At Raj Kapoor centenary event, a celebration of his rich cinematic legacy and his famous family

Raj Kapoor’s centenary will be celebrated in a manner befitting the actor and filmmaker who was the original showman of Hindi cinema. A day before Kapoor’s birth anniversary on December 14, 1924, members of his vast family will gather in Mumbai for the inauguration of a retrospective of 10 films produced by his banner RK Films.

The movies will be shown between December 13 and 15 at PVR-Inox and Cinepolis theatres across India. The programme includes Kapoor’s directorial debut Aag in 1948 and his final film Ram Teri Ganga Maili, made three years before his death in 1988.

Also in the retrospective are titles from the Golden Era of Hindi cinema. In the 1950s, working alongside Guru Dutt, Mehboob Khan and Bimal Roy, Kapoor made the classics Awara (1951), Shree 420 (1955) and Jagte Raho (1956). His first commercial success, Barsaat, in which he was paired with Nargis, had been released in 1949.

The films that will also be shown are Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai (1960) – which Kapoor produced for his cinematographer Radhu Karmakar – Kapoor’s first colour film Sangam (1964), his Limelight-inspired Mera Naam Joker (1970) and the teen romance Bobby (1973), starring Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia.

The event has been organised by RK Films, Film Heritage Foundation, NFDC-National Film Archive of India and the PVR-Inox and Cinepolis chains. “Raj Kapoor had an all-consuming passion for cinema,” Film Heritage Foundation founder Shivendra Singh Dungarpur said in a press statement. “His unforgettable avatar as a tramp that embodied the common man and till has last film he remained a great showman.”

Kapoor’s early films are suffused with socialist values, the individual’s struggle against social orthodoxies, and the throb of young love. Kapoor – who also acted in films outside his company – formed with Nargis one of the most iconic screen pairings in Indian cinema, unusual for its modernity and memorable for its portrayal of romantic passion. He also had one of the sharpest ears for music – some of the greatest songs are from RK Films productions.

Beginning in the 1960s, Kapoor veered towards ideas around relationships, sensuality and the conflict between the artist and the world.

“Raj Kapoor’s philosophy, as observed through his work, was a relationship with the living environment around us,” his daughter Ritu Nanda writes in Raj Kapoor, which includes Kapoor’s thoughts on his craft. “Here are a few examples. The young man trying to negotiate his free will with reality and truth in Aag, Aah, Awara, Shree 420. The value of human relationships in Barsaat, Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai and Sangam. The supremacy of spiritual being over a perceptual life in Satyam Shivam Sundaram. The vanity of customs and rituals in Prem Rog and his most enduring work, the futility of confining love in Mera Naam Joker.”

The centenary event is a reminder not just of Kapoor’s legacy, but also the contributions of four generations of his family to the Hindi film industry. Kareena Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor are the current stars from the latest generation who continue the work that began with their great-grandfather, Prithviraj Kapoor, in the 1920s. Over the decades, marital unions with the Bachchans, the Pataudis and the Bhatts have added branches to the family tree.

In The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema, Madhu Jain writes that the clan spans almost a century of cinema itself. “The Kapoor family is unique in the history of cinema, Indian or international,” Jain says. “You would need two sets of hands and more to count the number of actors and directors in the Kapoor family tree. In quantifiable terms, no film dynasty even begins to approach the Kapoors. The only dynasty (excluding monarchies) comparable to the Kapoors in this respect is a political one – the Kennedys.”

Efforts to get a retrospective off the ground began a couple of years ago, Kunal Kapoor told Scroll. As the son of Raj Kapoor’s brother, the actor and producer Shashi Kapoor, Kunal Kapoor is a custodian not just of RK Films but also Shashi Kapoor’s production company Film Valas. The banner produced six films: Junoon (1979), Kalyug (1981), 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981), Vijeta (1982), Utsav (1984) and Ajooba (1990).

“I realised some years back that the negatives of my father’s films were in dire straits and needed to be restored,” said Kunal Kapoor, who is an advertising filmmaker and also manages Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai, set up his parents Shashi and Jennifer Kapoor. “I brought this up at a family gathering one-and-a-half years ago, saying, your father and my uncle have made some amazing films. We better do something about them.”

Prints of RK Films productions had been deposited at the National Film Archive of India in Pune, and a few of them had been restored too. However, Kunal Kapoor was dissatisfied with the quality of the restoration.

“At some point, the government sanctioned a good amount of money for the preservation and restoration of Indian cinema that was at the archive,” he said. “They went ahead and did things on their own without consulting the families that owned the rights to these films. It came to our notice that they had submitted Awara to Cannes last year, which was rejected because of the quality of the restoration. Raj Kapoor’s films have actually been shown at Cannes in the past. It was a big source of embarrassment, not only to the family, but also to the government. So the family agreed to get in on the act.”

Once the decision was taken to organise the centenary, Kunal Kapoor personally supervised improvements on the sound and picture quality of the restored prints. The Kapoor have footed the bill for the centenary, keen that the classics be seen in theatres, where they belong.

“It’s rare to be able to marry your work and your passion and also be successful at it,” Kunal Kapoor observed about his family’s unique place in cinema. “Each one of us has reached different levels of success, but that doesn’t mean that all us don’t work or are not passionate.”

This too is Kapoor tradition: Prithviraj Kapoor famously put his sons through the grind at his theatre group, encouraging them to learn all aspects of the craft before they discovered their own specialisation.

“Our generation is standing on the shoulders of a giant whose every film spoke of the time that it was made and was the voice of the common man over decades, Ranbir Kapoor said in a press statement. “His stories are more than just films; they are powerful, emotional journeys that connect generations of viewers.”

Ranbir Kapoor played a big role in persuading the other family members, Kunal Kapoor said. “Ranbir told the family, I’m now a father – and I think this is what triggered it – and the next generation has no clue about its heritage, so it needs to be preserved.”

Ranbir Kapoor first spoke of his grandfather’s legacy at the International Film Festival of India in November. The movie star told Rahul Rawail, the filmmaker and author of Raj Kapoor – The Master at Work: “Raj Kapoor was Raj Kapoor because he didn't follow any model. I think that if you want to carry any legacy forward, you have to approach it in a very individualist way.”

In a similar manner, Shashi Kapoor too forged his own path, both as an actor and a producer. He was one of India’s earliest crossover actors, appearing in English-language films for director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant since the early 1960s. One of the Merchant-Ivory films, Shakespeare Wallah (1965), is a fictionalised account of the touring company set up by Jennifer Kapoor’s parents, Geoffrey Kendal and Laura Liddell.

“My parents started in theatre and they never lost the plot,” Kunal Kapoor said. “If you look at the early films my father did, they were different, whether it was Char Diwari or Waqt or Dharmaputra. The reason he started working in commercial films was to make money.”

Whether it’s the Raj Kapoor titles or the Film Valas movies, getting a good price for culturally significant but older productions is a challenge, Kunal Kapoor observed.

“People aren’t willing to pay for heritage. That’s not unique to India. What is unique to us is that there are no venues. You can go to New York, Paris and London and show such films in small single-screen cinemas. The decision to go in for restoration isn’t a commercial one – you’re not going to recover money from it. It’s a question of preserving an archive and a cinematic heritage.”