were never the same again. They did only two films together: Nazrana and Sangam. Yet, their relationship caused more havoc in the Kapoor household than did Raj Kapoor’s decade-long partnership with Nargis. Krishna Kapoor actually left Raj Kapoor and checked into Natraj Hotel on Marine Drive, at the other end of town, with her children. A few weeks later she moved into an apartment in Chitrakoot on Carmichael Road. It was the closest the Kapoors ever came to a split.
This sangam may not have been of the minds, as was probably the case with Nargis. But Vyjanthimala’s initial disdainful response to the invader from the north soon melted to incredible warmth. Whether Raj Kapoor actually fell in love with his heroines or convinced himself that he was is open to question. Those who know him well believe that his films were his real obsession and love—like a man possessed he sacrificed anyone and anything that came in the way, including, perhaps, personal happiness. During the Vyjanthimala phase, Kapoor made himself fall in love with her, according to Simi Garewal, who made a documentary on his life for Channel Four and became a close friend of Raj’s when he was shooting Mera Naam Joker. ‘He wanted to create an aura of love. Over the phone he would suddenly become dramatic while talking to her. He loved south India, and he used Tamil words now and then. You could just see him getting into that state. He was in love with love. Even if he did not fall in love with his heroine, Raj Kapoor wanted to make himself believe he was: he felt it was important for the film.’ Always the Svengali, Raj Kapoor was very particular about the looks of his heroines, at times putting the finishing touches to the make-up himself. In the case of Vyjanthimala, he ensured that she put less oil in her hair and looked more like a north Indian actress.
The grand seduction continued through the long months of filming in Europe. Kapoor, the great romantic, pioneered the trend for location shooting abroad. It was more than a Roman holiday: the honeymooning screen couple traipsed through Rome, Paris, Venice, Interlaken and Hamburg for over two months. Of course, she had come with baggage from Madras: there was her stern guardian grandmother, an aunt and her make-up man Sarosh Mody. But the bodyguards could not dissuade Kapoor. Just as he had disarmed Padmini’s mother, he charmed the formidable Yedugiri, showering both her and his second southern belle with expensive presents and flowers. The unit worked during the day and went nightclubbing most evenings.
It wasn’t too difficult for Cupid on this grand European tour, where India and its social and familial restraints seemed galaxies away. Vyjanthimala obviously managed to get under Raj Kapoor’s skin, and he hers—as Panchal’s photographs reveal. If he had mesmerized her, she had him in a trance as well. ‘Vyjanthimala had a strong, sensual sense about her. She cast a magic spell around him,’ says [socialite] Bina Ramani. ‘They did not snap out of their mutual enchantment when they returned to India.’
The famous Budha mil gaya song sequence in a Paris hotel suite was actually filmed at R.K. Films after their return. It is obvious that she is performing her dance of seduction for Raj Kapoor and not for the camera or posterity. The come-hither posturings come with emotion. Raj Kapoor could get his heroines to do anything for his films. Today, Vyjanthimala can’t quite understand how it all happened, why it happened. She says: ‘Even when I see it today I can’t believe how modern it is. How fusion came in a number like that—in the sixties. I had never danced like that. It was not a dance, there was no choreography. It came spontaneously. It was the first time I wore sleeveless. It was quite a daring number. All the movements were mine. He just told me to do a sort of Can-Can. I have to show that I can do the Can-Can better than the dancers in the nightclub where he is going, and I have to stop him. It was done in one take. I could never have done it a second time. I had to dance on such a small table. I had to wear heels; if I slipped I would have broken my ankle or teeth.’
The carefree mood of the idyllic European sojourn continued in Bombay. Film journalists began to write about the romance between the director and his actress. Grandma Yedugiri had been packed off to Madras, and Raj Kapoor and Vyjanthimala became less than discreet. This time Kapoor tested his wife’s patience. In his biography, Bunny Reuben writes: ‘I remember one picnic day four of us spent at Powai Lake—Raj and Vyjanthi, me and Devyani Chaubal. The two of us were included as eye-wash … when we returned to R.K. Films late in the evening we were sitting in the cottage … the door suddenly burst open and in walked Bhabhiji [Krishna Kapoor] with the children … They came and sat on the divan (Vyjanthi, Devyani and I were on the floor as usual, as also Raj himself) staring at us, saying nothing. The atmosphere was electric with tension. Hurriedly the three of us said our goodnights and came away from the cottage. There was a fierce quarrel that night.’
