Mobbed in Moscow, banned by Beijing: Raj Kapoor's 200 million tickets abroad

Somewhere in a small town in western China, in the early 1980s, an Indian graduate student was asked to sing something Indian. He chose the obvious thing, the title song of a film from 1951. What happened next he wrote down.

No sooner have I begun than I find that the musicians have struck up the accompaniment behind me: they know the tune better than I do.

The student was Vikram Seth, hitchhiking home from China to India, and the song was "Awaara Hoon". He had already heard it hummed on the streets of Nanjing. In a Turfan courtyard, a group of Uighur musicians picked it up before he reached the end of the first line.

This is the part of Indian film history that Indians tend to underrate. Awaara took about 23 million rupees at home, which made it a substantial hit. Outside India the estimates run to something like 200 million tickets, roughly 100 million of them in the Soviet Union and roughly 100 million in China. Figures from state-run distribution systems in the 1950s are reconstructions rather than audited receipts and should be held loosely. Even held loosely, they put a black and white Hindi film from a Bombay studio into the argument about the most watched film ever made.

The film, and the argument inside it

Awaara was released on 14 December 1951. Raj Kapoor directed it and starred in it at twenty six. His father Prithviraj Kapoor played the judge who disowns him, which is to say a real father played the father who throws his son away. His younger brother Shashi played him as a boy. Nargis played the woman who defends him in court. K.A. Abbas wrote it, Shankar-Jaikishan scored it, and Mukesh sang "Awaara Hoon" to Shailendra's lyrics, in raga Bhairavi. The tramp was borrowed from Chaplin without much pretence otherwise. It went to Cannes in 1953 and was nominated for the festival's top prize.

The plot turns on a belief. Judge Raghunath holds that character is inherited, that the son of a criminal will grow up to be a criminal. Acting on that belief he casts out his pregnant wife on a suspicion, and the child grows up in the street and becomes exactly the thief the judge predicted. The film then spends three hours arguing that the prediction is what caused the outcome.

Hold on to that argument. It is the thing that travelled. The songs helped it move, but the argument is why two very different countries took it seriously.

The Soviet Union

Indian films reached Soviet screens at an unusually good moment. Stalin died in March 1953, the cultural thaw began, and Soviet cinemas needed foreign films that were cheap to license and politically unembarrassing. Indian cinema fitted almost too neatly. It came from a friendly non-aligned country, it was anti-colonial by instinct, it was sympathetic to the poor, and it contained no sex to speak of.

Awaara arrived in 1954 as Brodyaga, opening through Indian film festivals in Moscow and Leningrad that drew around 1.5 million viewers in four days. On its first run it recorded roughly 65 million admissions. Re-runs through to the mid 1960s added something like 35 million more. That is around a hundred million tickets, and it puts the film among the twenty biggest hits in Soviet history, foreign or domestic.

What that meant for Raj Kapoor personally is harder to document and easier to picture. The family's own account, told later by his son Rishi, has him landing in Moscow without a visa and being waved through, then getting into a taxi outside the airport and feeling it lift, because the crowd had picked the car up and put it on their shoulders. That is family lore rather than record, and worth flagging as such. What is not in dispute is that "Awaara Hoon" became a song ordinary Soviet citizens knew by heart, sung in the street and played at official functions, and that it stayed known long after the Union that first played it had stopped existing.

The co-production almost nobody remembers

The traffic went both ways, briefly, and produced a film that has fallen out of memory almost completely.

Pardesi (1957) was an Indo-Soviet co-production between Mosfilm and K.A. Abbas's Naya Sansar, co-directed by Abbas and Vasili Pronin and shot in both Hindi and Russian versions. Its subject is a fifteenth century Russian merchant, Afanasy Nikitin, who travelled to India and wrote an account of it called A Journey Beyond the Three Seas. Nargis starred opposite the Soviet actor Oleg Strizhenov, with Prithviraj Kapoor and Balraj Sahni. It was nominated at Cannes in 1958.

A Russian writing about India, filmed jointly by Indians and Russians, released in two languages. It is a far more deliberate piece of cultural diplomacy than anything Awaara did on purpose, and it is the one almost nobody has seen.

China, and the part that stops you

Awaara reached China in 1955 as Liulangzhe, The Vagabond. It sold four million tickets in its opening week. Beijing alone accounted for about 1.43 million admissions. The first run is put at roughly 40 million.

Then the weather changed. The border war of 1962 froze relations, and the Cultural Revolution finished the job. The film was condemned as a corrupting bourgeois weed and disappeared from circulation for more than a decade.

It came back at the end of the 1970s as China reopened. Sources give the re-release as 1978 or 1979, and it pulled something like 60 million more admissions. This is where the story stops being a box office anecdote.

Consider what China had just been through. For a decade, millions of people had been classified, denied education, denied work and persecuted on the basis of family background, on the principle that a landlord's son carried his father's guilt in his blood. Then the cinemas reopened and showed them a film about a judge who believes that a criminal's son must become a criminal, and about the wreckage that belief causes.

The film critic Zhang Fan has made exactly this point: that the idea criminal tendencies are not inherited landed, on re-release, among viewers who had themselves been persecuted for their ancestors' class loyalties.

A commercial melodrama that played in 1955 as an entertaining story about a thief and a judge came back in 1979 as something close to a verdict on the audience's own decade. Nobody in Bombay planned that. The film simply happened to be built around the exact question China had recently answered wrongly, at enormous cost.

The song came with it. "Awaara Hoon" was a bestseller in China and, by several accounts, a favourite of Mao himself, though that claim circulates in books rather than documents and is best carried as a "said to be". The film is quoted in Jia Zhangke's Platform (2000), which is set among a travelling performance troupe in exactly those reopening years, and which tells you how deep into Chinese memory the tune had sunk.

The song outgrew the film

Beyond the two giants, Awaara kept going. It opened in Turkey in 1955 and sold 100,000 tickets in its first week there. It played across Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. In much of that world the film eventually faded and the song did not, which is why an Indian traveller could be ambushed by his own soundtrack in a Turfan courtyard thirty years later.

There is a decent case that "Awaara Hoon" was the most widely recognised piece of Indian music of the twentieth century, and that for several decades the phrase most non-Indians could produce in Hindi was not a greeting but a man cheerfully announcing that he is a vagabond.

What Awara opened

It would be tidy to call this a one-off, and it was not. Awaara established a distribution channel that stayed open for thirty years. Shree 420 followed in 1955 with the same tramp and another song, "Mera Joota Hai Japani", that did much the same work. The pattern outlasted Raj Kapoor entirely: Disco Dancer (1982) became the second highest grossing film ever released in the Soviet Union and the highest grossing foreign film of any kind there, which made Mithun Chakraborty a household name across the bloc, often under his character's name rather than his own.

For roughly three decades, the most reliable way for a film to be seen by a hundred million people was not to be made in Hollywood. It was to be made in Bombay and sold east.

The showman India files domestically

Raj Kapoor died in 1988, in the same year he was given the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, India's highest film honour. He is remembered at home as the Showman, a domestic legend, the middle figure in a famous film family.

That description is too small. For a stretch of the twentieth century he was plausibly among the most widely seen actors alive, in countries that had never heard of anyone else from his industry, on the strength of a film arguing that no child is born guilty. He did not set out to be a cultural ambassador and there is no sign he thought of himself as one. He made a melodrama about a judge who was wrong, and it turned out that a great many people, in a great many places, badly needed to hear it.