The joker and his disguises

Mera Naam Joker is seen as one of Kapoor's most personal films

Raj Kapoor, whose 90th birth anniversary was earlier this week, is a polarising figure for many movie buffs. Even those who have reservations about some of his work (they find it mawkish or narcissistic) tend to agree that he was one of mainstream Hindi cinema's leading auteurs. And that his important films, beginning with his directorial debut Aag in 1948, and continuing till at least Mera Naam Joker 22 years later, were deeply personal, even autobiographical.

There is plenty in them for the cine-aesthete too. Watch the brilliantly show-offish dream sequence in Awaara, or the smaller moments, such as the scene where the judge suspects that his wife was unfaithful: the slanted compositions, the shadows from a rain-soaked window playing across Prithviraj Kapoor's handsome face. This is style-driven cinema helmed by a young man drunk on the tools and possibilities of film making; it reminds me of Orson Welles's description of getting complete freedom to make Citizen Kan at age 25: "It was the best toy-train set a boy ever had." Kapoor also had a knack for bringing together people whose sensibility matched his own - from lyricist Shailendra and composers Shankar-Jaikishan to screenwriter Inder Raj Anand and cinematographer Radhu Karmakar - and making them part of his extended family.

And, of course, there are the women - from Nargis and Padmini to Vyjayanthimala - and the ambivalence one senses in Kapoor's attitude to them. An easy interpretation is that he was a controller, an exploiter, or a voyeur: dragging Nargis about like a caveman in Awaara; draping much younger heroines in semi-transparent clothes in his later films. Yet to look closely at his work is to be fascinated by a duality in his screen image - one that seems confirmed by the fetishes and insecurities revealed in such books as Raj Kapoor Speaks (by his daughter Ritu Nanda) and Madhu Jain's insightful The Kapoors.

On one hand, there is the naïf of films like Awaara and Shree 420 - embodiment of pastoral innocence, misfit in a corrupt world - or the good-hearted clown who makes others laugh while hiding his own sorrow under grease paint. Yet, mingled with this iconic character is a nastier, sulkier Raj Kapoor - the masochist who expects rejection and then, when it comes, almost revels in it. In Mera Naam Joker, often seen as his most personal film, he falls in love with - and idealises - different sorts of women, but the intensity of his feelings is never reciprocated. In his extravagant 1964 romance Sangam, the conventional hero is the sensitive, new-age lover Gopal, played by Rajendra Kumar, while Kapoor's Sundar is the suspicious, animalistic alpha male who wants to possess the woman.

While being mindful of the trappings of pop-psychology, the relationship between Raj Kapoor and his women (both as it was rumoured to be off-screen and as it was in films like Sangam) reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock and his blondes. One view of Hitchcock (presented in studies such as Donald Spoto's book The Dark Side of Genius) is that this short, fat man constantly surrounded by glamorous actresses used his films to exorcise his demons - by casting Ingrid Bergman as a sickly, dominated woman in Under Capricorn, or putting the attractive Tippu Hedren in real danger during the shooting of The Birds. But a more nuanced view comes from Camille Paglia, who responded to the charge that Hitchcock was "clearly a misogynist" with a discussion about the push-pull relationship - adoration mixed with fear - that male artists from Michelangelo downwards have often had with their female subjects. "Any artist is driven by strange and contrary forces," she said, "The whole impulse in art-making is to untangle your dark emotions […] We're talking about a man who made films in which are some of the most beautiful and magnetic images of women that have ever been created."

Some of this applies to the portrayal of women in Raj Kapoor's cinema: the worshipful gaze coexisting with the need to pull down or debase. Watch how elegant Vyjayanthimala so often is in Sangam, and then see how she is rendered ridiculous in the "Budha Mil Gaya" scene. By revealing as much of himself as he did in his work, Raj Kapoor also revealed a great deal about the many dimensions of love and romantic obsession. The clown had quite an assortment of masks.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer