“Mohabbat kaise karte hai, Zamane ko dikhana hai (We must show the world, how to love)” sings Rishi Kapoor in Zamane Ko Dikhana Hai (1981, Nasir Hussain). For those coming-of-age in the 1970s and 1980s, Rishi Kapoor was the stylish pop-cultural practitioner of love par excellence. In his ambitious film, Mera Naan Joker (1970) Raj Kapoor cast his 15-year-old son as an awkward teenager who is romantically and sexually drawn to Mary (Simi Garewal), a teacher who is older in age and engaged to marry another man. What makes the unrequited romance particularly audacious is that Mary acknowledges the love with feeling.
In Bobby (Raj Kapoor, 1970), Rishi Kapoor played Raj, a wealthy collegiate who falls in love with Bobby Braganza (Dimple Kapadia) across the rifts of class and religion. The film’s spectacular success turned Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia into overnight sensations. Notwithstanding Bobby’s extraordinary success, a number of Rishi Kapoor’s subsequent films flopped but they helped shape his emerging star persona and popular iconography.
The two decades most commonly associated with Amitabh Bachchan’s angry-young-man films, was also the time that Rishi Kapoor was performing his cinematic experiments with love. This included explorations with polyamory, however explicit or muted, in films like Kabhie Kabhie (Yash Chopra, 1976), Doosra Aadmi (Ramesh Talwar,1977), Hum Kisise Kum Nahin (1977), Tawaif (B.R. Chopra, 1985), Naqab (Raj Khosla,1989), Henna (Randhir Kapoor, 1991) and most notably Ek Chadar Mailisi (Sukhwant Dhadda, 1986) a quasi art-house film that established his credentials as a skilled and versatile actor.
Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh in ‘Kabhie Kabhie’ (1976) Photo: IMDB
In the era of single-screen theatres, films were made for a pan-Indian audience that cut across regions, religions, ethnicities, caste, class and gender. To be popular with such a heterogeneous audience, Bombay films, to quote Ashis Nandy, had to be “everything to everyone”. A majority of films were iterations of pre-established themes (or formulas) and audience expectations were driven by how well or badly these patterns were revisited. Stardom is always tied to the aspirations of the times.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the cinematic world of Rishi Kapoor was driven by the intoxications of music, dance, style and youthful energy. Bars, night-clubs, hotels and discos are no longer the preserve of the villain. Nor are the characters played by Rishi Kapoor apologetic about on-screen smoking and drinking. This permission extends to other addictions. In Amar, Akbar Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977) and Tawaif, pan and pan-masala become extensions of his fashion ensemble.
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Like the films of the 1960s, Kashmir and other picturesque hill-stations become the favoured destination for lovers; an escape from parental surveillance and other societal constraints. In Bobby, the teenage lovers defy parental opposition by running away and attempting to kill themselves only to be rescued by their repentant fathers.
In the defining love stories of the ‘70s and ‘80s, the lovers live or die in defiance of familial opposition. This longstanding tradition of privileging romantic love over family duty and authority is ruptured in the 1990s by Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (Sooraj Barjatya, 1994) and Dilwale Dujaniya Lejayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995). The two films are replete with pleasurable offerings but a rejection of patriarchal authority and family privilege is not among them.
In Zamane ko Dikhana Hai, Ravi (Rishi Kapoor) and Kanchan (Padmini Kohlapure) get drunk and end up spending a night in a hotel room. In the morning, Ravi claims he has been ravished by Kanchan and robbed of his honour at the prime of youth. “No one will ever trust a damsel in distress” he wails. In this parodic inversion, Kanchan’s moral dilemma is fleeting.
More than a decade later, a corrective is issued. After a night of drunken revelry in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Raj (Shah Rukh Khan) tells Simran (Kajol) that they had made love at night. Simran starts crying in earnest. A contrite Raj tells her: “I am a Hindustani and I know what honour means for Hindustani woman. Not even in my dreams can I imagine doing that to you.” In the globalising 1990s, the Bollywood hero assumes moral superiority through a mythic imagination of Euro-American men (colour notwithstanding) as rapacious, potential rapists. Among the films that fall prey to this unfortunate xenophobia is ironically Aa Ab Laut Chale (1998), Rishi Kapoor’s misguided directorial venture.
