Review of the Hindi Film Shree 420.

Critical Review of the Hindi Film Shree 420.

Raj Kapor's 1955 film Shree 420 opens with the protagonist and orphan Ranbir Raj in a Chaplinesque trot en route from his rural community to Bombay, where he hopes to find work. He soon learns that his naiveté and honesty put him at a disadvantage in surviving city life. Both symbolically and literally, he pawns his gold medal of honesty, trading it for the unscrupulous wiles of a city hustler.

Raj Learns the Ways of the City Streets

When he encounters Vidya Shastri, a pious school teacher, on the beach, Raj uses clownery and cunning to endear himself to her and her father. Homeless and broke, he searches tirelessly for work, finding luck within his network of footpath friends. Eventually, he lands a job ironing at a laundry, but ironically his uncontrollable obsession with Vidya leads him to negligence on the job, resulting in his dismissal.


Raj and Vidya Bonding

Notwithstanding, Raj's tenure at the laundry is not fruitless. It leads him to Maya, a sassy dancer with numerous connections to the bourgeoisie and the bosses of the Bombay underworld. When Maya discovers his exceptional skills at cards, she forces him to a poker match with her rich friends,and through threats and intimidation deprives him of all his Rs.20000 winnings.

The Scheming Maya

The wealthy corporate mogul, Sonanand Dharmachand, Raj’s defeated poker rival, lures Raj into white collar crime and corruption that eventually target the deception and financial exploitation of the homeless, including Raj’s own footpath friends. Haunted by his conscience and taunted by his love for Vidya, Raj is in a constant moral flux. At the final moment, he heeds Vidya's unceasing pleas to him to abandon his corrupt practices, and ironically, through chicanery, exposes Dharmachand's and his cronies’ scheme to defraud millions of homeless Indians.

The Unscrupulous Sonanand Dharmachand

From the onset, when Raj reaches Bombay, one of the first people he meets is a street beggar with an amputated leg, who feeds him with proverbial cues of an inevitable destiny.  This scene is loaded with historical meaning, which speaks to the physical mutilation and dismemberment caused by the realities of partition. As Sarkar (2009) notes, “They became flawed subjects whose wounds could be read metonymically as marks of a collective laceration” (p. 108). The fixation of Vidya’s father in the wheelchair and his lamentation over the demise of his professional and social standing also supports this theory.

The Symbolism of Disability in Shree 420

Kapoor could not have presented the poignancy of the inequities of post-independence India better than allowing the homeless vagabonds to take refuge in the yard of the wealthy Dharmachand.  This narrative does not only serve to reference the separation and displacement of partitioning, but it also foregrounds the deep stratification and classification of the citizenry caused by urbanization and industrialization (Sarkar, 2009, p.110).

The Homelessness of Bombay Streets

The recurrence of the role of the mother figure in Hindi Film continues in Shree 420 with Ganga Ma, the homeless banana vendor, providing comfort and solace to Raj, the orphan, even when nothing else in Bombay gives him hope; thus, revalidating the oedipal complex of psychoanalytical theory.  The redundancy of feminine representation also shows in Vidya’s role. She, like Madhumatti, and Rita in Awara, epitomizes all that is honorable and good of traditional Indian culture: she is the voice of conscience and the symbol of nobility.

Vidya as the Symbol of Traditional India

Again, Kapoor presents corruption and crime as a Western construct. His villains adopt Anglo-Saxon tastes and habits. Whenever his female characters splurge in vice or immorality, they seem to flay or shed some layers of their Indian identity or traditional culture.  

Maya Dancing to mud mud ke na dekh mud mud ke

Therefore, the flirtatious and avaricious Maya smokes flippantly, flaunting a blend of upper-class Indian vogue and Western panache. She speaks the only English words uttered in the film with an order to Raj from her room, “Get out!” When she dances at the elitist club, her dance is not traditional nor her dressing cultural, and even the logo on the instruments of the band in the background reads, “Rumba Boys”.
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Reference

Sarkar, B. (2009). Mourning the Nation. Durham: Duke University Press