Ranbir Raj arrives in 1950s Bombay on foot. A babe in the woods, he carries little except his BA certificate and a gold medal he received for imandari (integrity). Wide-eyed, he stands under a Coca-Cola billboard, cocooned in an English suit unwashed from his weary journey, Japanese shoes scrubbed out, thread loosened by the barely paved roads, a Russian hat, an Indian heart.

To make ends meet, our man of globalised surface and localised heart pawns this medal of imandari, but Shree 420 (1955), a film which paints in bold and bald allusive strokes, nudges at his integrity being on sale, too. Will the innocent man, played by Raj Kapoor—a sharp nod to Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, his derby hat, toothbrush moustache, and rickety joints—hack it in the ruthless city?

Will the city change him? Or, as Kapoor and the writer K.A. Abbas provoke with Nehruvian idealism, will he change the city?

Loss of joy

These questions haunt the opening stretches ofShree 420, Kapoor’s fourth and most emotionally pointed film as director, exemplifying best an idea that he keeps toying around with—innocence, as in the sense of wonder that lets you run amok, feeling safe, but also in the sense of being without blame, sans harm, what the poet Carl Phillips conceives as “innocence—of disappointment, still/clean”.

Raj meets Vidya (Nargis), a poor schoolteacher with enamel-hard morals, and immediately falls in love. He meets Maya (Nadira), a rich lady with an eye for spoils, and immediately trips into vice. Creeping up the ladder of easy comforts and loose morals, Raj loses sight of himself. At one point, dressed in a spiffy suit, he looks into a mirror and sees his older tramp self, smoked in dirt, smiling. Innocence and joy might be quenched in the same watering hole. Having swapped the messy and communal dance among the homeless for the sterile ball dance of the moneyed, this loss of innocence that Raj suffers is framed as a loss of joy.

Also Read | The showman who accidentally documented India’s soul

The allusive burden of a man stuck between Vidya or “knowledge” and Maya or “illusion” keeps the film’s tightly wound strings plucked. Raj’s climactic return to himself—that worn out coat, shoes, hat—is a return to innocence, choosing Vidya, picking knowledge. Dialogues are written such that you could be speaking about Vidya the person and vidya the ideal; imaan the physical object and its representation as one thing—the material and the ideal pooling their wares together.

This triumphant cinema lays its subtext so textually that it sheds that subtextual quality entirely. Similarly, Kapoor’s last film, Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), follows Ganga as she makes her way from the Gangotri glacier to get maili (sullied) as she reaches the plains—I speak of Ganga the character played by Mandakini in the same breath as I imagine the river, dredged up in the cities’ excretions.

The famous “Mudh mudh ke na dekh” song from Shree 420. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

The innocence in Shree 420, though, goes against the grain of how most people conceive of the word—this is a knowing innocence. In Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music, Amit Chaudhuri recollects an argument he had with an older man regarding William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Chaudhuri was fired by the engines of intuition even if it burnt his arguments. The youth regenerates.

He was convinced that despite coming chronologically first, the songs of innocence were written after the songs of experience. Factually, this is not true. Chaudhuri knows this, but he persists with this hunch. In that throwaway philosophical naivete, he wonders, “You only arrive at the simplicity and calm of innocence after experience, not before it”; that innocence is borne out of experience, and does not precede it.

A framework that flips life on its head, it asks us to look at Raj’s innocence not as someone who is yet to be blemished by the world, who needs to be protected, but as someone, who having experienced the world’s blemishing, emerged unstained. His innocence is not a beginning, but an end, whose mettle has been fired at in the kilns, and tested.

Anti-capitalist innocence

At the outset of Shree 420, when trying to take a lift from a rich merchant, Raj pretends to have fainted, and when caught and chastised, he notes, “Jhoot bolne se hi to badhiya car mein baithne ko milta hai” (It is only by telling lies that I get to sit inside such a luxurious car). This is not naivete. He knows the world’s ways. The film insists here that his garrulous, quick-witted mouth and lovesick, wide-open eyes have not been airdropped into this world. He has lived before. He knows.

He does not have to discover the world is evil and retreat. His discovery in the big city, Bombay, is how easy it is to get caught in the world’s evil, to then learn the lesson and retreat from its talon-grip. I say “retreat”, but this return to innocence is not a monastic vision of retreating from the world.

