Show People by Michael Newton

Author:Michael Newton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

21

NARGIS AND RAJ KAPOOR:

MY HEART IS HINDUSTANI

Few star couples were as closely bound up in their public’s imagination as were Raj Kapoor and Nargis, formative stars of the Indian film industry in the 1940s and ’50s. He was her co-star, her director and, it would appear, her lover. The films expressed their intimacy, something also remarked upon in interviews, while they also publicly denied that anything ‘romantic’ was going on; they presented themselves as purely ‘close’, just good friends.1 In reality they were in love, with Nargis eager to marry Kapoor, while Kapoor, who was already married, hedged his bets and hesitated.2 He declared that his wife was his wife, while Nargis was his actress. There was a daring in their being clandestinely together that was only permissible for great stars, if it were even permissible for them; Nargis’s brother, Akhtar Hussain, reportedly beat her in an unsuccessful effort to end the two stars’ relationship.3

Nargis and Kapoor were likely already lovers before they first acted together in Aag (1948), directed by Kapoor; in all they would make seventeen films together. Though she had made many other films before she worked with Kapoor, and also played alongside Indian cinema’s ‘tragedy king’, Dilip Kumar, it may seem that for a while Nargis allowed her career to fall into second place in relation to Kapoor’s. In fact, she was just as much of a draw as he was and regularly had higher billing and wages than the men with whom she worked.4

Both Nargis and Kapoor began their careers as people who had been born into the world of films. Kapoor’s father, Prithviraj Kapoor (1906–1972), was his mentor at first; as we will see, in Awāra Prithviraj played his real-life son’s on-screen father. Nargis was only six years old or so when she made her debut in film. Nargis’s mother, Jaddan-bāi, as a kothewali, belonged to the world of the professional singer and courtesan, and was herself a significant film actor; in time her mother’s life would colour audiences’ responses to the daughter’s on-screen persona and, more especially, to her off-screen self; respectability would always elude her.5 Nargis went to the elite St Mary’s school in Bombay and had ambitions to become a doctor, before she was waylaid by cinema – and her mother’s plans for her.6 It has even been suggested that her mother sold her daughter’s virginity to a Muslim prince.7 In the 1940s, when Nargis and Kapoor achieved stardom, one strong element in their appeal was the fact of their youth, which was as central to Kapoor as producer, actor and director as it had been to his role model Charlie Chaplin or to Orson Welles. Working with Kapoor was the first time that Nargis had a director of more or less her own age. Being young, they expressed the vibrant hopes of a new nation. Meanwhile, Nargis’s vital ability was to enact an extraordinary spontaneity of feeling on film and to stand at once in the audience’s mind for opposed and contradictory ideas, possessing especially the ability to seem both ‘modern yet pure’.

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