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One of the most popular films of all time in India, 19 January 2003
Author:
Howard Schumann from Vancouver, B.C.
Musicals in America in their heyday were mostly about the lives of prominent
show business personalities or small town middle class Americana, never
about the outcast or the urban slum dweller. This is not the case with the
films of Indian director, Raj Kapoor, especially in Awaara, a 1951 film and
the later Boot Polish. These films call attention to the less fortunate and,
in the case of Awaara, the vagabond whose life of crime is the inevitable
outcome of growing up in the slums.
In Awaara, Kapoor's real father (Prithviraj Kapoor) plays a heartless judge
who accuses his pregnant wife (Leela Chitnis) of infidelity after she was
kidnapped by bandits and throws her out of his home (the logic of this
eludes me since she was already pregnant when kidnapped). The stern judge
staunchly believes that a thief's son will always be a thief and a good
man's son will always turn out good. In a series of flashbacks, the film
dramatizes the unfortunate consequences of this belief system. Raju, played
by the director Raj Kapoor as an adult and by his brother Sashi Kapoor as a
child, is born on the streets and grows up in the slums.
Under the guidance of a ruthless bandit named Jagga (K. N. Singh), he turns
to stealing to help support his mother. Raj has little to comfort him except
for a picture hanging on the bare walls of his house of Rita, his childhood
sweetheart played by the stunning Nargis, a real life lover of Kapoor. The
romance between Raj and Rita is one of the central motifs of the film and
the chemistry between the two is electric. This is especially evident in the
boat scene where she performs an exotic dance to the Dum Bhar song, and
after she calls him a junglee (savage) and he slaps her in an incident that
serves to bring them closer together.
Raju, the tramp, is forced to live on his wits but does so with humor and a
Chaplinesque charm. When he finds out the true circumstances of his
childhood, however, he sets out to get revenge against his father, the
judge, and ends up facing a charge of attempted murder in the judge's own
courtroom. Rita, a lawyer herself, defends him as she promised she would
years ago. She puts the judge on the witness stand and asks pointed
questions about how he condemned his wife and child to a lifetime of
poverty. Rita holds him and society responsible for the conditions that led
Raju to commit his crime and asks the judge to forgive him and admit that
Raju is his son. Raju, in turn, offers an impassioned plea to the court to
punish him as a criminal but not to neglect the conditions that gave rise to
his life of crime. In the end, a very moving scene of attempted
reconciliation between father and son had me wiping away the tears.
Awaara is reminiscent of both 40s film-noir with its dark cobblestone
streets and menacing shadows and, in its social conscience, of the great
Italian neo-realists like de Sica. But basically, Awaara is still in the
Bollywood tradition; that means drama, romance, music, comedy, and action --
all put together in a total package to appeal to a wide audience. With great
songs and dances, amazing dream sequences, style and panache, strong drama,
and an inspiring message, it is not surprising that Awaara became one of the
most popular films in Indian cinematic history. It is one of my favorites as
well.
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