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In focus
No mention of Raj Kapoor is complete without a mention of his muse, Nargis. Said to have been engaged in a long affair, the ‘First Showman of Bollywood’ was devastated after she married Sunil Dutt in 1958, even though she’d stuck around with him for years before that, and had even consulted politician Morarji Desai on the possibility of her tying the knot with Kapoor. The filmmaker-actor viewed this as a ‘betrayal’, according to Madhu Jain’s book, The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema.
The book quoted Kapoor as saying to journalist Suresh Kohli after the ‘breakup’, “The world tells me I let Nargis down. It was she who betrayed me.” According the book, “He broke down and cried in front of his friends and colleagues when he found our that she had married Sunil Dutt. Raj Kapoor took it very badly: he would reportedly burn himself with cigarette butts to check if he was not dreaming, wondering how she could have done this to him.”
His wife and household were affected by his drinking as well. Krishna Raj Kapoor told author Bunny Reuben, “Night after night he’d come home drunk… He’d come and collapse almost unconscious in the bathtub weeping bitterly. Night after night. Do you think I thought he was weeping for me? No. Of course not. I knew he was weeping for her.” A ‘friend’ was quoted as saying, “Nargis was his only true love. He never spoke against her publicly. He blamed her brothers for driving a wedge between them.’ In private, he often babbled on about what he termed ‘a great betrayal’.”
Reportedly, two decades after this ‘betrayal’, Kapoor spoke to Suresh Kohli about it in depth, ‘as if it had just happened the week before’. But he also kept Nargis on the hook for years, reportedly telling her over and over again that he would marry her one day. She was beginning to get ‘restless’ because ‘she longed to be a wife and a mother — Mrs Raj Kapoor’. The book noted, “So important was the sanctity of marriage for Nargis that she apparently even cornered Morarji Desai, then Home Minister in Bombay and asked him for his advice on how she could legally marry the actor. Kapoor was a Hindu and already married.”
But the ‘writing was on the wall’ when she signed Mother India without consulting Kapoor first. She fell in love with Sunil Dutt after he saved her from a fire on the film’s set. They got married before the film’s release in 1958. Krishna Raj Kapoor invited Nargis to Rishi Kapoor’s wedding, and made sure that she felt comfortable. Rishi wrote about this in his autobiography Khullam Khulla, in which he also addressed the impact that his father’s infidelities had on their family.
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