The Home and the World: Rajshri Productions and the Story of Hindi Cinema

A village is besieged by floods, and when news of the disaster reaches the metropolis, teams of doctors are sent to the village for relief. The opening of Aarti (Phani Majumdar, 1962), the first film produced under the Rajshri Pictures banner, is a far cry from the lavish houses, exuberant musical set-pieces and star actors most have come to associate with the reputed production house. Now primarily known for their extravagant family dramas and romantic melodramas like Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (Sooraj R. Barjatya, 1994), Hum Saath Saath Hain (Sonu Sargam and Sooraj R. Barjatya, 1999) and Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon (Sooraj R. Barjatya, 2003), Rajshri Pictures has managed to maintain a firm footing in a rapidly changing film industry, both nationally and otherwise, over six decades since its inception. What makes Rajshri’s films so appealing to so many, and how have they changed with the times? An investigation into these questions would require delving into the birth of Rajshri, and its onscreen journey through the slums and chawls of Bombay to the well-appointed, sumptuous homes housing affluent joint families in unspecified locations in Mumbai. 
 

Rajshri was set up by Tarachand Barjatya closely following the independence of India in 1947. Tarachand Barjatya started actively producing films with Aarti. Starring Ashok Kumar, Meena Kumari and Pradeep Kumar in an unusually told love triangle, the film seemed to set the tone for the ‘slice of life’ stories that would become Rajshri’s hallmark over the next two decades and more. Aarti was closely followed by Dosti (Satyen Bose, 1964), a runaway hit featuring two unknown actors, Sudhir Kumar and Sushil Kumar. One of the highest grossing films of the year, Dosti enjoyed unexpected success, in particular with Laxmikant-Pyarelal’s soundtrack, brought to life by Rafi’s mellifluous voice. The music-composer duo received their first Filmfare Award for Best Music Director for their work on Dosti. In total, Dosti received six Filmfare Awards in 1965, a remarkable achievement for a film so modest in its outlook. Making a few more surprising choices, Barjatya then produced Satyajit Ray’s Kapurush-o-Mahapurush (1965) and Taqdeer (A.Salam, 1967), a Hindi-language remake of one of the earliest Konkani films, Nirmon (A. Salam, 1966). Taqdeer was dubbed into seven other languages as well. By the 1970s, Tarachand Barjatya’s production house had arrived. In a milieu dominated by increasingly formulaic films, Rajshri produced one-offs like Jeevan Mrityu (Satyen Bose, 1970), Piya Ka Ghar (Basu Chatterjee, 1971), Uphaar (Sudhendu Roy, 1971) and Saudagar (Sudhendu Roy, 1973).  Apart from what many see as the typically ‘Indian’ content of Rajshri films and their widespread appeal to local audiences, Rajshri Productions’ success owes a great deal to Tarachand Barjatya’s acute business acumen. Ashish Rajadhyaksha points out that Hindi cinema production has always shown a crucial link between distributors and exhibitors of cinema, a practice brought in by surviving local credit systems. Barjatya hit upon a brilliantly simple idea — Rajshri Productions was shaped to accommodate all three aspects of the process, namely, production, distribution and exhibition. Within ten years of the release of Aarti, Rajshri Pictures had a chain of offices across the country, distributing films in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati and Oriya. With control over the bookings of one hundred cinema halls at this point, Tarachand Barjatya was also planning to acquire a chain of theatres to exclusively screen non-commercial cinema. As early as 1973, the official press booklet for Saudagar proudly declares Rajshri’s hopes of entering the field of overseas distribution and co-production—a mark of prescience regarding international audiences for their films that has survived to the present.  While Barjatya’s business decisions were setting him on the map, his films themselves were carefully curated, often using a simple story to bring to the fore themes not usually addressed in the mainstream. Meena Kumari’s acclaimed Aarti sets the template for this—the titular heroine is introduced in the first few minutes of the film not as a beautiful, desirable woman, but a doctor in training. To the very end of the film, Aarti remains a colleague, an equal to Ashok Kumar’s Dr. Prakash, despite several obstacles in her way. Popular Hindi cinema usually takes on a recognizable form—the establishment of a dominant moral order, its disturbance by an agent, and the restoration of normalcy by a hero. In Aarti, the story revolves entirely around the woman. Aarti’s decisions throw her small world into flux, but it is she who restores normalcy at the end of the film. 