Rishi Kapoor became a star when terms like gay, lesbian or trans were yet to emerge but he starred in a film that gave visibility to that unnamed marginality now known as queer. Inspired by Billy Wilder’s classic film Some Like It Hot (1959), Rafoo Chakkar (Narendra Bedi, 1975), is about two struggling musicians Dev (Rishi Kapoor) and Salim (Paintal) who play in wedding bands. When an accidental witnessing of a murder puts their lives at risk, they join a women’s dance troupe and escape to Kashmir. The musical and cross-dressing talents of Divya (Rishi Kapoor) and Salma (Paintal) make them popular members of the troupe who get to perform some of the film’s best-loved songs.
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The duo ‘pass’ as women so successfully that even Rita (Neetu Singh) does not suspect that the man she loves is none other than her close confidant Divya. In a scene both witty and self-aware, Divya is approached by a male admirer (played by the director himself) who offers to take her out to watch a film. Divya says she watches only English films as she does not like Hindi films. “But why don’t you like Hindi films?” the man persists. Divya replies disdainfully: “Because they are copies of English films.”
The film’s non-judgmental approach to queer desires is best represented by the flamboyant and wealthy Mr Manglani who falls in love with Salma at first glance. So devoted is he that Salma actually gets engaged to him. When the charade comes to an end, Salim asks: “How many times should I tell you that I am a man?” Reprising a famous line from the original film, Manglani replies: “No worries. No one’s perfect.”
If cinema is about ‘world-making’ as some scholars have suggested, then in the cinematic universe of Rishi Kapoor, religions are seamlessly braided into social and cultural life. In Rafoo Chakkar, Dev and Salim are childhood friends who grow up sharing a house with their widowed mothers, one Hindu and the other Muslim. Similarly, in Aap Ke Deewane (Surendra Mohan, 1980) Ram (Rishi Kapoor) and Raheem (Rakesh Roshan) are best friends and college-mates. Ram excels in Urdu and Raheem in Hindi. Their achievement, the college principal declares, has proved that language is not the exclusive preserve of any country or religion. When the duo arrives in Kashmir in search of work, they fall in love with Samira (Tina Munim), the pampered daughter of Inshallah Khan (Ashok Kumar) and Thakur Vikram Singh (Pran). The two older men are friends and business-partners who share a house and the custody of their adopted daughter. Their only point of acrimony, resulting in long-standing litigation, is whether Samira should be called Khan or Thakur.
In Hathyar (JP Dutta, 1989), Samiullah Khan (Rishi Kapoor), estranged from his only brother, marries, Jenny (Sangeeta Bijlani) a Christian woman and finds community in his mixed neighbourhood. In Tawaif, Dawood Mohammad Khan Yusuf Zahi (Rishi Kapoor) is employed in an Urdu publishing house owned by his mentor, a Hindu proprietor. Bereft of a family, Dawood finds support in a community of well-wishers who are diverse in class, caste and religion. At the end of the film, in defiance of conventional morality, they help to unite Dawood with the tawaif Sultana (Rati Agnihotri) making the film a romance of many transgressions.
(L-R) Vinod Khanna, Rishi Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan in ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’ (1977). Photo: IMDB
In Amar Akbar Anthony, a joyous celebration of interfaith fellowship, Akbar’s qawwalis are sung in praise of love (Parda hai parda), against the enemies of love (Taiyab Ali, pyar ka dushman) and in spiritual ecstasy (Shirdiwale Sai Baba) for on-screen audiences of all faiths. In Hum Kissi Se Kum Nahin (Nasir Hussain, 1977) and Zamane Ko Dikhana Hai, the qawwalis are sung by the film’s non-Muslim protagonist for the entertainment of a mixed audience. In both films, the glitter of the seventies melds seamlessly with signifiers of Islamicate cultures.
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In Deedar-e-Yaar (H.S Rawail, 1982), Nawab Akhtar (Jeetendra) introduces Javed Khan (Rishi Kapoor) to his mother by comparing their relationship to that of Luv and Kush in the Ramayana. The multifaith cultural milieu of these films invoked a shared civilisational legacy. These cinematic worlds were created by the expansive imagination of writers and directors like Raj Kapoor, K.A. Abbas, Rahi Masoom Raza, Sachin Bhowmick, H.S. Rawail, Manmohan Desai, Raj Khosla and Nasir Husain among others.
They found in Rishi Kapoor a natural inhabitant of their world; one who could move effortlessly across many cultural spaces. It is therefore fitting that in the finale of Henna (Randhir Kapoor,1991), Rishi Kapoor should stand in the no-man’s land between India and Pakistan and rage against the hatred and divisiveness on both sides. For these and other experiments with love, Rishi Kapoor will be remembered.
Shohini Ghosh is a Sajjad Zaheer Professor at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia.
