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

In the early 1980s, in a small town in western China, people asked an Indian graduate student to sing something Indian. He chose the obvious song: the title song of Awaara, Raj Kapoor's film from 1951. He wrote down what happened next.

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. He was on a hitchhiking trip home from China to India, and the song was "Awaara Hoon". He had already heard people hum it on the streets of Nanjing. In a courtyard in Turfan, a group of Uighur musicians started to play it before he finished the first line.

Indians often underrate this part of Indian film history. At home, Awaara earned about 23 million rupees, so it was a big hit. Outside India, the estimates go to about 200 million tickets. About 100 million of these were in the Soviet Union, and about 100 million were in China.

In the 1950s, the state controlled film distribution in these countries. So the figures are reconstructions, not audited receipts, and you must not trust them too much. But even so, they put a black and white Hindi film from a Bombay studio in the argument about the most watched film ever made.

The film, and the argument inside it

Awaara came out on 14 December 1951. Raj Kapoor directed it and played the lead at twenty six. His father Prithviraj Kapoor played the judge who rejects him. So 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 and Shankar-Jaikishan wrote the music. Mukesh sang "Awaara Hoon" to Shailendra's lyrics, in raga Bhairavi. The tramp character came from Chaplin, and the film did not hide this. It went to Cannes in 1953 and got a nomination for the festival's top prize.

The plot depends on a belief. Judge Raghunath believes that character is inherited. He thinks that the son of a criminal will become a criminal. Because of this belief, he sends away his pregnant wife on a suspicion. The child grows up in the street and becomes the thief that the judge predicted. For three hours, the film argues that the prediction caused the result.

The songs helped the film to travel. But two very different countries took it seriously because of this argument.

The Soviet Union

Indian films came to Soviet screens at a very good time. Stalin died in March 1953 and the cultural thaw started. Soviet cinemas needed foreign films that were cheap and politically safe.

Indian cinema fitted almost perfectly. It came from a friendly non-aligned country. It was naturally anti-colonial, and it was sympathetic to the poor. It also had almost no sex.

Awaara arrived in 1954 as Brodyaga. It opened through Indian film festivals in Moscow and Leningrad, and about 1.5 million people came in four days. Its first run had about 65 million admissions. Re-runs until the mid 1960s added about 35 million more.

That is around a hundred million tickets. It puts the film among the twenty biggest hits in Soviet history, foreign or domestic.

It is harder to document what this meant for Raj Kapoor himself, but it is easy to imagine. His son Rishi later told the family's story. Raj Kapoor landed in Moscow without a visa, and the officials let him through. Then he got into a taxi outside the airport and felt it go up. The crowd had lifted the car onto their shoulders.

That is a family story, not a record, and I mark it as such. But one thing is not in dispute. Ordinary Soviet citizens knew "Awaara Hoon" by heart. They sang it in the street, and bands played it at official functions. People still knew it long after the Soviet Union stopped existing.

The co-production that almost nobody remembers

For a short time, the exchange went both ways. It produced a film that people have almost completely forgotten.

Pardesi (1957) was an Indo-Soviet co-production between Mosfilm and K.A. Abbas's Naya Sansar. Abbas and Vasili Pronin directed it together, and they made it in Hindi and Russian versions.

Its subject is Afanasy Nikitin, a fifteenth century Russian merchant. He travelled to India and wrote an account of the trip, A Journey Beyond the Three Seas. Nargis starred with the Soviet actor Oleg Strizhenov, and with Prithviraj Kapoor and Balraj Sahni. It got a nomination at Cannes in 1958.

So here was a Russian who wrote about India, in a film by Indians and Russians together, in two languages. This was much more deliberate cultural diplomacy than anything Awaara did on purpose. And almost nobody has seen it.

China: the ban and the return

Awaara came to China in 1955 as Liulangzhe, The Vagabond. It sold four million tickets in its first week. Beijing alone had about 1.43 million admissions. The first run had about 40 million.

Then the situation changed. The border war of 1962 froze relations, and the Cultural Revolution finished the job. The authorities called the film a corrupting bourgeois weed. It was out of circulation for more than ten years.

It came back at the end of the 1970s, when China opened again. Sources give the re-release date as 1978 or 1979. It got about 60 million more admissions.

Think about the decade before that. Millions of people were classified by family background. Because of it, they lost education and work, and they suffered persecution. The principle was that a landlord's son carried his father's guilt in his blood.

Then the cinemas opened again. They showed these people a film about a judge who believes that a criminal's son must become a criminal. The film also shows the damage that this belief causes.

The film critic Zhang Fan made exactly this point. The film says that criminal tendencies are not inherited. On re-release, this idea reached viewers who had suffered persecution for the class loyalties of their ancestors.

In 1955, this commercial melodrama was an entertaining story about a thief and a judge. In 1979, it came back as almost a verdict on the audience's own decade. Nobody in Bombay planned that. By chance, the film was about the exact question that China had recently answered wrongly, at an enormous cost.

The song came with the film. "Awaara Hoon" was a bestseller in China. Several accounts say that it was a favourite of Mao himself. But this claim comes from books, not documents, so it is best to call it "said to be".

Jia Zhangke's film Platform (2000) quotes Awaara. Platform is about a travelling performance troupe in exactly those years of reopening. This shows how deep the tune went into Chinese memory.

The song became bigger than the film

Awaara did not stop at the two giants. It opened in Turkey in 1955 and sold 100,000 tickets there in its first week. It played across Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean.

In much of that world, people slowly forgot the film, but not the song. That is why an Indian traveller heard his own soundtrack by surprise in a Turfan courtyard thirty years later.

There is a good argument that "Awaara Hoon" was the best-known piece of Indian music of the twentieth century. For several decades, many non-Indians knew only one phrase in Hindi. It was not a greeting. It was a man who happily says that he is a vagabond.

What Awaara opened

Awaara opened 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 song did much the same work.

The pattern continued long after Raj Kapoor. Disco Dancer (1982) became the second highest grossing film ever released in the Soviet Union. It was also the highest grossing foreign film of any kind there. It made Mithun Chakraborty famous across the bloc, often under his character's name, not his own.

For about three decades, a film from Bombay sold to the east was a more reliable way to reach a hundred million viewers than a film from Hollywood.

The showman India sees only at home

Raj Kapoor died in 1988, the same year that he got the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, India's highest film honour. At home, people remember him as the Showman: a national legend and the middle figure in a famous film family.

That description is too small. For a part of the twentieth century, he was possibly one of the most widely seen actors alive. He was famous in countries that knew nobody else from his industry. The reason was a film that says no child is born guilty.

He did not try to be a cultural ambassador, and there is no sign that he thought of himself as one. He made a melodrama about a judge who was wrong. And many people, in many places, badly needed to hear that message.