Raj Kapoor — film director with roots in the USSR
Raj Kapoor was born in Peshawar, in British India, on 14 December 1924, the eldest son of the stage and film actor Prithviraj Kapoor. He founded his own studio, RK Films, in 1948, and as director, producer and star he became the leading figure of Hindi cinema in the 1950s, often playing a hopeful tramp modelled on Chaplin, in films such as Awaara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955). He had no Russian ancestry; his connection with Russia is the audience his films found in the Soviet Union.
That connection began in 1954. Awaara, released in the USSR as «Бродяга», sold about 64 million tickets, the third-highest total for a foreign film in Soviet history, and its title song, "Awaara Hoon", sung by Mukesh to words by Shailendra, was heard across the country; in Solzhenitsyn's novel Cancer Ward the nurse Zoya sings it. Kapoor and his co-star Nargis visited the Soviet Union in 1954 and again in 1956 and were mobbed by crowds; young Soviet men copied his look. In Tbilisi in 1954 he was received by the actor Akaki Khorava.
His later films repeated the pattern, and Indian cinema as a whole found a mass Soviet audience in their wake. Jagte Raho drew 33.6 million Soviet viewers in 1965, and Bobby (1973), which launched his son Rishi, drew 62.6 million. For Mera Naam Joker (1970), which he directed and starred in, he cast the Soviet actress Kseniya Ryabinkina as a circus performer and shot part of the film in Moscow; released in the USSR in 1972 in three parts, it sold 73.1 million tickets. Kapoor called Awaara his small contribution to friendship between the Soviet Union and India.
He received the Padma Bhushan in 1971 and India's highest film honour, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, in 1987. He died in New Delhi on 2 June 1988, at sixty-three. The Soviet news agency TASS described him in its obituary as the best-known Indian in the Soviet Union after Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. His sons Randhir, Rishi and Rajiv all worked in film, and the family remains one of the central dynasties of Indian cinema.
Tracing the roots — Peshawar (British India)
He had no Russian ancestry. His connection is his popularity in the Soviet Union, where Awaara sold about 64 million tickets from 1954, and Mera Naam Joker, which he filmed partly in Moscow with Soviet actors.
No Russian ancestry. Connection: his films' audiences in the USSR and his visits there from 1954.
Peshawar (British India). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.