ਬੀ. ਆਰ. ਚੋਪੜਾਬੀ. ਆਰ. ਚੋਪੜਾ

Baldev Raj Chopra (22 April 1914 to 5 November 2008), known to the film world as B. R. Chopra, was a Punjab-born Indian film director and producer who founded B R Films and shaped popular Hindi cinema for four decades. He directed Naya Daur, Sadhna, Kanoon, Gumrah and Hamraaz, produced films for his younger brother Yash Chopra and his son Ravi Chopra, and in his seventies produced Mahabharat, the television epic that emptied streets across India on Sunday mornings.

ਮੁੱਢਲਾ ਜੀਵਨ

Chopra was born on 22 April 1914 in Rahon, a town in Punjab that now lies in Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar district, the son of Vilayati Raj Chopra, an employee of the Public Works Department. He was the second of several siblings, and the youngest of them, Yash Chopra, would follow him into films. His birthplace is not reported the same way everywhere: film references such as Upperstall give Rahon, while several obituaries published at his death in 2008 gave Ludhiana. This page follows Rahon, and Jugti's own Rahon entry lists him among the town's notable people.

The family later moved to Lahore, where Chopra took an M.A. in English literature from the University of the Punjab. Cinema reached him first through print. In 1944 he began working as a film journalist with Cine Herald, a film monthly published in Lahore, and he later took over the magazine and ran it until 1947. That year he launched a film, Chandni Chowk, from a story by I. S. Johar, but riots broke out in Lahore as production was about to start, and the family had to flee the city during Partition.

After Partition he moved first to Delhi and then to Mumbai. His first production, Karwat, began in 1948 and failed at the box office. His first film as a director, Afsana in 1951, told a story of mistaken identity with Ashok Kumar in a double role, and its success established his name in the Bombay industry. Chandni Chowk, with Meena Kumari, followed in 1954.

B R Films and the films that asked questions

In 1955 Chopra formed his own production house, B R Films. Its first production, Ek Hi Raasta in 1956, which he also directed, argued for widow remarriage and was a success. A year later came Naya Daur, in which a village tonga driver played by Dilip Kumar races a motor bus to defend his livelihood against mechanisation. The film, co-starring Vyjayanthimala, was a golden jubilee hit and remains the clearest statement of his method: a live social question carried inside a popular story, with music and stars doing the persuading.

The run of films that followed made social argument a habit rather than an exception. Sadhna in 1958 dealt with the rehabilitation of a sex worker. Kanoon in 1960 was a courtroom drama against capital punishment, made without songs at a time when Hindi films were expected to have them, and it won him the Filmfare Award for Best Director. Gumrah in 1963 examined a married woman drawn back to her former lover, and Hamraaz in 1967 turned on a woman with a secret past.

As a producer, Chopra built the banner into a family workshop. He gave his younger brother Yash Chopra his directorial debut with Dhool Ka Phool in 1959 and produced Yash's Waqt in 1965, Ittefaq and Aadmi Aur Insaan in 1969. Ittefaq, a thriller without songs in which the heroine is revealed as a murderer, showed how far the banner would bend the conventions of its day. In later decades he produced The Burning Train in 1980 and Aaj Ki Awaaz in 1984, and the banner returned to wide popularity with Baghban in 2003 and Baabul in 2006, both directed by his son Ravi Chopra.

His own directing continued across genres into the 1980s: the thriller Dhund in 1973, the comedy Pati Patni Aur Woh in 1978, Insaf Ka Tarazu in 1980, which dealt with sexual violence and the courts, the Muslim social drama Nikaah in 1982 and the political thriller Awam in 1987. Behind the films stood a story department, unusual for its time, and long collaborations with writers and poets such as Sahir Ludhianvi. He also developed the career of singer Mahendra Kapoor, who sang in most of his films.

Mahabharat and television

Chopra's largest audience came from television. Mahabharat, produced by B R Films and directed by him with his son Ravi Chopra, ran for 94 episodes on Doordarshan from 2 October 1988 to 24 June 1990. Pandit Narendra Sharma wrote the script from the Sanskrit epic, Rahi Masoom Raza wrote the screenplay and dialogues, Raj Kamal composed the music, and Harish Bhimani narrated as the voice of Time. Nitish Bharadwaj played Krishna and Mukesh Khanna played Bhishma, in performances that defined those figures for a generation of viewers.

The Sunday morning broadcasts became a national habit, widely remembered for streets emptying while episodes aired. Chopra's choice of Raza, a Muslim poet and novelist, to write the dialogues for a Hindu epic was questioned by some at the time and is now counted among the production's strengths. B R Films also produced other television series, including Bahadur Shah Zafar, Vishnu Puran, Aap Beeti and Maa Shakti.

What made B. R. Chopra's films different?

His films were different because they were built around a question society was avoiding, and then answered that question inside a story audiences wanted to watch. A songless courtroom drama argued against the death penalty in Kanoon. A hit romance asked what a village owes its workers when machines arrive in Naya Daur. Gumrah and Ittefaq gave women desires and crimes that the commercial cinema of the day usually reserved for men. Film writers have noted that his endings often returned to the moral norms of the period, but the questions his films raised were frequently ahead of it, which is why so many of them are still discussed.

Honours and later life

Chopra served on the jury of the 13th Berlin International Film Festival in 1963. His productions and directions collected National Film Awards, including honours for Kanoon, for Dharmputra as producer, for Gumrah and for Hamraaz. The Government of India gave him the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, the highest honour in Indian cinema, for 1998, and the Padma Bhushan in 2001. He also received a Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award.

In his last years the banner passed increasingly to his son Ravi Chopra, whose Baghban and Baabul carried the family name to a new audience, while Bhoothnath appeared under the banner in 2008. B. R. Chopra died in Mumbai on 5 November 2008, aged 94, survived by his son Ravi and two daughters.

ਵਿਰਾਸਤ

Chopra's legacy works in three directions. The first is the films themselves: Naya Daur, Kanoon and Gumrah are still shown and studied as examples of popular cinema carrying reformist argument. The second is institutional. B R Films, founded in 1955, gave Hindi cinema a durable production house, and inside it he trained two filmmakers who reshaped the industry after him: his brother Yash Chopra, who left in 1970 to found Yash Raj Films, and his son Ravi Chopra. The third is television: Mahabharat proved that an Indian epic, carefully written and produced, could hold the whole country at the same hour, and it set the scale every later mythological serial has been measured against.