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Bharati Dubey

17 May 2026 at 7:08:10 am

53 Years of Bobby: The Raj Kapoor Romance That Changed Hindi Cinema

The 1973 classic captured a changing India, from youthful romance and new fashions to a new musical and cinematic language. By the early 1970s, Raj Kapoor had reached a curious point in his career. He was one of Hindi cinema’s most recognisable filmmakers, an institution whose name was inseparable from films such as Awaara, Shree 420 and Sangam. Yet his most ambitious film, Mera Naam Joker, had proved a commercial disappointment. Kapoor, who had spent decades building a distinctive cinematic...

53 Years of Bobby: The Raj Kapoor Romance That Changed Hindi Cinema

The 1973 classic captured a changing India, from youthful romance and new fashions to a new musical and cinematic language. By the early 1970s, Raj Kapoor had reached a curious point in his career. He was one of Hindi cinema’s most recognisable filmmakers, an institution whose name was inseparable from films such as Awaara, Shree 420 and Sangam. Yet his most ambitious film, Mera Naam Joker, had proved a commercial disappointment. Kapoor, who had spent decades building a distinctive cinematic universe around the tramp, the dreamer and the socially conscious romantic, now had to decide what he would do next. The answer was Bobby. Released in 1973, the film told a story of a Hindu boy, a Christian girl, parental opposition, youthful rebellion and an irresistible collection of songs. But beneath that familiar romantic framework was a remarkably well-timed film. India was changing, its young people were acquiring a new cultural confidence, and Hindi cinema was beginning to recognise that romance did not necessarily have to be filtered through the sensibilities of the older generation. Film historian Dilip Thakur’s recollections of the making of Bobby reveal just how many unusual circumstances came together to create the phenomenon. The Mukesh Connection Raj Kapoor’s films had long enjoyed an almost legendary musical association with Shankar–Jaikishan. Their partnership had helped define the sound of some of his most celebrated films, making the prospect of another music director composing for a major Raj Kapoor production particularly significant. According to Thakur, the story began with playback singer Mukesh. Mukesh informed Laxmikant that Raj Kapoor was planning to offer his next film to Laxmikant–Pyarelal. For the composers, this was an important opportunity. Working with Raj Kapoor meant entering a musical tradition that had been extraordinarily successful for years. There was, however, an amusing misunderstanding at the beginning. Neither Laxmikant–Pyarelal nor lyricist Anand Bakshi initially understood what the title Bobby referred to. Since Raj Kapoor was making a film with his son Rishi Kapoor, they assumed that Bobby was the name of the young male protagonist. They eventually discovered that Bobby was, in fact, the heroine. The misunderstanding now seems almost quaint, particularly because Dimple Kapadia would come to define the title character so completely that it is difficult to imagine Bobby without her. The film’s music became one of its greatest strengths. Anand Bakshi, Inderjeet Singh Tulsi and Vitthalbhai Patel contributed the lyrics, while Laxmikant–Pyarelal gave the film a sound that was considerably different from the musical identity audiences associated with Raj Kapoor’s earlier work. Songs such as Hum Tum Ek Kamre Mein Band Ho, Jhoot Bole Kauwa Kaate and Ae Ae Ae Phansa became enormously popular. More importantly, the music sounded young. It belonged to a generation that was increasingly impatient with the emotional vocabulary of its parents. Complex Heroine If Bobby was about youthful romance, its heroine was at the centre of an extraordinary real-life story of her own. Dimple Kapadia was only a teenager when she was cast opposite Rishi Kapoor. She was also making her debut at a time when the Hindi film industry was accustomed to producing heroines through a rather more conventional system of grooming and promotion. But even before Bobby reached theatres, her personal life had become the subject of enormous attention. Dimple married Rajesh Khanna in March 1973, while Bobby was still in production. Thakur recalls that she was pregnant during the filming of some sequences. This presented practical difficulties. There were scenes involving Prem Chopra, whose introduction - “Prem naam hai mera, Prem Chopra” - would itself become one of Hindi cinema’s most enduring pieces of popular dialogue. There were also sequences in which Dimple had to run, requiring the production to take additional care during filming. Her marriage produced another kind of uncertainty. Would audiences