Indian cinema stepped out into the world with Awara, which captivated audiences not only in India, but in Soviet Russia, China, and the Arab countries as well. The hugely popular title song Awara hoon (I’m a vagabond) represents a first outing for the character, loosely modelled on Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp that Raj Kapoor played in subsequent films. The film’s plot, which has been described as an ‘Oedipal melodrama’, deals with a respectable judge who turns his pregnant wife out of his house, suspecting her of infidelity. Their son Raju grows up in the slums to become a rootless vagabond who lives by his wits. Falling in love with the judge’s ward, he comes into conflict with his father, played in the film by Raj Kapoor’s own father, the veteran Prithviraj Kapoor. 

Turning Modern Mythology on Its Head 
The apprehension of beauty brings both danger and desire. The danger becomes the Chorus and desire becomes Oracular. Of epic history is born peasant tragedy. The redemption, of course, is in love. It rises above the medieval arches of oppressive regimes, hewn in stone, alien to the nation. The heavy black tones weigh down upon all who see freedom. Outside is the real abode of the ‘jungli’. 
The fragrant lotus that embeds the feminine, also brings forth the spirit of the wild Awara. 
Thus the personal poetry of Raj Kapoor, vagabond-flâneur, surrounded by kitschy signals of heaven and hell, the mythical imperatives of mass communication, iconised both as rebel and dictator. 

The phenomenal success of both Chaplin and Raj Kapoor lies perhaps in the fact that both of them identified themselves with thedisenfranchised, finding in them the truth and beauty of simplicity and innocence. They inverted the processes of identification that mainstream cinema manufactured to formula. Raj Kapoor was harassed by his distributors to fracture his own telos later on in life when he carried his autobiographical concerns into the wide sweep of history, just as Chaplin, in a manner, was exiled from the State that proclaimed the law of the Father. 

The destiny of the patriarch seems to be the destruction of his beloved and their progeny, as it is of the state to annihilate its own people, equal in moral terms, unequal in every other. Raj Kapoor made his own father Prithviraj play this figure, an act of daring that no other Oedipus of our times may have undertaken. He made the father apologize to all citizens of the world for the blind rule of Law, albeit to the wounded, shrouded mother in death’s throes.
The scenes of adolescent love in Raj Kapoor’s films have all the innocence and freshness of first love, the first kiss, the first consummation, like an illumination, the discovery of the other that is the fountainhead of knowledge without guilt or remorse. Perhaps therein lies the felicity of his address to every human heart, across the ideological divides, cultural differences and learned prejudices that hide our sacred nudity from ourselves and those whom we love.

Kumar Shahani