At one point in Shree 420 (1955)—perhaps the true standout collaboration between Raj Kapoor and K.A. Abbas—our hero introduces us to an unusual enterprise: a “managing agency” with the piquant title of Raj Raj Raj & Co. This is a front for something called Tibet Gold Co. Raj, we soon realise, is scamming an unnamed Sindhi businessman, and his extended subterfuge, including a long conversation faking a Japanese accent, is one of the film’s comedy highlights.
The scenarist Abbas may, however, have had other ideas when conceiving this elaborate financial front purporting to sell shares to New York and Tokyo financiers. This little clip would eventually play its own role in revealing Bombay’s central presence in the global bullion trade, including gold transactions initially between Britain and India but spreading in the inter-war period precisely to, as this scene says, the US and Japan. It would also throw curious light on how a market system not too different from naked gambling was, even as the film was being made, fabricating the foundations of the city’s post-war capitalist economy.
Gold rush
Shree 420 is peppered with references to gold long before we come to the big one—when the film’s chief baddie, Seth Sonachand Dharmanand (played by Nemo), comes out and describes himself as the city’s “Cotton and Bullion King”. From the moment Raj sets foot in the city, he starts receiving lessons on how to navigate it. Having arrived from Allahabad wearing Japanese shoes, English trousers, and a Russian hat, he is tutored by a blind beggar (played by M. Kumar) on how the “rupiyon ke jhankaar” (clang of rupee coins) is the only sound to be heard in an otherwise deaf city.
Looking for a place to sleep, Raj chances upon a pavement-dweller, Abdul, who demands “pagdi”. Raj, unaware of the meaning of the term, offers his Russian hat, upon which Abdul says in some irritation: “Roosi topi pahenta hai, pagdi nahin samajhta. Pagdi yaane nazrana: paisa, paisa” (He wears a Russian hat but doesn’t understand pagdi: it means money). The pagdi system—a cash component to all real estate alongside a purely verbal pledge—has existed in Bombay since the late 19th century.
Raj has apparently arrived here at a time of considerable unemployment. This could be 1934, in Lower Parel where, having (we presume) got off at Dadar station, he finds himself beneath the sign of a Rekha Mills, which surely must refer to the textile industry in the locality.
The fictional Rekha Mills locates the film in Lower Parel.
| Photo Credit:
By special arrangement
So, by the time Raj pawns the gold medal he received for honesty to the pawnbroker Raddiwala Kaka (played by Rashid Khan)—an important figure in the city during the mass distress sale of gold by agrarian populations in the years following the Depression—he is no longer surprised. “Thank you Mr Raddiwala,” he says, “Ab dekhte jao is chalis rupiyese kis tarah tumhari sari Bambai ko kharidta hoon” (Now watch how with this 40 rupees I buy up the entire city of Bombay).
The quintessential post-war Bombay melodrama
He learns all his tactics of survival on the street and, with them, soon bluffs his way into the city’s higher echelons. As he does so, the film too properly enters the decadent nightlife set in the city’s famous Taj Mahal Hotel (the location of the spectacular “Mudmudke na dekh” song number), and we encounter, one by one, all of Abbas’ great vices. Raj has to learn to “change his mask” and learn something of the nature of the financial universe into which he has now entered (encapsulated in the virtually untranslatable city colloquialism, Idhar ka patta udhar, udhar ka patta idhar).
The pawnbroker’s shop, where Raj sells his “honesty” medal for Rs.40.
| Photo Credit:
By special arrangement
In more than one sense, Shree 420 is the quintessential post-war Bombay melodrama. It is, to its face, a classic country-to-city story of an educated youth from Allahabad who is unable to find employment, makes a fortune through gambling, finds himself entangled with loan sharks and financiers, and is eventually rescued by a schoolteacher, Vidya (Nargis).
The film is also way more than that. It consciously encourages a reading of itself as a saga of capitalism, with its hyper-visible picturing of capital literally as a maze to be navigated. It is also then a very different story of Bombay, of the war, and the post-war era and of cinema itself in this city.
Changing masks. Raj masquerading as the fictional Rajkumar of Piplinagar.
| Photo Credit:
By special arrangement
A little over a decade earlier, in a letter he addressed to Mahatma Gandhi, Abbas had tried to pick a quarrel with Gandhi’s steadfast opposition to cinema. Gandhi, he wrote, included cinema “among evils like gambling, satta [betting], horse-racing etc”, and had campaigned for people to reject it or “lose [their] caste”. Abbas demanded that Gandhi withdraw this statement so that “decent people [could] take an interest in this industry” and not be discouraged when “you and other great men like you continue to count the cinema among such vices as gambling and drinking”.
