#dnaEdit: Shashi - The third Kapoor

Interestingly, Shashi Kapoor is the third in the family to get the prestigious Dadasaheb Phalke award, after father Prithviraj Kapoor and eldest brother Raj Kapoor. The father and elder brother were giants of Hindi cinema.

Prithviraj was a pioneer, first in theatre and later — cinema. Raj Kapoor brought poetry to Hindi cinema in the first decade of independent India, and the magic of his films as well as music remains in the nation’s collective memory. In the early 1960s, it was Shashi’s other elder brother, Shammi Kapoor, who stole the show with his Dean Martin-Elvis Presley antics. The “Yahoo” call of the hero of Junglee mesmerised a whole generation. When Shashi Kapoor made his appearance on stage, he had a lot to contend with. He was the soft, nearly-anglicised Kapoor, used to doing things his own way. Kapoor acted in James Ivory-Ismail Merchant movies, a genre midway between Hollywood and Bollywood, in films like The Householder, Shakespeare Wallah and The Guru. 

His success as a romantic hero came somewhat late, first with Aamne Saamne, where he teamed up with the bikini-clad Sharmila Tagore, playing the suave hero who could be romantic and yet not loud; do the fight scenes with enough punch but no violence. When Kapoor played the poor boatman in Jab Jab Phool Khile with wistful Nanda, he was clearly not cut out for that rustic role. Yet he managed to pull through the film. For him, histrionics came to the fore in Deewar, where Amitabh Bachchan played the underground don, based on the life of Haji Mastan, the successful smuggler of the 1960s. Remembered as a Bachchan film, Deewar established Bachchan as the “angry young man” on silver screen. Shashi Kapoor played the perfect foil to the angry young man as the policeman who wants to do his duty and make no bones about it. A difficult role to play, but Kapoor did pull it off with aplomb. It is difficult to imagine any other actor in that apparently secondary role and still remaining in the spotlight. 

Many successful Hindi film actors — including Raj Kapoor — could not do what Shashi Kapoor did. He established Prithvi Theatre, which created space for hosting serious plays. He also turned to producing thought-provoking films, though not masterpieces, like Shyam Benegal’s Junoon based on Ruskin Bond’s A Flight of Pigeons, Aparna Sen’s 36 Chowringhee Lane, in which Kapoor’s wife Jennifer Kendal’s role as the Anglo-Indian schoolteacher was truly memorable, and Girish Karnad’s Utsav, based on the famous Sanskrit play, Sudraka’s Mrichchakatika. But for all his achievements, Kapoor’s calling card was never that of the art-film actor or festival circuit movie-maker. 

The actor remained part of the unpretentious mainstream Bombay masala films without looking down upon commercial cinema with its mindless rounds of song-and-dance sequences and comic fisticuffs scenes. The modest actor leaned towards sensible cinema and did his best to promote it. At the same time, there was the realisation that this genre of films was difficult to sustain commercially. Yet that did not make him a cynic. Finally, Kapoor accepted the market imperatives of cinema, the simple and straight formula. Though a successful hero in popular cinema, he kept away from the rat race. A connoisseur of sensible cinema who never featured among festival juries, the quiet third Kapoor remains devoted to cinema and theatre — the quintessential Kapoor family heirlooms.