A jobless, honest-to-goodness tramp and a tender love story from 1959

Anari is not among the best-regarded films in the opulent oeuvre of Hrishikesh Mukherjee. The dramatic films that he made subsequently like Anupama, Satyakam and Abhimaan are far more widely celebrated. Anari is counted among Hrishida’s more commercial films. As though commercial success automatically eliminates any chance of making a mark in the merit list.

To be sure, Anari was one of Hrishida’s most commercially successful film. It marked the beginning of the director’s lasting friendship with Raj Kapoor. The two were so close that Hrishida would often cower in fear at the thought of losing the dear friend that was Raj Kapoor. “What would I do if he goes first?” Hrishida would wonder. Anand which came 12 years after Anari was a mellow and magnificent manifestation of the movie-maker’s fear of losing his friend. The characters playedby Amitabh Bachchan and Rajesh Khanna were loosely based on Hrishida and Raj Kapoor.

Anari brought together the sublimity of Raj Kapoor’s pairing with the timeless Nutan in a captivating clasp of themes and strands celebrating the rich-poor divide through a story that saluted Raj’s Shri 420 as much as it tilted its topi to the blithe-hearted cinema of Frank Capra.

Anari came in the year when Shammi Kapoor’s ‘yahoo’ image was first created in Dil Deke Dekho. All attention was focused on Shammi rather than his elder brother Raj who had by then scaled dizzying heights of popularity with his Charlie Chaplinesque image of the innocent tramp in Awara and Shri 420.

Hrishida created a hero in Anari who became an interesting variation on the innocent tramp. He plays Raj, a jobless honest-to-goodness Raj in blunderland. When we first meet Raj, we also meet Lalita Pawar in her first major breakaway performance from her shrewish negative roles. Pawar’s heartwarming performance as the soft-hearted but stern Mrs D’Sa went on to become the most popular character in Anari. She epitomized the film’s theme of goodness of heart always scoring over malicious intentions.

But Pawar didn’t play Mrs D’Sa as sugar-sweet. She brought a tangy flavour to the Anglo-Indian character. Berating and doting on Raj’s character in rapidfire rounds of genuine maternal pride and the artificial cruelty of a landlady, it’s a majestic performance that surpasses the film’s other performances by a wide margin. Her character’s death in the film casts a shadow over the goings-on. Goodness is suddenly gone. We are left looking at a world bereft of love that transcended religion, class and other prejudices.

Many years later Sanjay Leela Bhansali paid a homage to Lalita Pawar’s Mrs D’Sa in Saawariya. While Ranbir Kapoor did his grandfather Raj Kapoor’s wide-eyed heart-stealer’s paying-guest act to perfection, the indefatigable Zohra Sehgal stepped into Lalita Pawar’s role of the landlady with saucy aplomb. The entire relationship between Ranbir and Ms Sehgal was an open homage to Anari. She keeps bringing up the ‘rent act’ but actually sees him as a substitute for the son she lost.

Bhansali, a huge fan of Raj Kapoor, had designed the Sehgal-Ranbir relationship as a homage to Anari.

Hrishida wrenched Lalita Pawar from the cluches of shrewishness. It was a big risk to cast her as the pure-hearted Mrs D’Sa at a time when she was typecast as a vamp. But then Hrishida loved playing with images. In Arjun Pandit (1976) and Abhimaan (1973) he cast another vamp Bindu in positive roles.

Interestingly, the incandescent Nutan agreed to play second-fiddle to Lalita Pawar in Anari. Pawar clearly has the author-backed female part. Nutan, during the same year when she swept audiences and critics off their collective feet with her stellar author-backed title role in Bimal Roy’s Sujata, struggled in Anari to give substance to the part of an heiress who pretends to be the chaperone (Shubha Khote) because that is the only way she can win over the non-capitalist simpleton.

The camera-born Motilal who three years earlier in Raj Kapoor’s Jagte Raho dazzled drunkenly with the song ‘Zindagi khwab hai...’ played in Anari Nutan’s entrepreneur uncle whose avarice tears the lovers apart. It is not a straight forward villain’s part. There are shades. How could there not be, when the oh-so-subtle Motilal plays the part?

Anari is brilliantly written by Inder Raj Anand.Stock characters—the simpleton hero, the goodhearted heiress, the ambitious uncle, the kindly landlady—are turned into sparkling individuals who are not quite the epitome of believability and yet very credible in their journey from preamble to climax.

Sab kuch seekha humne, na seekhi hoshiyari/Sach hai duniya walon ke hum hain Anari...wrote Shailendra for Raj Kapoor. The song comes at a heart breaking moment between Raj Kapoor and Nutan. Here again Hrishida shows his mastery over the medium of mush-watch kitsch. A streotypical ‘party song’ where the hero sings of his broken heart, becomes a celebration of the end of innocence…which need not be the beginning of corruption.

The film is dotted with subtle touches that Hrishida never tired of putting into his work. When Raj huffs and puffs to a posh club to return Motilal’s wallet, the impressed tycoon points to couples dancing. “Do you know who they are? They are people who found wallets on the road and didn’t bother to return them.”

I love the film’s ending where Raj, thoroughly disillusioned with the city and its corruption, gets ready to lock up the home that Mrs D’Sa willed to Raj. Suddenly we see Nutan at the door.

“You are leaving? But I’ve come home. Mrs D’Sa had told me to look after you in case she was
no more.”

Saying this, Nutan did something that clinched the moment. She buttoned the top button on Raj Kapoor’s shirt. That one gesture symbolised her love for the man and her determination to look after him. The black-and-white photography by Hrishida’s loyal cameraman Jaywant Pathare casts delicately drawn shadows across the character’s faces when they are frozen in meditative moments.

Yes, some of the material has dated. A song celebrating the year 1959 in a club looks pretty odd. Hrishida was not the kind of director who was comfortable with floor-show numbers. But the two Lata-Mukesh romantic numbers ‘Who Chand khila...’ and ‘Dil ki nazar se...’ show a fine barter of romantic emotions between Raj and Nutan, a pair that never really took off the way Raj-Nargis or Nutan-Sunil Dutt did. But there is something special between these two charismatic actors. Something supple, tender and restrained.