It didn’t stop here. Raj Kapoor was so captivated by Vyjanthimala that he could not hide his involvement with her, even in the presence of his wife. The last straw was the Bangalore premiere of Sangam, where he took both Krishna Kapoor and Vyjanthimala. Describing what happened there, Panchal says: ‘Vyjanthi is there, and so is Krishnaji. And they were playing a very romantic song on the piano, with Vyjanthi standing near him. Krishnaji says, “Panchal sahib bus, don’t take any photographs.” She was crying.’ Mrs Kapoor returned to Bombay with Mukesh, and shortly afterwards moved to Natraj Hotel.
But no matter how besotted Raj Kapoor was, he was not about to break up his marriage. The Kapoors don’t divorce: he didn’t do it for Nargis, and it was unlikely that he was going to do so for Vyjanthimala. In fact, he made it clear to her that his home and his work belonged to two mutually exclusive worlds, just as his wife and his actresses did. ‘He would often describe a scene of Chaplin’s wife, Oona, and his mistress walking down these long stairs. He would say: “There is Oona on one side walking down the steps gracefully. His actress and mistress is walking down on the other side.” And then he used to add: “The two never meet,”’ recalls Vyjanthimala.
Vyjanthimala, like Nargis, wanted marriage. And remarks like these must have irked her. Just as his previous comments about his wife being the mother of his children and his actress the mother of his films hurt Nargis. Once again Raj Kapoor was oblivious to the romance blooming right under his nose, this time during the making of Sangam. Dr C.L. Bali, Raj Kapoor’s personal doctor, accompanied the unit to Europe. In fact, Kapoor even asked the doctor to look after Vyjanthimala in Bombay when he went to London for three months of post-production work on the film.
When she quietly left and married the doctor, Kapoor was stunned. Years later, he told a friend that Vyjanthimala used to ‘disappear into the bathroom for long spells and write letters to Dr Bali while she was very much with him in London’. This particular sangam did not last long, though it took its emotional toll. Vyjanthimala turned her back on both Raj Kapoor and cinema. She returned to dance, started playing golf and eventually became a Rajya Sabha MP when Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister. Interestingly, both she and Nargis became members of the Rajya Sabha. Raj Kapoor never did, although his father was a distinguished Rajya Sabha member.
Raj Kapoor’s trinity of women—Nargis, Padmini and Vyjanthimala—is widely known. Less so is his very special relationship with Lata Mangeshkar. He was entranced by her voice, and she by his chikna face and blue eyes as well as his formidable talent and powers of persuasion. She looks girlish and coy in photographs taken during the early days of their collaboration. There is an air of intimacy, of unspoken complicity in a photograph in which Raj Kapoor is grooming Lata. He is standing behind her as she sits. A cigarette dangling from his lips, he is dressing her hair, while she looks like a blushing teenager. Lata Mangeshkar became yet another woman in white: she only wore white saris, but with coloured borders. While Nargis was his screen beloved, Lata Mangeshkar was her voice and the aural incarnation of the poetic soul of Raj Kapoor in his early days.
Lata, like Nargis, was also his collaborator in creation—in this case his partner in creating some of his most memorable songs. Raj Kapoor pushed her to the limit, extracting her best, and she willingly gave it. The intensely heady experience of composing and recording the three songs for the nine-minute dream sequence of Awara—an R.K. epiphany—had meant so much to both. She sang through the night, beginning at nine at night, and continued until day broke, after which she, Raj Kapoor, Shankar and Jaikishen went to the Irani restaurant opposite Famous Studios in Tardeo. Years earlier, it had been the same sort of exhilaration after they finished recording the music for Barsaat, when they went out and sat on the pavement outside the studio, wondering if the film would make it. In his biography of Lata Mangeshkar, Raju Bharatan writes: ‘Lata in white was for Raj a replica of Nargis in white; somewhere the voice and the vision merged.’
The singer with her tanpura spent many evenings in the cottage— sometimes singing through the night. Raj Kapoor was besotted with her voice. In the fifties, after Barsaat and Awara, he even planned to make a film with her as a heroine. He was going to call it Soorat aur Seerat (Face and Soul). It was a film Raj Kapoor and Lata Mangeshkar had developed together around the theme of the body versus the soul, beauty versus ugliness. Kapoor had first touched upon the theme of internal and external beauty in his film Aag. In that film the disfigured persona is a man, the hero, who is shunned by women after a fire destroys his face. There is a poignant line in the film in which the hero says that had he not been so handsome, with his golden hair and blue eyes, the subsequent rejection would not have hurt. Here was Lata with a magical voice and face slightly disfigured by the smallpox she suffered when she was five.
