The dark night of the soul

 Recently was celebrated the Raj Kapoor film festival as part of the centenary celebrations. The most interesting of the RK films in my opinion is "Jagte Raho", a brilliant dystopian satire on the big city life in a period when metros were not even conceptualised.

This critique of capitalism wherein everything and anything, including human beings and relationships, are mere commodities with a price tag, is a look at urban realities from the innocent perspective of a villager who witnesses all the idiocies of the so-called upper class bourgeois life.

Based on a Bengali play produced by the IPTA, and directed by Shombhu Mitra, the film is yet another brilliant example of the fifties' superb connect of the Hindi films with the Bengali sensitive intellectual artistry. 

In the Hindi version, too, Mitra continues to be the director. He is the scriptwriter as well, while the dialogues are by A.K. Abbas. If the screenplay by Mitra is a searing critique, the songs written by Shailendra and Prem Dhawan bring out in to sharp focus the irony the film intends. The Salil Chowdhury music uses folk forms to intensify the critical view of the city life. Raghu Karmakar's brilliant black-n-white cinematography captures the dark night of the soul of a nascent nation.

Raj Kapoor has produced this film, which was a huge risk to take, as it is not a typical love triangle, et al, that his filmography excels at. The social criticism, mutant/indirect in his other films, is 'in the face' in this film.

He enacts his typical 'Raju' character in an effective mimicry of the Charlie Chaplin common man, here dressed in a short dhoti. In fact, there are any number of Chaplinesque effects echoing in the film. Indeed, it would not be wrong to say that this RK film shows how mainstream cinema can effectively be as intense as the then parallel art cinema of the Ray-Ghatak variety.

Of course, there are concessions to the Raj Kapoor mode such as the topless Nargis, clothes clinging most suggestively, singing the great "Jago Mohan" bhajan at the end. Despite such co-opting by the pop art, the film continues to be a classic in multiple ways. A must watch, in brief!

Pratima@ Just as Raj Kapoor made social criticism easily palatable for the common man, the tabla maestro, Zakir Hussain, made 'popular' the tough art of  playing the tabla. A great contribution his was to classical music. May his soul rest in peace!