John chacha in Boot Polish (1954) teaches the kids the importance of respectability in one’s job. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Progressive journalist, screenwriter, and outspoken communist K.A. Abbas, who frequently collaborated with Kapoor, writes: “In my mind Raj Kapoor is like an engine, and I felt that if this engine could be connected to the right vehicle, it would spread my views far and wide.”

These views were not of renunciation but of a socialist state. At the end of Shree 420, having realised how easy it is to get tainted by the city, Raj hits the road, dressed again as the tramp. But Vidya calls him, and drags him back to the city, and shows him what he made of it—having mobilised the public, the city is now bursting with public housing for the homeless. Against this background, their silhouettes glow. It is not a retreat from the ruthless city, but a return to a transformed, once-ruthless city. Yes, Raj had an arc. So does Bombay.

This innocence is also anti-capitalist—for often in Kapoor’s films the conflation of material impoverishment with moral virtue rears its head. To be rich is to optimise, and the moment you optimise for anything in life, you have lost joy, lost innocence.

Nehruvian ideals

Take John chacha in Boot Polish (1954), a film that Kapoor allegedly took creative control over—a bootlegger with a heart of gold who, by taking the two orphans under his wing, becomes a paragon of Kapoor’s innocence. He teaches the kids the importance of respectability in one’s job. “Bheek mat do. Kaam do” (Don’t give alms, give jobs) he tells the people dripped in gold who are donating money to the poor. He advises the two children to not beg, to find other means.

As someone who is himself in a disreputable line of work, with constant anxiety about a police arrest, he knows what respectability brings to the table. But what the character also makes clear is the distinction between goodness and respectability.

In a world that constantly demands your humiliation, as Awara (1951) makes clear, hold on to what is good in you. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

By all means a good human being performing disreputable labour, John chacha exemplifies Nehruvian India’s desire for respect as one separate from goodness. In a world that constantly demands your humiliation, as Awara (1951) makes clear, hold on to what is good in you.

The innocent character, then, is one who values goodness over respectability, even if he never gives up on the dreams of respectable labour. It is why Awara’s Raju, a vagabond and small-time thief, registers as innocent, even as he slashes pockets with the grin of a slippery kid, and eventually murders thugs and assaults his high-strung father who left his mother out to dry. His innocence is a moral but not a legal victory in the film, which begins and ends as a court drama. Spared from being executed, he is jailed for three years. But that is not the film’s justice—the justice is Raju’s release and his union with his lover, Rita. That is his arc.

The loss of innocence is when a character allows this desire for respectability—which could mean money and power—to eclipse the moral demands made from the character—to be kind, helpful, and in a world where spreading joy is a virtue. The provocation of Kapoor’s films is that sometimes the two desires might be opposed to each other. You cannot be both respectable and innocent.

In Kapoor’s cinema, bad actions are profit-mongering ones, evil tied to fortune. Bad actions done by the poor—such as thieving—are so deeply contextualised that they shed their “badness”. There is something morally compromised at worst and joyless at best about being moneyed: the lawyer in Awara eating dinner on the lonesome long table; the businesspeople in Shree 420 partying and swindling each other; the politician and industrialist in Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985) trying to make a quick buck off the river’s pollution, but also, literally, sullying Ganga the character by holding her hostage to their carnal desire; and the land-owning thakur in Prem Rog (1982).

The innocent figure, thus, works as a foil to the respectable or the ambitious one who never looks back and is in constant pursuit—fragile and wiry. “Mudh mudh ke na dekh” (Don’t look back), Maya sings to Raj.

You can faintly hear Kapoor’s cinema whisper in your ears: can you be both ambitious and innocent? Can you optimise for profits and love?

In 1948, at the spindly age of 24, Raj Kapoor not only began his own banner, RK Films, but also made his directorial debut, Aag. At that time he was known as “Raju” the hustler about town or “the elder son of Prithviraj” the towering theatre personality of Mumbai. The arc of Kapoor’s five-decade career, his becoming the Showman of Hindi Cinema, was an act of retrieving himself from his father’s shadow, a theme that keeps rising in his films until youth itself becomes synonymous with the shrugging off of received legacy.

In Aag, Kewal (Raj Kapoor) leaves his family tradition of lawyers, to become a stage actor. In Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), his last film, Naren (Rajiv Kapoor, Raj Kapoor’s youngest son) leaves his industrialist father to go “kahin door”, somewhere far off, by the banks of the Ganga, with his lover and their child.

