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.
