Raj Kapoor wondered why he was ‘accused of exploiting women’, argued with censor board for Zeenat Aman’s portrayal in Satyam Shivam Sundaram: ‘If Fellini shows a nude woman…’

Raj then spoke about showing Satyam Shivam Sundaram to the censor board in India and shared, “When the film (Satyam Shivam Sundaram) was complete, I asked the censor board, ‘Which is more harmful, this or what you are permitting? You see the banners and posters all over India. Everybody is holding a gun or a sword or something with which to kill, in a country that propagates non-violence! Can’t you understand that that is what is harmful?'”

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Raj insisted that he respected women, and did not understand why he was accused of exploiting them. He said that when a director like Federico Fellini showed women in the nude, it was seen as art, but when he tried something similar, it was seen as exploitation. “I respect women and I cannot understand why I am accused of exploiting them. If a Fellini shows a woman in the nude, it is considered art. If I show off a woman’s beauty, it’s called exploitation,” he wrote.

Women in Raj Kapoor’s films weren’t always shown in the same way as there was a significant shift after the 1970s. He acknowledged that and wrote, “What influenced my work of the early 1950s is not necessarily what will influence the work of the 1980s. It is not that idealism has been lost. I have taken up themes in which women are perhaps more active than men or are more subjected to emotional tyranny by society.”