Stories of Raj Kapoor’s unflinching devotion to cinema are legion. Sample this one: Kapoor once bumped into poet Majrooh Sultanpuri at a central Mumbai studio. Packed off to jail for his Marxist poetry by the erstwhile Bombay government, Sultanpuri had just finished his penal servitude. When Kapoor asked how his 19 months behind bars were, Sultanpuri began to recount them at length. He also read out his latest poem, which he had penned during incarceration. Kapoor, so goes the story, grabbed the sheet from Sultanpuri, paid him ₹1,000 in cash —in circa 1949—and walked away triumphantly. Obviously, he was more interested in the song for his next film than Sultanpuri’s sob story. Twenty-five years later, Kapoor used “Ik din bik jaayega maati key mol, jag mein raha jaayenge pyaare tere bol” as a defining moment in Dharam Karam (1975).

Kapoor, whose birth centenary concludes on Sunday, epitomised all that was best in Hindi cinema: Entertainment, egalitarianism and enterprise. During a pivotal era of socio-cultural transformation, he used cinema as a powerful tool to define post-independent India, and gave voice to the........

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