After Awara, she worked almost exclusively with him even turning down her mentor Mehboob’s Aan (1952). Shree 420 reaffirms the Raj Kapoor-Nargis searing on-screen chemistry. All laugh at her including Raj and when he subsequently slips and falls on the peel, Vidya, though having just fallen and angered at been laughed at, too joins in laughing at his fall – a beautiful illustration of the harsh cruelty of the city. But the film also captures several nuances of Bombay in sequences like when Vidya slips on the banana peel and falls. Several of the comic sequences are homage to Chaplin not to mention least the climax of the film with a money bag being thrown around and the characters chasing it. Modernity in nation building has focused on economic productivity and autonomy of the individual contradicting Indian Traditions which have a strong base in community, religion and honour. On one hand even as India successfully challenged colonial domination, she accepted the very intellectual premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based. The conflict has been there right since Independence as India strove to combine modernity with a strong National ethos in order to promote its own path of nation building. This conflict on the surface might just be a clash of the two facets of a woman – the home-loving girl next door versus a femme fatale but on a larger scale we see it is really a conflict of two ideologies that post-independent India faced following the years of its freedom – the traditional Indian and the so called modern western.
But what’s most interesting in the film really is the duality of the face of the Indian woman. Nargis plays Vidya the nourisher and pure, good Indian woman – a poor schoolteacher with a paralyzed father, while Nadira plays Maya the corrupt Westernized modern woman seducing Raj into a world where money is the beginning and end of all means. True to mainstream Hindi film stereotypes, the city is populated by the cold blooded rich on one end and the warm-hearted poor like the fruit seller at the other. Like many of Raj Kapoor’s films, Shree 420 focuses on the duality of issues – here it was the battle of innocence v/s corruption, rich v/s poor and tradition v/s modernity. Going a step further with the character of the Chaplinesque tramp of Awaara, he effectively uses the character in a most enjoyable tale that charts the moral corruption of an innocent soul coming to the big bad city to make his fortune. Shree 420 is perhaps Raj Kapoor’s most famous film next to Awara (1951). Matters come to a head when a housing scam Raj is involved in threatens to defraud thousands of common men and women of their entire life’s savings… But increasingly he also finds he is alienated from the people he loves like Vidya or the fruit seller on Bombay’s streets (Lalita Pawar). With money now at his command, Raj finds himself totally corrupted by this world of materialism. However, Seth Sonachand Dharmanand who was there at the club that night seeks Raj out and offers him a partnership in his under-hand dealings.
Maya dresses him up and parades him in front of several rich and influential people as a ‘Prince’ in a posh club where his sleight-of-hand tricks win her a big sum of money, but once out of the club, she mocks him and casts him out. When he delivers a dress to a rich client Maya (Nadira), she discovers his proficiency with cards. After a spell of unemployment, he lands a job in a laundry. He encounters Vidya (Nargis), a poor school teacher with a paralyzed father and the two fall in love. However his ideals and principles are soon crushed by the harsh realities of the big bad city. Raj (Raj Kapoor) is a small town person who comes to Bombay with the dream of making it big.