A star on the home lap

The Bollywood icon’s Punjab connect was tenuous as best, but the handful of Rishi Kapoor starrers that were set in the community he belonged to, notablyEk Chadar Maili Si andPatiala House, revealed that the actor was perfectly at home with his cultural roots

Saibal Chatterjee

Hindi cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, the two decades that saw Rishi Kapoor at his peak, rarely, if ever, sought geographical or cultural specificity in the stories that it told. The Mumbai movie industry catered to a pan-Indian audience. In the films that it produced, therefore, it refrained from placing its characters in a defined ethos. On the stray occasions that it did, the manner of doing so was strictly superficial.

Kapoor, a Punjabi by birth, was a youth icon whose appeal transcended linguistic boundaries. Several of the major directors that the hugely popular actor worked with had roots in Punjab but they did not always set their films in the state.His illustrious father, Raj Kapoor, who launched his career as a lead actor in 1973 by casting him in the super-successfulBobby, was born in Peshawar, North West Frontier Province.

Lyallpur in undivided Punjab was the birthplace of H.S. Rawail, with whom the actor did 1976’sLaila Majnu. And Yash Chopra, who cast Kapoor in the multi-starrerKabhie Kabhie in 1976 and went on to do other films with him, includingChandni (1989), was born in Lahore. But with Rishi Kapoor, they did not ever make a trip back to their roots although 1995’sDilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (with Shahrukh Khan and Kajol), the directorial debut of Aditya Chopra, Yash Chopra’s son, had an intrinsic link with Punjab.

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that Kapoor played a role in a film that was located wholly in Punjab — Sukhwant Dhadda’sEk Chadar Maili Si. Adapted from Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Urdu novel of the same name, the social drama wasn’t a box-office success. But all these years later, the film stands out as a shining example of a piece of formidable literature that was effectively brought to life on the big screen with the aid of great performances from the actors and outstanding cinematography (by Kerala’s Shaji N. Karun).

Ek Chadar Maili Si, which had outstanding performances from Hema Malini and Rishi Kapoor as a mother of four and her younger brother-in-law in rural Punjab whose relationship undergoes a transformation when the former’s alcoholic husband (played by Kulbhushan Kharbanda) is killed in a case of mistaken identity by the brother of a sexually assaulted girl.

The film deserves to be rediscovered by audiences. It ranks among the four best screen adaptations of works by Punjabi writers alongside Chandraprakash Dwivedi’sPinjar (based on Amrita Pritam’s celebrated novel), Mani Kaul’sUski Roti (a 1969 film adapted from a Mohan Rakesh short story) and Rajendra Bhatia’sPavitra Paapi (1970), based on Nanak Singh’s novel of the same name. The last-named film came into existence at the insistence of Rawalpindi-born Balraj Sahni, a great admirer of the writer’s literary output.

In the context of Rishi Kapoor’s career,Ek Chadar Maili Si, set in pre-Independence Punjab, is a marked departure. It was the only literary adaptation that the actor was ever a part of. The film allowed him to traverse the entire gamut from a happy-go-lucky youngster in love with a bubbly nomadic girl (Poonam Dhillon) to an emotionally conflicted man who, under the pressure of social custom and tradition, is required to marry his sister-in-law, who is more than 10 years older than him and who has raised him like a son.

Ek Chadar Maili Si was a sharp critique of the practice ofchaadar daalna, which was prevalent in parts of Punjab. Kapoor’s interpretation of the character of Mangal contained the seeds of his evolution in the new millennium as an able character actor who played a wide range of roles with panache in films such asDo Dooni Char, Kapoor & Sons, Mulk andAgneepath.

InDo Dooni Chaar (2010), written and directed by Habib Faisal, Kapoor is a Punjabi middle-class mathematics teacher Santosh Duggal, who struggles to make ends meet as inflation eats into his family’s limited budget. The Duggals live in a cramped apartment in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar. The teacher depends on a rickety scooter to get him around town but he nurtures the hope of buying a car someday.

Do Dooni Chaar was a slice-of-life drama enlivened by Kapoor’s chemistry with his real-life wife Neetu Singh, with whom he was reuniting on the screen after a long hiatus. The film demonstrated the actor’s ability to play down his starry qualities and flesh out a completely believable middle-aged Delhiite.

Around the same period, Kapoor had two dramatic films that had him in the role of a Punjabi patriarch —Sadiyaan (2010) andPatiala House (2011). In the former, helmed by Raj Kanwar, who directed Shahrukh Khan’s debut film (Deewana, 1992) and also launched the career of Priyanka Chopra (Andaaz, 2003), Kapoor is Rajveer, the head of a Lahore-based family who, in 1947, flees across the newly drawn border with his wife Amrit (Rekha). In the house that they move into, Amrit finds a boy abandoned by a Muslim family that has left everything behind to escape the Partition riots.

Rajveer and Amrit raise the foundling as their own son. He grows up as a Sikh boy Ishaan. On a trip to Kashmir, he falls in love with a Muslim girl. The latter’s family rejects his proposal for marriage. When Rajveer and Amrit get wind of the development, they decide to reveal that Ishaan is actually a Muslim boy. They take it upon themselves to track down Ishaan’s biological mother (Hema Malini).

Sadiyaan was a box-office failure, but Nikhil Advani’sPatiala House, which was loosely inspired by the life and career of English left-arm spinner Monty Panesar, who was addressed by his fans as the Sikh of Tweak. The film had Kapoor in the role of an ageing turbaned Sikh Londoner who cannot reconcile himself with the idea of his son (Akshay Kumar) playing for England. Over my dead body, he tells the cricketer.

The younger man, egged on by his girlfriend (Anushka Sharma) and cousins, gives the England spot another shot although he isn’t getting any younger. His father eventually relents: it takes an imitation of Lala Amarnath’s unusual bowling style — a short run-up and delivery off the wrong foot — to bring the old man around. The climax was a doff of the hat to Lala Amarnath’s iconic status in Indian cricket history.

A couple of years beforePatiala House, Kapoor had played another London-based turbaned Sikh with customary aplomb in Imtiaz Ali’sLove Aaj Kal.His character, hotelier Veer Singh Panesar, gives life-altering tips to the protagonist, played by Saif Ali Khan, on matters of the heart. Veer narrates his own love story set in the 1960s, with Saif also playing the old man’s younger avatar.

The last phase of Kapoor’s acting career, during which he played his age, allowed him to explore human foibles and frailties with greater leeway than his stint as a romantic hero afforded him. It wasn’t surprising that directors opted to use the emotional warmth that his screen persona exuded by casting him as an avuncular Punjabi gentleman who could be cantankerous when things did not go his way.

Be it the temperamental Bhajanlal Bhalla in Umesh Shukla’sAll is Well (2015), the impish 90-year-old Amarjeet Kapoor inKapoor & Sons (2016), the larger-than-life Guggi Tandon in the romantic comedyPatel Ki Punjabi Shaadi (2017) or the standoffish long-time Old Delhi resident Raj Mathur in Leena Yadav’sRajma Chawal, Kapoor gave his all to every role he played, revealing his amazing versatility and adaptability.

Punjabi cinematographer-filmmaker Manmohan Singh (whose credits as director of photography include the epochal 1981 Punjabi filmChann Pardesi, besidesLekin…, Maachis, Chandni, BetaabandDil to Paagal Hai) cast Kapoor opposite Tabu in the romantic dramaPehla Pehla Pyar(1994) but the ethos of the film was indeterminate.

One of Kapoor’s last films,Jhootha Kahin Ka, was directed by Punjab’s very own Smeep Kang. It was, however, a Hindi-language comedy-drama that did not have much do in a direct sense with Punjab. But Kapoor, as always, stood out in an ensemble cast.