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Raj Kapoor - Bio Graphy
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]LIKE GURU DUTT, RAJ KAPOOR TOO WAS ANGUISHED BY AN iniquitous, inequitable world order. The tramp's world was also a far-far cry from Utopia, with its class distinctions, its murky moral code and its crass commercialisation. Here, in such an awry clime, the status of the common man is almost similar to the street dog who is kicked off from the main highways, whenever he dares to walk on them. One of the most recurrent images in his films is that of the tramp and the mongrel sitting together on the pavement in shared rejection.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]In Shri 420, too, he aligns himself with the dehumanised down and outs who live behind the glare of Bombay's glittering skyline. With his tattered shoes, patched trousers and pocketful of dreams, he strikes an instant rapport with the city scum. A banana-seller becomes his foster-mother and a plebeian schoolteacher (Nargis) his betrothed. Raj Kapoor's penchant for proletarian woes was like his outward tramp-like appearance. Totally Chaplinesque. For Chaplin, the proletarian may be the man who is hungry and the representations of hunger may be epic in his films: excessive size of sandwiches, rivers of milk, cartfuls of fruit tossed carelessly aside, untouched. Nevertheless, despite being ensnared in his starvation, the Chaplin Man is always just below political awareness. Roland Barthes elucidates: "Historically, Man, according to Chaplin, roughly corresponds to the worker of the French Restoration, rebelling against machines, at a loss before strikes, fascinated by the problem of bread-winning (in the literal sense of the word), but as yet unable to reach a knowledge of political causes and an insistence on a collective strategy." [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Raj Kapoor's tramp was also a political animal who cried out against destitution and the inequitable distribution of wealth. But he did not hold political-economic systems responsible for this. With him, rebellion grew soft, gentle and hence easily containable, even though the underdog was stationed centrestage. For Kapoor's underdog may be poor, yet he was happy and full of buoyant life. And once the downtown ramblings were complete, the identification with the down and outs was also done away with. In Awara, when the first opportunity of a class transfer looms ahead, Raju, the bourgeois-basher, becomes the biggest bourgeois of them all. At the end of the our-class-their-class diatribe, the vagrant realises that he is actually the lost son of the city's stuffy, aristocratic judge, Raghunath (Prithviraj Kapoor). The very same one who frowned upon the fringe people and believed in the Nietzschian concept of men and supermen, of bad blood and blue blood, of kings and common men. Thus, the first opportunity that comes his way, Raju moves upwards and finds a comfortable niche for himself in the gilded family hearth, unmindful of all vagabonds, tramps, street dogs, the unwanted and the dispossessed.[/FONT]