The film takes a few more striking turns on its way to the resolution. Aarti’s wealthy father, Mr. Gupta, is benefactor to the impoverished but gifted Dr. Prakash. When Dr. Prakash approaches Mr. Gupta to ask for Aarti’s hand in marriage, a conversation regarding the role played by wealth in access to education (and thus further wealth) unfolds. While this union seems only natural to Dr. Prakash, the next step in securing a life he has always aspired to, Aarti rejects his proposal that they live and work together as equals. To the young, idealistic woman, this is not enough—she considers her profession a service to be offered to those in need of it, and not a means to accumulate further wealth. She chooses to marry Deepak instead, an unemployed poet with whom she visits the nearby slums to treat patients for free. Interestingly, Aarti’s beliefs do not blind her to the ground realities of poverty. She refuses to exhort Deepak’s poetry while ignoring the uncomfortable truth of his deprived material conditions. Deepak’s family, including his ageing father, brother, sister-in-law and their child, occupy the same small house, a theme that repeats in later Rajshri depictions of housing in Mumbai. Immediately upon her arrival, Aarti senses the reason for her sister-in-law Jaswanti’s frustration. In a standout scene, she explains to Deepak that the task of maintaining the household all by herself takes a great toll on Jaswanti. The sequence is particularly noteworthy in that the cantankerous sister- or mother-in-law in later family dramas gradually solidifies into a one-dimensional villain, the source of tension in an otherwise close-knit household. Aarti’s clarity regarding herself and the other women in the house as individuals does not end here—when Deepak asserts his ownership over her, she decides to leave the house, precipitating the climax of the film. 
 
Satyen Bose’s Dosti toed the rules set by Aarti, even with its acclaimed soundtrack. Both films featured songs penned by Majrooh Sultanpuri set to tune by composers Laxmikant-Pyarelal and Roshan respectively. A movie largely reliant on music, Dosti does not skimp on the length of the songs, voiced by Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar, coupled with the fresh, vibrant sounds of a mouth organ. Long through they are, the songs feature no dance sequences, while fulfilling the purpose of exposition. Decades later, this tendency develops into the musical set-pieces featured in films like Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, where the narrative itself seems superfluous, merely an excuse to link one song and dance sequence to another. In Dosti, the song Jaanewalon zara mud ke dekho features the line “Insaan hun main tumhare tarah” (I am a human being just like you), making clear the overriding humanism of the early Rajshri films. The compassion demonstrated in Dosti extends into films like Saudagar, Piya Ka Ghar and Chitchor (Basu Chatterjee, 1976) towards the end of the next decade.  Like Aarti, Dosti’s happy resolution does not serve to elide the important concerns the film raises. Ramu’s mother dies in financial distress caused by a large corporation’s refusal to recompense them for his father’s death on the job. If Aarti shows the audience a glimpse of the slums she visits to treat the inhabitants, in Dosti the very focus of the narrative moves to the inhabitants of these localities. Ban Bhatt’s story and Moonis’ screenplay poses a simple solution to the widespread structural inequality they depict—equal access to education. Achieving parity between those from different backgrounds becomes an important theme of Rajshri films Dosti onwards, and true to its name, this equality in the film is gestured towards through friendship. Friendship continues to iron out seemingly irreconcilable differences in Rajshri’s productions, even with films released in 2019 (Hum Chaar, Abhishek Dixit). 

