|
 In
Awara (1952), Raju, the petty thief, cries out against a society that
accords respectability to thieves, conmen, pickpockets, hoarders and
capitalists at the expense of the impoverished working class. "Yeh
hamare naye samaj ka dosh hai, jo chor ham, jebkatre hain, public ki
aankh mein dhool jhokte ham, meri tarah achche kapde pehante hain, wo
chor nahin, aur jo mehnat-mazdoori kartne hain, won. chor hain" (This is
a defect in our new social set-up which hails thieves, pickpockets,
well-dressed conmen as respectable people and looks down on the
hard-working people as thieves), he exhorts and then draws parallels
between his own dismal lot and a street dog's destiny. "Kitni ajeeb bat
hai, tu bhi awara, main bhi awara, tu bhi badnam, main bhi badnam, tu
bhi beghar, mera bhi koi nahin, tu bhi meri tarah pyar ka bhhokha. Fark
sirf itna hai ki tu janwar hai aur main insaan. Insaan, huh!" (How
strange. You are a vagrant. I am also one. You are of ill-repute, I, too
am. You are homeless, I, too, have no home. You are also hungry for
love, like me. The only difference between us is that you are an animal
and I am human. Human, huh!). Obviously, in Raju's view, there is hardly
any difference. For the poor who throng the pavements are as
marginalised as the street pariahs.
In
Shri 420, too, he aligns himself with the dehumanised down and outs who
live behind the glare of Bombay's glittering skyline. With his tattered
shoes, patched trousers and pocketful of dreams, he strikes an instant
rapport with the city scum. A banana-seller becomes his foster-mother
and a plebeian schoolteacher (Nargis) his betrothed. Raj Kapoor's
penchant for proletarian woes was like his outward tramp-like
appearance. Totally Chaplinesque. For Chaplin, the proletarian may be
the man who is hungry and the representations of hunger may be epic in
his films: excessive size of sandwiches, rivers of milk, cartfuls of
fruit tossed carelessly aside, untouched. Nevertheless, despite being
ensnared in his starvation, the Chaplin Man is always just below
political awareness. Roland Barthes elucidates: "Historically, Man,
according to Chaplin, roughly corresponds to the worker of the French
Restoration, rebelling against machines, at a loss before strikes,
fascinated by the problem of bread-winning (in the literal sense of the
word), but as yet unable to reach a knowledge of political causes and an
insistence on a collective strategy."
Raj Kapoor's tramp was also a political animal who cried out against
destitution and the inequitable distribution of wealth. But he did not
hold political-economic systems responsible for this. With him,
rebellion grew soft, gentle and hence easily containable, even though
the underdog was stationed centrestage. For Kapoor's underdog may be
poor, yet he was happy and full of buoyant life. And once the downtown
ramblings were complete, the identification with the down and outs was
also done away with. In Awara, when the first opportunity of a class
transfer looms ahead, Raju, the bourgeois-basher, becomes the biggest
bourgeois of them all. At the end of the our-class-their-class diatribe,
the vagrant realises that he is actually the lost son of the city's
stuffy, aristocratic judge, Raghunath (Prithviraj Kapoor). The very same
one who frowned upon the fringe people and believed in the Nietzschian
concept of men and supermen, of bad blood and blue blood, of kings and
common men. Thus, the first opportunity that comes his way, Raju moves
upwards and finds a comfortable niche for himself in the gilded family
hearth, unmindful of all vagabonds, tramps, street dogs, the unwanted
and the dispossessed. |
