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Raj Kapoor revived his declining career with the superhit 1973 film Bobby, starring his son Rishi Kapoor. The film pulled the elder Kapoor out of a financial crisis spurred on by the failure of his 1970 passion project, Mera Naam Joker. So, all attention was understandably on the filmmaker’s follow-up to Bobby, Satyam Shivam Sundaram. Would it cement his stature as a hitmaker, or would it be too esoteric for popular tastes?
The film also drew attention for what was perceived at the time as a rather racy portrayal of women. Starring Shashi Kapoor and Zeenat Aman, Satyam Shivam Sundaram was released in 1978, and went on to become a hit. But it wasn’t entirely without controversy. The film grabbed attention even before it had been completed, and later, a case was filed against the filmmaker for ‘moral depravity and shocking erosion of public decency’.
Journalist Vir Sanghvi recalled in his autobiography, A Rude Life, how interested around the film peaked when pictures of Zeenat Aman were leaked from the set, revealing her in clothes that were deemed too scanty for Indian sensibilities. Raj Kapoor sued the publication that ran the pictures, leading to more attention.
Sanghvi, who interviewed the filmmaker at Mumbai’s famed RK Studios, wrote that he described the film in ‘philosophical terms’. “Take a stone. It is just a stone. But you put some religious marking on it and it becomes God. It is how you see things that matters. You hear a beautiful voice. But only later do you discover that it comes from an ugly girl…”
He was talking about singer Lata Mangeshkar, with whom he had a fallout because of similar comments that he had made about the difference between her face and her voice. Asked about the attention that Aman’s set pictures drew, he said, “Let them come to see Zeenat’s body. They will go out remembering my film.”
Satyam Shivam Sundaram was released around the same time as Dev Anand’s Des Pardes, which also did the duty of reviving its star’s fading career. But Dev Anand didn’t seem too pleased with Raj Kapoor’s success. He was quoted by Sanghvi as saying about Satyam Shivam Sundaram, “It’s a dirty film. Did you notice how the camera kept focusing on Zeenat’s body? Dirty!”
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