Raj Kapoor and Vyjayantimala Bali in Sangam. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

Here, I must caution a difference between innocence and naivete. If to be innocent is to be unblemished by the world, to be naive is to not know blemish, to be ignorant of it. The broad arc in Raj Kapoor’s cinema can be seen as the movement from the innocent male to the naive one. This might be because as Kapoor’s filmography ages, his actors—his sons Rishi Kapoor and Rajiv Kapoor, and his brother Shashi Kapoor—look embryonic, smooth-skinned, wide-eyed, without facial hair. The first time they see a beautiful woman in the film feels like the first time they have ever seen beauty. The first time they hear a beautiful song, their response is pronounced with heightened, dopey feeling, as though they have discovered melody. The face of Raj Kapoor, after all, looked touched by life—he had a moustache. These faces look touched up, air-dropped.

But I also suspect this male naivete has a lot to do with how desire was shown in these later movies, whispers from Mera Naam Joker (1970) and Bobby (1973), expressing itself most egregiously in his final three films, Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978), Prem Rog (1982), and Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), where women withered as suffering symbols of sexed tradition, who yearn to be cast out and punished, losing their sense of self at the feet of their lover.

In the 1950s, working exclusively with Nargis, the imagery of women in Kapoor’s films was saree-clad virtue. Whether they were poor in Shree 420 or rich in Awara, there was no scope for moral dithering or erotic fixation. Even when Nargis wore a swimsuit in Awara—shot indoors in a set constructed on Nargis’ demand, for she refused to be outdoors in a swimsuit—Rachel Dwyer notes, “the close up [is] of her face with her hair blowing in the wind, not one of her body.”

Enter voyeurism

But soon, with Nargis’ exit from Kapoor’s oeuvre, a voyeurism enters Kapoor’s cinema. Although Vyjayantimala’s scene in a swimsuit in Sangam (1964) only came after much cajoling, Kapoor seems disturbingly fixated on the idea of the exposed female body. In Bobby and Mera Naam Joker, these were used to fuel the men’s first brush of desire—“pandrah-solah baras vala pyaar”, the love of an adolescent, basically a hormonal surge.

But from Mera Naam Joker onwards, these sexualised female bodies performed by freshly minted actresses could not muster what Michael Newton calls Nargis’ “spontaneity of feeling”. And a stilted, staged, sexed presence begins to permeate these films.

Kapoor seems disturbingly fixated on the idea of the exposed female body after Nargis’ exit from Kapoor’s oeuvre. Here, a still from Satyam Shivam Sundaram. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

The women became forcefully buxom, and the chemistry between the lovers refuses to see it as erotic, only romantic. If only the writing were as frank as the wardrobe. Why is there this chasm between what we are seeing and what we are hearing? Raj Kapoor still wanted to hold onto the mantle of tradition even as he called himself a “bosom man” in a conversation with the writer Khushwant Singh. The woman became the site of pavitrata (purity) for the people on screen and the object of lust for us off-screen—he wanted it both ways. What is this purity he is after, an idea that is itself tainted by generations of de-sexualising women?

Besides, these women do not seem aware of themselves as sexualised objects, for there is an abandon that comes with self-knowledge that these women lack. The erotics is for us, the audience, to salivate over.

Also Read | Awara and the Constitutional question

When Zeenat Aman writes about the furore around Satyam Shivam Sundaram where she walks about wrapped in a white cloth or in tight low-cut blouses—“I was always quite amused by the accusations of obscenity as I did not and do not find anything obscene about the human body”—she is responding to the image in isolation. The human body is a site of desire. But when it is hollowed solely into a site of desire, that is uncomfortable to watch, like watching a shapely mannequin being eroticised.

How do you respond to these women, over-sexed traditionalists who will caress the shivling with their face in an act of devotion, come to pujas in bursting blouses, shower under waterfalls in white wraparounds, are constantly burned, assaulted, raped, thrown into brothels? It turns the men into saviours who turn their backs on their families and their future to hold on to love as a sacred solution to all of society’s ills.

The male actor, then, has to be turned into a naive lover, unaware of how these sexed bodies are being looked at, unaware of how it will be made maili or sullied by the world. If they respond to the erotic body erotically, it might come off as sleazy. A man cannot say to a woman, I want to have sex with you. He has to talk about her “tan ki sundarta”, the body’s beauty. In some ways, words construct meaning. But elsewhere, they seem to leach meaning. The more they say the less they mean, these joyless puppets in the fag end of Kapoor’s cinema that once showed us what innocence looked like.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.