Mera Naam Joker

It’s been 25 years since Mukesh passed away. We salute the great singer with Raj kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker that had two of his best songs which topped the list of his favourites too.

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Mera Naam Joker vs Johny Mera Naam

It was 1964. Raj Kapoor was riding high on the super success of Sangam. Shot in technicolour, what made this trite menage a’ trois appealing was undoubtedly its exotic locales. This story of three friends and their supreme sacrifices, promised its wide-eyed audience a trip to London, Paris, Venice and Switzerland, all for the price of one ticket. It was a lure hard to resist. The film whose cost had run into unheard of figures and which had been sold for the highest price overseas, went on to become the biggest box-office grosser in Indian commercial cinema for the next five years. The time was right, the showman decided, to play his "joker".

KA Abbas, Kapoor’s friend and scriptwriter, had been working on an impressionistic interpretation of the superstar’s life. Much impressed by Charlie Chaplin’s "little man", Kapoor had decided to rediscover the Tramp as a circus clown. Mera Naam Joker, a complete biography in three parts, was to be Raj Kapoor’s Limelight.

Besides ‘Jeena yahan...’ and ‘Jaane kahan...’Mukesh recorded two more songs for Mera Naam Joker. ‘Gaao gaoo jhoom ke gaao...which started with Simi’s beautiful, full-throated laugh. ‘Da da niyat niyat...’ ended with a three minute music piece with about a 100 violins. Both the beautiful songs are missing in the film. "May be Raj uncle held them back for Mera Naam Joker II," Nitin Mukesh muses.

If Sangam had been big, Mera Naam Joker was bigger. It was three full-length films rolled into one. It took off with Rajoo clown’s last performance. Three women have been specially invited to come to the circus. Three women whose lives Rajoo has touched and enriched, whom he loved and lost to other men. There was the gray-haired Mary (Simi), the teacher the teenage Rajoo had idolised from a distance. Marina, the Russian trapeze artiste, he had dreamt of marrying. And Meena, the about-to-retire movie star, who had dumped him without a thought. As they watched and wondered Rajoo took centrestage--clown with an enlarged heart in need of an emergency operation. The operation is rushed through and his heart is handed over to Rajoo by the doctor who advises him to keep it safe because "it is growing bigger all the time and soon a day will come when the whole world will be accommodated in your heart". It’s a vision of the future that has Rajoo dancing with joy. Suddenly, the heart slips from between his fingers and splinters...into a thousand fragments. In one of them Rajoo sees a splintered image of Mary and he’s back in school.

Mary is Rajoo’s beautiful teacher who enters his fantasies when he comes across her changing in a thicket after a dunking in the stream. Infatuated, Rajoo dreams of wooing her but ends up being the best man at her wedding with David (Manoj Kumar).

Minoo Master (Padmini) starts out as a buddy in a boy’s disguise till Rajoo catches a glimpse of her bare bosom. He teaches her singing, dancing and acting but soon the footpath theatre isn’t enough for this ambitious miss who throws him over along with her dog Moti and goes off with Kumar (Rajendra Kumar), a movie moghul, to live out her starry dreams.

Rajoo encounters Marina (Ksiena Rabiankina ) when he is mistaken for one of the Russians and welcomed into the circus. In the Big Top Rajoo discovers true love, finds his vocation and faces up his biggest loss when his mother watching him take a diving leap from the top of the tent, is cruelly reminded of her joker husband who didn’t survive a similar fall, and suffers a fatal heart attack. His heart breaking Rajoo continues with his act, a brave smile on his face. The smile is still there when he watches Marina go out of his life.

Obviously, through Mary, Marina and Meena, Kapoor was remembering the three women who came into his life--Nargis, Padmini and Vyjayanthimala-- and left him with a splintered heart. Through the joker Kapoor was reliving his own life. He admitted as much when in a personalised piece in Screen three decades ago, he wrote, "Mera Naam Joker is a film about laughter yes, given that its central character is that of a joker, but it is also a film about the human heart. It is a film about love and longing. It is a film about human tragedy--tragedy which common people everywhere endeavor to conceal by fixing a smile on their faces even as tears are brimming over from beneath their eyelids."

The joker was a character Kapoor identified with strongly having lived the life of an entertainer from the early days of his boyhood. The joker was for him not just the eternal image of laughter, but the quintessence of the "little man". The "little man" who through the course of his long and eventful journey had suffered many an indignity and humiliation yet had always remained hopeful of the future.

Undoubtedly, despite its tales of loss,Raj Kapoor had himself never given way to pessimistic despair as for six long years he laboured over his magnum opus. Days before its release, he flew into Delhi to supervise preparations for the double premiere. One chilly, winter morning as he drove out of the hotel, he noticed some youths clustered around a small fire. Impulsively he stopped the car and stepped out. In minutes he was surrounded and bombared with questions about his new film. When he informed them that it was opening on December 18 they clasped his hand and told him, "We are eager to see our story."

That encounter reassured Kapoor who had invested all his saving, his very being, into Mera Naam Joker. The common man, he was happy to find, were looking forward to the release of the film. For them Rajoo, whether it was the Rajoo of Awaara, Shree 420, Jagte Raho, Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behta Hai, Sangam or Mera Naam Joker was representative of them, the common man, his aspirations and ambitions, his longings and frustrations, his dreams and hope. He now had reason to be ever more optimistic about Mera Naam Joker that he described as the most "difficult and monumental film of my career".

The film opened on the evening of December 17, 1970 at Mumbai’s Novelty Theatre. Raj Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, Rajendra Kumar and Manoj Kumar were crowded into the theatre along with Hema Malini and Waheeda Rehman. It was undoubtedly, the most eagerly awaited premiere of the year and the most well attended.