“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”.

A movie in which Shashi Kapoor, Raj’s younger brother, plays the negative role of a Hindu nationalist, Dharmputra, was in fact a bold and frontal critique of narrow nationalism. Shashi Kapoor played a Muslim boy raised as a Hindu in the backdrop of the partition, who grows up to unknowingly target his Muslim parents with a hateful notion of nationalism. Most among the younger movie buffs may not even be aware of the 1961 sensation filmed by B.R. Chopra.

Perhaps more than Raj Kapoor’s stories, it was the songs penned by a bevy of leftist poets he lip-synced that made him a household name. Raj Kapoor was particularly loved in the USSR and the Russians crooned his songs to their own delight.

There’s a good reason to feel worried by this strange meeting of the Kapoor household not least as they admitted to admiring the ‘spirit’ and ‘energy’ they saw in the exalted leader even though his rule routinely incurs censure from UN human rights bodies and European watchdogs.

Should we dismiss Kapoor’s daughter Rima Jain and daughter-in-law Neetu Singh ushering their children into Modi’s presence as a sign of the times? After all, US corporate leaders, among them heads of Apple and Amazon, are wooing Donald Trump although he was not ideally their lodestar. But the birthday offers an occasion to reminisce about the hoary past of the Indian cinema.

Upon India gaining independence, it devolved on the vivified and hurting country’s intelligentsia to help heal and shepherd the new nation broadly along the multicultural path prescribed by Gandhi and Nehru. The young film fraternity stepped up to make crucial contributions to nation-building, wooing moviegoers with creative scripts embellished with lilting music. They put the lens on India’s social maladies and poverty while celebrating inclusiveness.

Raj Kapoor made several commercially successful movies that were praised for their progressive storylines and anti-establishment themes. He was enabled in this endeavour by communist lyricists like Shailendra, Sahir Ludhianvi and Majrooh Sultanpuri. They were helped in the enterprise by script writers from the Indian People’s Theatre Association, then a vibrant leftist platform. Khwaja Ahmed Abbas who wrote the stories and scripts for many of Raj Kapoor’s timeless classics was a founding member of the Progressive Writers Association.

Modi favourably mentioned Raj Kapoor’s movie Phir Subah Hogi to the young visitors. The movie is inspired by Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment.

As the meeting progressed, a businessman close to Modi was eyeing land on which a Mumbai slum pulsates. Given the widespread land grab, Sahir’s song filmed on Raj Kapoor comes alive. “Jitni bhi building-ein theen, sethon ne baat li hain/ Footpath Bambai ke hain aashiyan hamara.” Too many people, it seems, are putting up with their lot. In doing so, they may be proving Brando right.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, December 17th, 2024