Filmmaker-actor Raj Kapoor had a very strong association with his muse, actor Nargis, with whom he worked on several of his films, such as Aag, Awara and Shree 420. Their iconic pose from Barsaat also became the symbol of Raj’s production company, RK Films. The two also shared a romantic relationship even though Raj was a married man at the time. He said that when he saw Nargis for the first time, he felt that she was angelic. He described her as a “noble lady,” and said that “Nargis meant more than anybody else.”
In the book Raj Kapoor: The One and Only Showman, written by his daughter Ritu Nanda, Raj recalled his first meeting with Nargis when he was 22, and she was 16. He said that he rang the doorbell of her flat in Marine Drive. He was there to see her mother, Jaddan Bai, but it was Nargis who opened the door. “The door opened and what did I see? An angel standing before me. Woh kisi pari se kam nahin thi (She was no less than an angel)! She had short hair. Baalon ki ek latt uski dahini aankh par aayi, aur lag raha tha jaise woh mujhe sirf ek aankh se dekh rahi thi (A strand of hair fell over her left eye, and it seemed as though she was looking at me with only one eye). That is how I met her.” Raj later recreated his first meeting with Nargis in the film Bobby, where Dimple Kapadia’s character opens the door in the same way for Rishi Kapoor’s Raja when they first meet.
When Raj asked for her mother, he was told that she wasn’t home. He left her house but this meeting created a strong impression in his mind. “Her memory stayed with me,” he said. He was planning to make his 1948 film Aag at the time, and decided to cast her.
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Raj continued, “Women have always meant a lot in my life, but Nargis meant more than anybody else. I used to always tell her, ‘Krishna is my wife, she is the mother of my children; I want you to be the mother of my films’. And that’s precisely what she was. I have very beautiful memories of Nargis and our work. There was a special delight in her looks, her gait, her speech. You couldn’t cast her in just any role, though she had great adaptability. That calibre, that kind of person, you do not find in films any more,” he said.
He spoke fondly about her, and said that they understood each other very well, but the relationship that they shared with each other couldn’t exactly be described as love. “She understood me and I understood her. You know, I cannot exactly explain my feelings towards her. No, it is not love, though I do like her very much. I think it is the feeling that one good artiste has towards another,” he wrote.
Nargis and Raj Kapoor appeared in many films in the 1950s. (Photo: Express Archives)
But after years of sharing a close working relationship, Nargis decided to cut ties with him. She chose to work in Mehboob Khan’s 1957 film Mother India, which suggested that she was out of Raj Kapoor’s camp. In the same book, Ritu wrote, “Nargis was signed for Mother India and switched over to the Mehboob camp. And that was the end of a beautiful relationship-a relationship that bore all the strains of public and private life while it lasted, and which enhanced the creativity of a man, possessed as he was by his lady-love, who gave Indian cinema some its most memorable moments. ‘It is quite likely,’ Raj Kapoor later observed, ‘that when Nargis signed up for that film she had, within herself, already mentally resolved the most important dilemma of her life, whether to continue what had become a futureless association with Raj Kapoor, or to make a life of her own, away from R.K. Films’.”
Raj and Nargis never worked together again. She quit films a few years later. She passed away in 1981 at 51 and Raj passed away in 1988 at 63.
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