accept a married actress as the heroine of a youthful romance? Dimple’s screen presence was fresh, self-assured and strikingly contemporary. She seemed to belong to the generation the film was portraying. Raj Kapoor understood that cinema did not merely reflect popular culture but could manufacture it. Bobby did that in spades as Rishi Kapoor’s jackets, bell-bottom trousers and overall appearance became objects of imitation. The scooter associated with the film also acquired a fashionable aura. Young men wanted to look like Rishi Kapoor; young women wanted to capture something of Dimple’s appearance. Changing Mores The film arrived at a moment when India’s urban youth was becoming increasingly conscious of fashion, music and individual identity. Western influences were visible, but they were being absorbed into an unmistakably Indian popular culture. Bobby gave that sensibility a cinematic form. This was one reason the film travelled so far beyond the cinema hall. Its songs could be heard everywhere, its fashions were copied in everyday life, and its characters became reference points for an entire generation. For Thakur, Mumbai’s Metro cinema remains closely associated with Bobby. The film premiered at Metro, then a celebrated single-screen theatre and one of the city's important cinematic landmarks. The theatre would later be transformed into a multiplex, but Thakur remembers its earlier incarnation, including the ground-floor showcases where posters and memorabilia from notable films were displayed. Among them was a Bobby poster. Such displays may seem modest today, but they captured something important about the relationship between the single-screen cinema and its audience. A major Hindi film was not simply consumed for two or three hours. It occupied the public imagination. People waited outside theatres. They bought records. They returned to see the film again.Bobby was one of those rare films that escaped the boundaries of its own running time. Raj Kapoor had always been fascinated by youth, innocence and romance. But Bobby allowed him to approach those themes from a different vantage point. Dev Anand and Rajesh Khanna had already demonstrated the enormous commercial power of the romantic hero. Yet Raj Kapoor was attempting to understand a younger generation that was beginning to speak in a different cultural language. The most obvious example was Hum Tum Ek Kamre Mein Band Ho. The song’s playful suggestion of romantic intimacy was unusually open for mainstream Hindi cinema of the period. It did not depict sexuality explicitly, but it acknowledged desire and youthful intimacy with a frankness that would have been difficult to imagine in many earlier mainstream romances. The lovers of Bobby did not merely wait for their parents to approve. They wanted to make their own choices. Their conflict with the older generation therefore had a distinctly modern quality. Raj Kapoor, despite being from an earlier generation, understood this instinct remarkably well. Striking Transformation The transformation becomes even more striking when Bobby is viewed against Mera Naam Joker. The latter was an enormous, sprawling meditation on Raj Kapoor’s own life and philosophy. Bobby, by contrast, was younger, faster and more commercially accessible. Thakur recalls the recollections of writer Vasant Sathe, who spoke about discussions concerning Raj Kapoor’s next film after Mera Naam Joker. The question was what Kapoor should attempt next. The answer was to look away from himself and towards the young. Thakur recalls that Sathe had many stories about Raj Kapoor and V. Shantaram, filmmakers he greatly admired. The plot of Bobby was hardly revolutionary. What was revolutionary was its timing. India in the early 1970s was not the India of Awaara or Shree 420. Bobby responded to this change. Its extraordinary success turned Rishi Kapoor into a major star and made Dimple Kapadia an instant screen sensation. It gave Laxmikant–Pyarelal an important association with Raj Kapoor and produced songs that would outlive the film itself. It also demonstrated the extraordinary commercial possibilities of youth-oriented romance. Importantly, it showed that Raj Kapoor could reinvent himself without abandoning the emotional instincts that had defined his cinema. It is the story of a filmmaker who recognised that his audience was changing and changed with it. (The writer is a journalist and film critic. Views personal.)

Why is Mamata Seeing Ghost of Bangladesh?

Writer: Romita Datta
Romita Datta
Aug 27, 2024
4 min read

Updated: Oct 21, 2024

Why is Mamata Seeing Ghost of Bangladesh?

Mamata is seeing a ghost of Bangladesh behind the massive outrage and waves of protest over rape and murder of the trainee doctor. And the reasons are many.