Following the triumph of Dosti, Rajshri Productions quickly rose to the top, while still making films with a streamlined story and no glitz and glamour. In the 1970s, the production house played an important role in lending nuance to the rapidly consolidating star image of many. Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra appeared respectively in Saudagar and Jeevan Mrityu, both in roles that remained important milestones through the rest of their successful careers. Other, more short-lived stars also appeared in the Rajshri constellation through the ‘70s—like Anil Dhawan in Piya Ka Ghar and Honeymoon (Hiren Nag, 1973) and Arun Govil in Paheli (Prashant Nanda, 1977) and Sawan Ko Aane Do (Kanak Mishra, 1979). Perhaps due to Rajshri’s stress on a strong, yet clean narrative that demanded stellar performances from the actors, the production house also became the place where numerous actors found roles that would define the rest of their screen lives, including Jaya Bhaduri in Piya Ka Ghar, Rakhee in Tapasya (Anil Ganguly, 1975) and Amol Palekar in the hugely popular Chitchor. 
    Basu Chatterjee’s Piya Ka Ghar could perhaps be held up as fairly representative of this phase. Basu Chatterjee’s dialogues and direction for the film are complemented by K.K. Mahajan’s cinematography, Bansi Chandragupta’s art direction and Mukhtar Ahmed’s editing to best advantage. Focusing on a middle-class family in Mumbai, Piya Ka Ghar highlights the travails of a young woman from a village who marries into the house. The problem this poses is not a unique one: Malti’s (Jaya Bhaduri) uncle, a man of moderate feudal wealth, cannot reconcile himself to what he suspects is not an affluent or even a very conservative family from Mumbai. Malti herself struggles to make peace with her move into a much smaller house. From the very start, the emphasis is on the lack of space—where are the newlyweds to find time to themselves in a house with barely any doors, and seven occupants? It could be argued that this insistence on the quotidian difficulties faced by that most essential structure—a ‘family’—makes Rajshri’s films so very ‘Indian’. From Aarti to the unbelievable settings of Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! by way of Nadiya Ke Paar (Govind Moonis, 1982), Rajshri movies repeatedly explore the trappings of a system wherein a newly married woman has to make her home elsewhere. In Piya Ka Ghar, the film comes to a culmination with the song Yeh jeevan hai. A simple melody with straightforward lyrics, the song effectively pauses the film into a tableau, seamlessly blending into the narrative. By way of editing, lighting and the camera panning over the entire family attempting to sleep in a small house, Yeh jeevan hai manages to express much of the nuance of the film with no requirement for histrionics.  Released a year later, Saudagar is another film from Rajshri’s ouevre that relies primarily on images guided by a strong narrative. Based on Narendranath Mitra’s story Ras, the film was directed by Sudhendu Roy, known for his stunning vision as an art director while collaborating with Bimal Roy in films like Devdas (1955), Madhumati (1958), Kabuliwala (1961) and Bandini (1963). Saudagar, consequently, is not a dialogue-driven film, and Roy wisely focuses on his forte. The entirety of the movie emotes through carefully crafted tableaux, the expressions of the actors in their close-ups, startling cuts and flashbacks. Roy’s joyous use of colour shines through, often echoing between different settings in time and place, linking them thematically, particularly in the picturization of the song Tera mera saath rahe. Sudhendu Roy’s painstaking attention to setting and location brings to life the idyllic Bengali village on the banks of a river, while Nutan plays to perfection the wary, fiercely independent widow Majubee.

