Today is Raj Kapoor's birth anniversary and there will undoubtedly be a lot of good things said about one of the 'pioneers' of cinema in India. A lot will be said about how he is responsible for the current state of the Hindi Movie Industry (I hate referring to it as 'Bollywood'). Many of his Industry folk will trip over each other to try and sound intelligent in their 'eulogy' calling him out for being responsible for their own careers by influencing them with his showmanship in the formative years of their careers.
For me, he was guilty of a crime, and one of a heinous nature - he had a chance to shape the ideology of a young nation, a nation that was getting back on it's own feet after more than a thousand years of subjugation initially by culturally inferior savages and then by Racist Caucasians that looked down upon anything we held dear and everything we practised. A thousand years and more, of forces trying to change us - through force (read: torture), coercion and systematic manipulation of our beliefs.
This man had a chance and he not only squandered it, but he made it worse. He made it so bad that I truly believe a lot of the sediment of the manure he spread around in order to plant and popularize his fables are still facilitating grounds for roots to develop robust trees of of that ideology, bearing similar poisonous fruit.
Take specifics: Who were Raj Kapoor's protogonists in his movies? If you have to look for one term to answer that: The Undeserving, or here's another harsher one: The Loser!
The roles he portrayed were almost always these fellows: A Thief, A Loafer, A Vagrant, A Charlatan, A Con and mostly - all of these rolled into and resulting in one Rotten excuse of a Human Being. Then, the formula script: a lady comes along, usually a well meaning damsel, obsessed on improving this Scum's life and then come the stereotypes, a fraud Godman, a conniving Loan Shark, a Twisted Leader (always from the Brahmin or the Kshatriya communities, usually the damsel's father/guardian) and all these stereotypes have only one goal - to keep the Scum with no hopes of rehabilitation and grovelling in the dirt where they all believe he belongs. To whatever end the movies unrolled, the underlying message was this - the rich are wicked and the poor have no hope.
And these movies ironically were during the times that (at least in South India) a lot of wealthy upper caste & progressive land owners gave away their lands (either voluntarily or through the policies of the most vicious lady we have ever had at the helm of this country's affairs) relinquished their Brahmin/Upper caste identities (to this day most of them only use their initials and not their full family names, leave alone their titles) and the only legacy they passed on to their kids was the education they worked hard to give themselves and then their kids. That generation, mine and born 10 years before and after, having no family lands or wealth to back them, had to work extra hard and as a consequence, turned out to be self made women and men after struggling through the first half of their working lives.
Having gone through this struggle in life and having had to deal with all the outcome of the whacked out policies framed by the undeserving idiots that were in charge of policy making in the 1947-1970 time frame, my generation and my ilk ended up having respect for only one thing: Meritocracy!
And as for the ones that have made it to the top, through this muck of the unfair policy of reservation based on caste and the back breaking tax regime, we deem them fit for adulation and even worship.
I often imagine how our society would be today, if Raj Kapoor had instead made movies based on the largely unsung, barely known Heroes that initially fought and warded off these barbaric hordes from the Islamic tribes and then those that kept in control, the smooth-talking, back-stabbing, Bible wielding Europeans. If he had made movies glorifying our ways of the world, of Karma, of Good Karma & Bad, if he had made movies that were the opposite of a movie called Nayaa Daur (losely translated to 'New Course/Times' which had a story line completely opposite to what should have been the script, given the title!), If he had shown the struggle of the achievers, of the job-providers and the hard workers.
If only he had glorified the real Heroes instead of the vicious under-dogs scavenging for survival, would we have been better? Undoubtedly so.