It’s been over a fortnight. Yet with each passing day the voice of protest is getting louder and stronger. From the streets of Kolkata it’s pouring into roads of hinterland. The cry for justice for a rape victim has consolidated into a wail of demands to set a lot of wrongdoings right. Here in lies the fear and trepidation. Wasn’t the issue that brought the youth of Bangladesh out on the thoroughfares a simple, innocent one of quota reform?

The chief minister of Bengal, known for understanding the pulse of people better than many, was quick to read the signages floating in the political horizon.

The most obvious reason for her to be tensed is that both the regime change in Bangladesh and the mass protest in Bengal, were student-driven to begin with. The two incidents---end of 15 year old Sheikh Hasina government and turbulence in West Bengal, over the heinous crime, falling back to back, the first on August 5th and the latter from August 9th onwards, give natural scope for comparisons. More so, because in both the cases the movement strayed beyond an affected constituency to include aggrieved people at large, cutting across socio-economic demography. If the quota reform protest started by students in Bangladesh became a mass uprising against an autocratic regime, the campaign demanding justice for the rape victim and overall safety and security of women in Mamata Banerjee’s Bengal soon snowballed into a movement of no-confidence against the government. Slogans--”Mamata must resign” also got floated in social media much in line with the call for ouster of Sheikh Hasina. In fact “Resignation of Hasina” became the single point agenda into which all other fringe demands coalesced.

Incidentally, even before people started drawing parallels, that there could be a thread of commonality in the way the upheaval in Bangladesh and Bengal played out, Mamata was quick to point out that the Opposition were trying to pull off a Bangladesh by politicizing the tragic incident: “A coordinated approach has been executed by the BJP and the CPIM with support from the Centre to defame Bengal and exploit the situation....They want to make a Bangladesh here. They are taking cues from student unrest in Bangladesh and are attempting to capture similarly. I have no longing for the chair. I came here to serve people.”

Not only Mamata, her political lieutenants are consistently equating the turmoil in Bengal with the mayhem in Bangladesh. Cabinet minister for North Bengal development Udayan Guha threatened to take stern action against those, who would be trying to exploit the situation by emulating a Bangladesh like movement. “ Even after the hospital was vandalised, the police did not open fire on anyone. The police will not allow a Bangladesh type situation. We will not allow Bengal to turn into Bangladesh, Guha thundered.

Is the government’s fear unfounded?

Apart from the similarities on ground zero, as to how and where the future course of events are heading to, there are ample reasons for Bengal to mull on-- as to what led to a Bangladesh like boiling point. To begin with, it’ll be appropriate to talk of Bangladesh and the prevailing situation, that made the students’ protest become big in magnitude. The students were out on the streets because of a high reservation in public jobs. Unemployment and stagnant job market in private sector coupled with a high rate of inflation drove the educated youth to rebel against the government.

But soon the students found enormous number of sympathisers, who were equally at the receiving end. According to Bangladesh citizens, the last two terms of the Sheikh Hasina government were a mockery of democracy. Even elections would be compromised. As Hasina grew from strength to strength, she politicized institutions. The rank and file of police owed allegiance to the ruling dispensation. Extortion, harrassment and raids by police and people in power became rampant. An atmosphere of fear and repression reigned and people got restless to overthrow the government.

Politicization of institutions has been happening in Mamata government too. Allegations are quite strong that police in Bengal functions at the beck and call of political bosses. The lapses and alleged loopholes on the part of police in handling the rape and murder of the young doctor have yet again revealed a sense of confused or misplaced loyalty.

But above everything else both Hasina and Mamata governments allegedly seem to have twined in accepting corruption as a way of life. In Bangladesh jobs of primary and secondary teachers got sold at premium, Rs 10-12 lakh in the Hasina regime. Even police had to pay up for prized postings and transfers. In Bengal busting of the teacher’s recruitment scam has revealed how unsuccessful and ineligible candidates got government jobs in schools in exchange of bribes.

Similarities are multiple and inescapable. Mamata has good reasons to be apprehensive. It’s not only she, who can see and connect the dots. People, out on the streets, clamoring for justice, can see a providential pattern somewhere in the unfolding of future events in these two places-- Bangladesh and Bengal. True, they share more than 2,217 odd km of border. They share the same umbilical cord, other than language, culture, ethos, icons. Even emotions are the same. So she cannot take any risk.

(The writer is a senior jounalist based in Kolkata. Views personal)

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