Now, in a new and fundamentally transformed era, Abbas appeared determined to tell a rather different tale of the genesis of capital, of Bombay, and eventually of the nation, in which cinema would be deeply implicated, both as an art form and as an industry. Hindi cinema had played an economic role within the upheaval, but it had also become, together with the city’s urban brutalism and its slums, the primary representational form of that upheaval.
Experience of urban life
Shree 420’s plot is not precisely dated. But we may safely assume that it is set around 1945 and the months just after the conclusion of the Second World War in the western hemisphere (although there are references to both the Global Depression and the textile strike of 1934). The experience of urban life— the satta, racing, gambling, drinking, the pagdi system, and the trading in gold bullion—would all become part of post-war Bombay’s drive to control, to buy or “own” the city as a condition of survival in it. Or, as Raj says to Vidya’s father, to get the key to the khazana: “Khazaneki chaabi zaroor mil gayi hai, sab dekhte jaaiye: thode dinon mein saari Bambai apni ho jayegi” (The key to the treasure is now in my hand, watch out everyone: in a very few days all of Bombay will be mine).
Seth Sonachand Dharmanand selling dreams.
| Photo Credit:
By special arrangement
Dharmanand’s own range of business interests is encapsulated in his reply to Raj that he is not selling houses but auctioning a dream (“Main ghar nahin bech raha hoon Raj, ek sapna neelam kar raha hoon”). Viewers of Shree 420 do not know if he has taken his business over, inherited it, or built it from scratch. Nevertheless, the history of Sonachand Dharmanand goes back to at least the 1870s. We may safely assume that the business began during the American Civil War and the boom in Bombay’s cotton industry, that much of this trade came from Gujarat, as a diversification of growing agrarian surplus, and from Karachi.
Dharmanand: “Phir tum bhi mitti me se sona nikaalo” (Then see if you too can manage to extract gold from mud). The posters announcing the Janata Ghar scheme, with Raj becoming its public face.
| Photo Credit:
By special arrangement
By the 1910s, Dharmanand (or his ancestors) would have moved into bullion and, by the 1930s, would have had widespread links with finance for textile ancillaries. By this time, as something of a free-floating venture capitalist willing to put his money in whatever was profitable, Dharmanand would certainly have invested some of his assets in the Hindi film industry. By the late 1940s—which is the time when the film is primarily set—as the textile industry began to be hit by deindustrialisation, Dharmanand moved, as we see, into real estate: through the scam “cooperative” scheme for people’s housing.
Figuring out the scam
As the final showdown takes place, Raj too shows how much he has learnt. “Magar in raddi kagazonke liye aap kya kuch nahin karte”, he thunders to the villain, “bogus kampaniyan aap chalate hain, kala bazaar aap karte hain, insurance ka rupya lene ke liye aap karkhanon mein aag aap lagate hein” (For this worthless paper, you run bogus companies, work the black market, even set fire to your factories to get insurance).
It is this final, and biggest, scam that truly speaks to the city. Here, Raj fronts, unbeknownst to him, a scheme by Dharmanand to create the Janta Ghar, offering the “common man” ownership for Rs. 100 to “your own home” with “a room, a kitchen, and a veranda”. This specifically refers to both the cooperative housing society movement being sponsored by the State and the origin of several of the city’s leading property developers who would fuel Bombay’s real estate economy for the next half century or more.
Indeed, moving from bogus companies to the black market and to the very Bombay phenomenon of textile mills mysteriously catching fire, providing owners with insurance as well as a fait accompli for closure, Raj has figured the scam out entirely—as did several of the great melodramas of the 1950s made by him or featuring him.
The outsider role would define much of Kapoor’s key work in the years to follow: among others, Jagte Raho (Stay Alert, 1956) and Phir Subah Hogi (Dawn Will Come Again, 1958). And in Sahir Ludhianvi’s searing rephrasing of Iqbal’s nationalist fervour in Saare Jahan Se Achha to “Chin-o-Arab Hamara, Hindustan Hamara / Rehne ko ghar nahin hai / Sara Jahan hamara” (China and Arabia are ours, India is ours, no place to call home, the whole universe is ours), it would give India a new anthem of freedom.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian.
Source:https://frontline.thehindu.com/arts-and-culture/cinema/shree-420-and-the-alchemy-of-bombays-capitalist-dream/article69566788.ece