by JAWED NAQVI
“Everyone acts every day of their lives,” said Marlon Brando. Think about it. The air hostess acts with her plastic smile. The politician acts with his double-faced lies. The shopkeeper. The banker. Spouses, siblings, offspring, junior clerks and executives.
They all act according to Brando’s definition of acting. Opposition parties in India claim Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also an actor, albeit a bad one. Bear that in mind, as we look at his meeting last week in Delhi with a bunch of Raj Kapoor’s grandchildren and their partners, nearly all involved in moviemaking.
It was an odd assembly since Modi patronises communal movies and Raj Kapoor’s films were secular at the very least. It was the high point, the visitors told Modi of the celebrations they were holding for the late actor-director’s 100th birthday. Kapoor was born in Peshawar on Dec 14, 1924, to India’s pioneering theatre and movie actor Prithviraj Kapoor.
To mark the occasion, two of Raj Kapoor’s great-grandsons were making a documentary on the legend who they had otherwise never met. Modi, not known to miss an opportunity to play the teacher, applauded their zeal for sifting fact from fiction, which he told them was always rewarding. He also confided to the lump-in-their-throats, starry-eyed visitors how he heard Raj Kapoor songs in China. Their jaws dropped but with apparently feigned surprise.
Most of those in the meeting with Modi were not born when Prithviraj Kapoor, Raj Kapoor’s father, played Emperor Akbar in a fabled movie depicting Hindu-Muslim bonhomie under the Muslims from Ferghana. The 1961 movie Mughal-i-Azam was a remarkable feat of conjuring a script about a love story linked to the Mughal era while underscoring in no small way the Gandhian-Nehruvian idea of Hindu-Muslim unity. It is rather tricky to imagine the idea of India without Hindu Rajputs supporting Mughal rule, but dare the visitors mention their grandfather’s memorable performance to Modi?
Raj Kapoor’s movies were often plied with maudlin mush but they never wavered from secular values.
Raj Kapoor’s movies were often plied with maudlin mush but they never wavered from deeply held secular values on which Nehruvian India was founded. Often enough, his stories etched on the silver screen India’s egalitarian dreams for the masses, which they applauded. There were, of course, other dedicated men and women working in front of the camera and behind it. Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand together with Raj Kapoor were the ruling trinity of actors for decades. One could add Moti Lal, Balraj Sahni and A.K. Hangal among the older lot with a social perspective.
With other hallmarks of their work, they scrupulously shunned movies that insulted communities, be they Pakistanis or Indian minorities. In Bengal, for example, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen and Satyajit Ray created a genre of socially critical films whose aesthetics and craft rivalled the best in the field, globally. Ghatak, in particular, took bold and sensitive themes, which in another director’s hands could easily fall into the communal claptrap. The three heartbreaking melodramas built around the partitioning of Bengal — The Cloud-Capped Star, The Golden Line and E-Flat — are together sometimes referred to as Ghatak’s “partition trilogy”.
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