Raj Kapoor shelved the idea, returning to it years later when he made Satyam Shivam Sundaram, with Zeenat Aman playing the Lata role. In an interview years later he spoke about making a film about an ugly girl with a beautiful voice—like beauty and the beast. According to Bharatan, Lata Mangeshkar felt insulted by Raj Kapoor’s choice of Zeenat Aman. The singer thought these were pointed references to her because ‘her vocals had been the inspiration for the Satyam Shivam Sundaram theme, which was first written as Gharonda by Inder Raj Anand’. Unfortunately, while talking about casting Roopa (form), the role Zeenat plays, Raj Kapoor is supposed to have bragged: ‘Give me a girl with big boobs and I will make her an actress.’ Initially he had planned to cast Hema Malini in the lead role: he had acted with her in her debut film Sapnon Ka Saudagar. Lata was not averse to the Dream Girl playing Roopa. ‘What she did not like was the body beautiful theme,’ writes Bharatan. ‘She expected the fusion of emotion and vision, and got fusion of vision and passion.’ She was apparently aghast by the ‘Zeenatizing’ of Satyam Shivam Sundaram.
People forget that Lata Mangeshkar was a sensual being, and not just a disembodied, ethereal voice. She had acted in plays and in movies long before she became a playback singer. In photographs, the young Lata may look tiny, shy and fragile. Yet, hope and ambition stare out of those limpid, sad eyes. She toughened up fast when the mantle of supporting her entire family fell on her with the demise of her father, the actor–singer Dinanath Mangeshkar.
Lata Mangeshkar may have had a weakness for Raj Kapoor. But she was the only woman to make him dance to her tunes. The two fell out over Lata’s levy: 2.5 per cent royalty for her songs from the music companies in addition to the fee Kapoor paid her for each film. Film producers used to get 10 per cent from the music companies. Raj Kapoor used to give half of what he got from HMV to his music director. He believed in a one-time payment to the singer. The problem with Lata arose when Mera Naam Joker was being made: the singer realized that she had not yet been paid for Sangam.
It was a draw; neither of them budged. Raj Kapoor’s nightingale became a prima donna: she kept going abroad for tours. She returned to Raj Kapoor four years later when Bobby was being made. Both Mera Naam Joker and Kal Aaj Aur Kal were commercial flops. Raj Kapoor must have realized that Lata was his talisman: he needed her more than she needed him. Obviously, Raj Kapoor’s infatuation with Vyjanthimala rankled—ironically enough, like Krishna Kapoor, Lata was wearier about Vyjanthimala than Nargis or Padmini. She also resented the danseuse–actress getting all the credit for the Man dole, mera tan dole song sequence in the film Nagin.
Lata Mangeshkar did turn up for the recording session of the final song of Satyam Shivam Sundaram. Unit members recall seeing her sitting in her white Ambassador in the courtyard of Famous Studios—and Raj Kapoor waiting with folded hands by the door. She looked at him and drove off. ‘The look on Lata’s visage as she thus took off was one of score-settling triumph,’ writes Bharatan. Was she still simmering over what she perceived as an insult: the choice of Zeenat Aman with a half-scarred face to play the character that is supposedly based upon her? Whatever, there was no final song in Satyam Shivam Sundaram.
Raj Kapoor and Lata had more in common than music. Both their fathers had been part of travelling theatre groups. Dinanath Mangeshkar’s Marathi play Raj was staged at the Royal Opera House in Bombay. Prithvi Theatres staged their plays there when they were in the city. As children, and later as adolescents, both grew up in the world of greasepaint. She used to sneak off to see movies as a child, as did he. Her first acting role was when she was seven. Raj Kapoor wasn’t much older. Both shared a passion for cricket. Theirs could have been a meeting of the minds as well.
They also had Dilip Kumar in common. The thespian was her rakhi brother, and in a sense a blood brother of Raj Kapoor. What is puzzling is the fact that Raj Kapoor did not make Lata Mangeshkar tie a rakhi on him, as he did with other actresses. Nadira and Nimmi were two of his sisters; in fact he asked Nimmi to become his ‘muhn boli behan’ as soon he cast her in Barsaat. Were his feelings less than brotherly towards the singer whose voice enthralled him and gave him a high?
