Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Awaara
1951 · Raj Kapoor · Awaara on Sightlines
A courtroom, filmed head-on. A judge sits above the room in all his authority. A young thief stands in the dock, accused of attempted murder. A young woman rises to defend him. Raj Kapoor's Awaara starts where most melodramas would end, with the verdict still to come. Then it does something odder: it puts an idea on trial alongside the man.
The idea belongs to Judge Raghunath, played with granite certainty by Prithviraj Kapoor. He believes character is inherited. Good blood makes good men, and a criminal's son will be a criminal. The thief, Raju, is played by Prithviraj's real son, Raj, who also directed the film and produced it under his own banner. So the argument about fathers and sons starts in the casting, before anyone speaks. The film spends most of its length taking the judge's belief apart, and it does it with the tools of a great showman: songs, slapstick, rain-soaked streets and one of the most extravagant dream sequences Indian cinema had yet built.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, gives us a way to see what kind of argument this is. He described two kinds of world that classical film could show. In what he called naturalism, the visible social world is a thin surface over a deeper and more savage one, ruled by drives. Heredity carries those drives forward, and characters slide down a slope their blood laid out for them. In what he called realism, the world of the action-image, a milieu (a street, a class, a climate, a household) presses on a person and shapes them, and the person answers it by acting. Deleuze's word for this mutual stamping of person and place is the imprint.
Raghunath is a naturalist. He sees the world the way Zola's novels of heredity saw it. Kapoor and his screenwriter, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, are realists, and the film turns the quarrel between these two pictures of the world into a court case. That's why the lens is worth using here. It shows that Awaara is a film about which kind of movie we are living in, the one where blood is destiny or the one where circumstance is.
The film makes its case in space. Raghunath's ordered bourgeois home and the waterlogged slum are set against each other as a thesis about class. We watch the boy Raju, played by Shashi Kapoor, worn down by hunger and the pavement and pulled into the orbit of the bandit Jagga. Deleuze would call the slum an encompassing situation: a milieu that surrounds a character and calls actions out of him. The cruel irony arrives early, in backstory the film lays out openly. The judge's own suspicion, the same hereditary logic he uses on the bench, is what drives his pregnant wife out of his house and into that slum. His theory builds the world that seems to prove it.
The film gets to all this through flashbacks, and they behave in a particular way. Deleuze called the classical flashback a recollection-image: a present situation raises a question, memory goes back to a dated past, and it returns with an answer. In many later films the past turns murky and unreliable. Not here. Each trip back from the courtroom brings evidence. The flashbacks work like exhibits, and editor G.G. Mayekar keeps the line between trial and memory clear because the argument needs the past to be solid and admissible. Awaara trusts that a life can be explained, and that explaining it can change a verdict.
Its light runs on a different logic. Radhu Karmakar shoots the street scenes in hard, low-key contrast, faces half lost in shadow and figures isolated against black. This is where the film's debts pull in two directions. Abbas brought the street-level attention to poverty that De Sica's Bicycle Thieves had just made famous, the neorealism André Bazin praised for letting the world appear without manipulation. Kapoor takes that subject and wraps it in studio artifice. The lighting comes out of German Expressionism, and Deleuze's account of expressionism helps here. For him, expressionist light and shadow are two ends of one gradient running through a single body, not two separate blocks. That's the film's view of a person: one nature, carrying dark and light at once, with circumstance deciding which way it leans.
Then comes the dream. Art director M.R. Achrekar built a vast spiral staircase, celestial and infernal zones, clouds and smoke, and figures who descend and climb. The debt to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is plain in the stylized stairs and looming statuary. Deleuze separated the dream-image from the memory: it doesn't take us back to a moment we can date. It opens a stretch of pure feeling, and he noted that some films build their dreams with heavy machinery, through sets, superimposition and moving cameras. Awaara's dream is that heavy kind, marked off by deliberate cuts at each end, and its vertical design turns the moral argument into architecture. Up and down, heaven and hell, are the film's question about Raju made into a building.
At the center of all this is Raju himself, and Kapoor's real invention. He grafted Chaplin's Little Tramp onto the Hindi social melodrama. From The Kid he took the foundling raised on the margins. From City Lights he took the tramp who courts a woman above his station, here Nargis's Rita, poised and modern, a lawyer and the judge's ward. Deleuze loved Chaplin for gestures that tip between comedy and catastrophe. Kapoor keeps both in the same body. Raju pratfalls, and his face carries grief. And when he sings "Awaara Hoon," the voice is Mukesh's, prerecorded and mimed, part of the playback system that Dhoop Chhaon had established. The vagabond's declaration of who he is comes out of another man's throat. That song traveled farther than almost any Indian film song of its century: into the Soviet Union, China, Turkey and the Middle East.
The film also inherits Devdas's register of moral suffering and cross-class love, with songs as the emotional skeleton, and it politicizes that register. Suffering in Awaara has causes, and the causes are social. Kapoor's later films kept extending the vagabond-innocent persona that begins here.
What Awaara did for film as an art was to prove that every register could serve one argument. Song, slapstick, expressionist dream and neorealist street are not decorations around a plot. Each is an exhibit. In a newly independent country, the claim had weight: if the milieu makes the man, the milieu can be remade.
So watch the light on the faces, and watch where the rain falls. Ask, scene by scene, whose voice is speaking, the street's or the blood's. The film is sure of its answer. Notice how hard it has to work, with every resource a studio had, to win the case.
Concepts in play
- naturalism (heredity and the originary world) — Judge Raghunath's thesis that criminals breed criminals, that character is carried 'in the blood', the view the film puts on trial
- the imprint (empreinte) — The film's nature-versus-nurture argument: the boy Raju (Shashi Kapoor) is ground down by slum poverty and drawn into Jagga's orbit, shaped by milieu rather than blood
- the encompasser (synsign) — Achrekar's staging of the ordered bourgeois home against the chaotic, waterlogged slum as a spatial thesis about class, a milieu that calls forth Raju's actions
- action-image, large form — The courtroom frame: a global situation (class, the judge's suspicion, the slum) that the trial argues can be answered and transformed; the film's conviction that the milieu can be remade
- recollection-image (mnemosign) — The trial-and-flashback structure, with clearly managed cuts between the courtroom present and the dated past of Raghunath's marriage, his wife's expulsion and Raju's childhood, used as evidence
- expressionism (light–shadow gradient) — Karmakar's high-contrast, low-key chiaroscuro, with faces half in darkness and figures isolated against black, carrying the argument about light and dark within a single nature
- dream-image (onirosign) — The 'Ghar Aaya Mera Pardesi' dream sequence: a vast spiral staircase, celestial and infernal zones, clouds and smoke, superimposition and crane work, sealed off by deliberately marked transitions
- the movement-image — A film that trusts action and proof: flashbacks return answers to the courtroom, and situation and character are causally linked throughout