Interestingly, Saudagar sets itself apart from other Rajshri productions by departing from a strictly realist mode of narration. Parts of the film rely on flashbacks, voice-overs, and the vivid use of colour, reaching a fever pitch in a scene of utter frustration when Amitabh Bachchan’s Moti breaks his pots of ras. What is most notable about Saudagar, however, like Piya Ka Ghar and Aarti before it, is the screen-time devoted to exploring women’s desires and emotional needs. The resolution in Piya Ka Ghar arrives only when Malti decides to continue staying with the family. While her decision ultimately remains within the permitted structure of the family, she asserts the need for a private space. This coming-of-age moment for the painfully young Malti allows for the story to reach its culmination, finally knitting the new bahu into the family. 
  With its focus on the older, widowed Majubee, Saudagar is clearer in its examination of the intricacies of desire. In the first conversation between Moti and Majubee, she asserts the worth of her labour to him, demonstrating the unfair nature of the profit he makes from her work. Moti further inflects her assertion when he remarks on the village being separated into a distinct hierarchy in terms of land ownership and wealth. This one scene sets out the entire problem the narrative revolves around—desire for wealth and sexual desire mingling for Moti, pushing him to aspire to a ‘good life’ that a rasik would want. While Moti’s desires lead him astray, it is the women who become the driving force of the action in the film, as Majubee slowly, disbelievingly falls in love with him, and has to reconcile herself to his ultimate betrayal. Phoolbano is also not only the object of Moti’s desire, but repeatedly on the receiving end of the same question: “What do you want?” By the end of the film, when a desperate Moti appeals to Majubee for forgiveness, she turns not to him, but to Phoolbano, her supposed rival. The two women tearfully embrace, bringing the film to a close.  Following Saudagar, perhaps one of the most sensitive cinematic efforts produced by Rajshri comes with Saaransh (Mahesh Bhatt, 1984). With Anupam Kher making his screen debut, the story of an elderly Maharashtrian couple struggling to deal with the loss of their only son catapulted both Mahesh Bhatt and Anupam Kher to fame. Also starring Rohini Hattangadi and Soni Razdan, the film featured costume design by film and theatre stalwart Amal Allana, while Sooraj R. Barjatya worked as assistant director. Touching on themes of grief, separation, respectability and the corruption of politicians, the film deals with Sujata’s (Soni Razdan) experience of an unplanned pregnancy with a delicate touch, gesturing towards the stigma this may bear for an unmarried woman employed as an actress, but never indulging in such judgement through the lead characters themselves. The thread of male friendship survives in Saaransh, two decades after Dosti, as does the portrayal of conjugal intimacy. 

A few years later, Sooraj Barjatya under the auspices of his father Rajkumar Barjatya kick-started his reinvention of Rajshri Productions with Maine Pyar Kiya (Sooraj R. Barjatya, 1989). Themes of friendship and love—whether in the family or otherwise—became the base on which the youthful Maine Pyar Kiya was built. Released around the time that films like Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (Mansoor Khan, 1988) were finding some success, Maine Pyar Kiya clearly sets itself out as a love story within the confines of the family. Friendship is echoed across various relationships in the film—between the mechanic Karan (Alok Nath) and the wealthy businessman Kishen (Rajeev Verma), Prem (Salman Khan) and Manohar (Laxmikant Berde), and finally, Prem and Suman (Bhagyashree). Much like Dosti, Maine Pyar Kiya begins with the relationship between two male friends, and addresses the ruptures caused by the immense wealth of one in comparison to the other. Following some climactic action, the resolution mends the split between the two, culminating in the union of their children and thus folding them into one family. 
  Maine Pyar Kiya sets the template for another major departure from earlier Rajshri films—women onscreen are no longer depicted with the nuance that they were afforded previously. Perhaps in keeping with the times and the rising demand for formula films with demarcated good and bad moral agents, women in the film are starkly divided into the good, sanskari woman and the bad, greedy woman. Women’s ability to establish familial connections makes them endearing in this universe, and Suman immediately charms Prem’s household upon her arrival. Seema (Pervin Dastur), meanwhile, wears short dresses, has flyaway hair, and smokes and drinks. Her link to Western modernity is established as one that corrupts her ability to fit into the family. For Prem, however, this link establishes him as the new aspirational hero.  Prem becomes the ‘good son’, a figure that survives with very little modification up until the making of Prem Ratan Dhan Payo (Sooraj Barjatya, 2015), so much so that he is almost always played by the same actor, with a few exceptions in films like Vivah (Sooraj R. Barjatya, 2006) and Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon (Sooraj R. Barjatya, 2003). His turn as Prem in Maine Pyar Kiya proved to be a game-changer for Salman Khan, ensuring that he would continue to play the role regardless of how far his screen image differed from his life as a celebrity embroiled in various criminal cases. Poised on the cusp of the ‘90s, Prem represents the decade. He is the foreign educated, yet respectful young man, attracted not to the allure of the West, personified in the ‘bad woman’, but to the innocent girl from a hill station. Barjatya skilfully draws on a number of stereotypes popular in previous romantic melodramas, thus, and adds the gloss of a specific cultural moment to them. And so, Prem becomes a bankable character for the production house, allowing them to mould an entire series of films around him.  Rajshri’s replication of the template has proved to be quite fruitful. Tropes from the older films are sprinkled liberally in those made post ‘90s, leaving a trail of clues for a loyal audience. In a masterpiece of genre filmmaking, an incident in Dosti, where a pet dog plays a crucial part in carrying a message of love from one character to another, appears again in Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! Touches like these helped Rajshri tide the tempestuous 1980s into two more decades of success, when remakes of films from South India, Bachchan’s stardom and other strains of cinema were threatening to engulf the production house. 

With Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! Sooraj Barjatya brought the family drama back in style. The lavish sets and extravagant execution were meant to dazzle, while sticking to the conventions laid out by earlier Hindi cinema. As Javed Akhtar argues, these were perhaps the first “really new formula” to emerge since the ‘70s. Faced with the onslaught of liberalisation and growing consumerism, Sooraj Barjatya sated the perpetual fear of cultural invasion with a film that took on the consumerism the West provided access to while holding on to the joint family structure for dear life. Holding up a model of excessive wealth, the film has elements of a full-blown musical, with long songs serving the purpose of exposition as well as entertainment. With the success of Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, followed by Hum Saath Saath Hain, Vivah and Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon, Rajshri catapulted to its self-declared position as “India’s largest entertainment conglomerate”. Keeping in mind its revenue from an NRI audience, Rajshri held a promotion event in New York City for Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon before the film’s worldwide release. In 2003, an Economic Times report announced the takeover of Rajshri Productions by Zee Telefilms, one of the first big consolidations of its kind in Bollywood. In part relying on social and kinship relationships that had always held them up, Rajshri was prompt to reimagine its operations and forge connections with large media corporations. 

In another mark of their foresight, Rajshri set up a website in 2006, establishing a platform for distribution across the world. The move to the digital was spearheaded by Rajjat Barjatya, creating a website that now allows the streaming of films, television shows and music online in various languages. In a first for Indian cinema, Vivah was released on the site the same day as its theatrical release. The production house seems to have achieved its goal to appeal to “families all the way from Bihar to Manhattan”, in Rajjat Barjatya’s words. The 2019 release Hum Chaar returns to the basics of Rajshri—four new faces, a film about how “friends bhi family hai” (friends are family too), and a snippet from Dosti in the trailer for the new film. With the continuing retreat of audiences further from cinema halls into their own homes, Rajshri’s fortunes seem representative of the larger story of the Hindi cinema industry. As Rajshri moves into other genres like detective thrillers, it remains to be seen how much of their ‘indie’ flavour—still gestured at in Hum Chaar—survives the times. 

References:

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Chintamani, Gautam, “Rajshri reloaded”, Daily Pioneer, https://www.dailypioneer.com/2015/sunday-edition/rajshri-reloaded.html (Accessed June 18, 2020)

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Prasad, M. Madhava, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998)

Punathambekar, Aswin, From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (New York: NYU Press, 2013)

Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, “The Curious Case of Bombay’s Hindi Cinema: The Career of Indigenous ‘Exhibition’ Capital (part I)”, http://www.jmionline.org/articles/2006/the_curious_case_of_bombays_hindi_cinema_the_career_of_indigenous.pdf (Accessed March 18, 2020)

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Singh, Gurbir, “Zee to acquire Rajshri Productions for Rs 50 cr”, The Economic Times, December 09, 2003, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/brand-equity/zee-to-acquire-rajshri-productions-for-rs-50-cr/articleshow/347128.cms?from=mdr (Accessed June 18, 2020)