Raj Kapoor was the high priest of romantic love on the Indian screen. The R.K. logo certainly heralds the fact. Scores of directors— from Subhash Ghai to Karan Johar and Sooraj Barjatya—have been ‘inspired’ by him. But the big question that looms over his romantic interludes and intense love affairs is: Was he just taking notes? Was he in love with his actresses or was it just for the sake of his art? Perhaps Nargis was the only heroine he really loved; his colleagues and friends believe that his only real love was his films, and if there was anyone else he did love, it was Nargis.
Although Raj Kapoor was convinced that he had to be romantically involved with his heroine for a film to work, to do well at the box office, did he really fall in love with his leading ladies? Or did he make himself do so for the sake of verisimilitude, to make the screen sizzle with sexual chemistry? Cynics say that not only did the star pairing off-screen bring the vibes on to the screen, it also brought great publicity—that all-important buzz which is crucial for a film to be commercially successful.
One only has to look at the romantic scenes in the earlier films of this alchemist of screen love. Nargis, Padmini, Vyjanthimala— Raj Kapoor was able to make them glow with an inner light. His heroines don’t look as if they are acting when they gaze into his eyes—something they did not quite achieve in their films with other directors. Whether it is Barsaat, Jis Desh Mein or Sangam, the leading ladies don’t appear to be performing for the camera but for the director. Their respective gazes directed at him are being returned, to which they respond: the astute Raj Kapoor is provoking them. For them, the audience at that particular moment does not exist.
But for the audience it was the shock of the real. Take Barsaat, Kapoor’s first hit. It appealed to the youth because such raw passion had not really been seen on screen before. Referring to the film’s treatment of passion, George writes: ‘His fingers tenderly probing around her mouth, her head tilting in a gesture of total submission, his hands fondly rustling her hair, her eyes catching fire as she looked at him—this was intuitive romancing, honest and unpremeditated, and audiences accustomed to lovers running around trees were enthralled.’
Raj Kapoor’s need for women went beyond romantic love or sex. He was a grabber, a collector of other people’s experiences and emotions. ‘He needed women to replenish his creative juices, to stoke his creative fires,’ says Madhu Malik [a friend of Raj Kapoor’s]. She remembers him telling her that he was ‘a professional emotionalist. He sought friendship with people who had what he called emotional depth. The only reason he got up in the morning was to look for things that he could put in his films’.
Kapoor fell in love with celluloid in his first film. From then on not only did he prise open other people’s hearts and minds in search of fodder for his films, he was always ‘on’, collecting ‘material’ for his films—images, sensations, feelings, emotions, even unpleasant experiences. It isn’t surprising that there was a thin line between the reality of his life and his films. Says Simi Garewal: ‘He loved the emotion of going through a heartbreak, of acting out a scenario from a film.’ It was all grist to his cinematic mill.
Raj Kapoor sought intimacy outside the pale of the family, whether it was with women or men—even casual acquaintances. His obsessive quest for creativity is perhaps one of the reasons he sought intimate friendships with women. The self-confessed ‘professional emotionalist’ reached out to women of all ages and backgrounds. Apparently, he felt the need to do so more intensely after his father died. On his way back from Haridwar after he had immersed his father’s ashes in the Ganga, he stopped in Delhi. Madhu Malik met him at the time and recalls his being ‘obsessed by the very idea of mortality. He seemed very bitter about man’s inability to reproduce. He said that no matter what a man could do, no matter how many films he made or how creative he was, he could not do this’. Obviously, he envied women their ability to bear children, the ultimate act of creativity.
Raj Kapoor was also apprehensive about women, often playing a cat-and-mouse game with them. The director used to tell his friends that a man should never let a woman get power over him. Says Simi Garewal: ‘In this baby style of talk he would say, “Never tell a woman too much, never show her you love her.” He did not trust women too much. He always used to say that the women he cared for would always walk out of his life.’
Much mythology has been spun around Raj Kapoor’s women in white. The man liked everything white—from gajras, mogras and tuberoses to white furniture and clothes. There is some irony in the colour: brides wear white in the Christian tradition, but according to Hindu custom it is the colour of mourning. Raj Kapoor may have loved more than one woman but in the end he reserved his fidelity for his films. His women inevitably ended up R.K. banner widows.
Extracted from The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema.