A family affair

A new book felicitates India's most famous movie dynasty, the Kapoor khandan.

At the book launch for Madhu Jain's The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema, there's a distinct whiff of naughtiness in the air. "They (the Kapoor family) have been a part of our dreams over the decades," says the author - adding, as the guests of honour Shashi Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh squirm imperceptibly, "and sometimes even our wet dreams."

And a little later, before the screening of the 1939 Sikandar in which Prithviraj Kapoor played the great conqueror: "I do encourage you all to watch this film. The man is gorgeous - and what legs!"

Raj Kapoor - whose movies, even in the 1940s and 1950s, contained a strong sexual charge - would probably have enjoyed this ribaldry. Other members of the clan might have frowned disapprovingly.

But that's the Kapoors for you - a fascinatingly complex family in which non-conformity and orthodoxy have coexisted ever since the 1920s, when the young Prithviraj Kapoor threw up his law studies and travelled to Bombay to try his hand at acting.

Prithviraj gazes out at the reader from the cover of this long-overdue memoir - dressed in Arab regalia, with the smouldering good looks that would have put silent-era matinee idols like Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro in the shade.

It's his birth centenary next year ("a happy coincidence," says Jain, who hadn't planned the book for the event) and his legacy is in good hands. Seventy-seven years after he made the train journey from Lyallpur to Bombay, the torch is in the hands of his great-granddaughters Karisma and Kareena.

His grandson Aditya Raj (Shammi's son), though relatively low-profile, is still an active director. And Rishi and Neetu's son Ranbir is set to make his acting debut next year.

The Kapoors have been a major part of every twist and turn in Hindi film history from the dying days of the silent era onwards, and Jain approaches this daunting canvas with a mixture of panache and good sense.

Rather than attempt an integrated, steadfastly chronological account of the family, she dedicates separate chapters to the life and career of each major individual - which helps maintain the focus on some very disparate personalities; the character sketches of Raj, Shammi and Shashi are particularly adept.

Importantly, the author hasn't shied away from dissecting the darker side of the family. The Kapoor weakness for alcohol and food, and the subsequent tendency towards corpulence, are discussed ("I learnt a lot about food when I became a part of this family," quips Neetu Singh during the book discussion) - as are individual tics like Raj Kapoor's faux-humility (he would walk into a room full of his admirers, bent forward, hands folded, saying "Mujhe Raj Kapoor kehte hain") and Rishi Kapoor's latter-day abusiveness towards his wife and children.

More skeletons peek out from the family closet at the book launch: when the subject of Kapoor women having been forbidden to act comes up, Shashi dismisses it as a media fabrication.

But there is little conviction in this statement, or in Ritu Kapoor's declaration that no one in her family told her she couldn't join films.

There are still visible traces of the atavistic tendency to look down on actors as "kanjars" (a pejorative term used by Prithviraj's father when he learnt of his son's ambition back in 1928), and the need to "protect" the family women from the profession - even if those shackles have been broken by the current generation.

In the final analysis, Jain says, the success of the Kapoors owes equally to passion for cinema and hard work. "It would be erroneous to think they have it made because of family backing," she says.

In the book she talks about how difficult it is for each succeeding generation of the family to carve a distinct niche for themselves - one of the reasons why the careers of Raj's sons Randhir and Rajeev fell by the wayside. "I had plenty of luggage to carry," adds a solemn Rishi at the launch. "I was always being gauged by my father's or my uncles' success."

Will the industry ever run out of Kapoors? "No way," avers Jain. "There are too many of them, and they are passionate about movies. In fact, in future we might well see generations that combine the Kapoor and Bachchan genes [Ritu Kapoor's son is married to Amitabh Bachchan's daughter]."

Little wonder that, as she points out, there has never been a film dynasty like this: "Excluding monarchies, the only dynasty comparable to this one in quantifiable terms is a political one "" the Kennedys."

Things you didn't know about the Kapoors

In the 1940s some history textbooks carried photos of Prithviraj Kapoor playing Sikandar in the chapter on Alexander the Great "" much to the mortification of Shashi, who was in school at the time. Twenty years later, stills from Mughal-e-Azam were carried in chapters on Akbar.

Nargis described her first meeting with Raj Kapoor to a close friend as: "A fat, blue-eyed pinkie had visited the house." Later, she would tell the friend: "Pinkie has started getting fresh with me."

When creating his famous "Yahoo!" persona, Shammi Kapoor developed a fascination for Hollywood bad boy Errol Flynn "" wanting to emulate the sexually adventurous actor both on- and off-screen.