The socialist soul behind Dev Anand’s charm

Dev Anand did not look like a socialist hero. In a young India where socialism was being preached as a principle of nation-building, he arrived on screen in immaculate clothes, a cigarette between his fingers, his head tilted at an improbable angle and a smile that seemed to belong to a different, more glamorous republic.

Then he began playing gamblers, smugglers, pickpockets, black-marketeers and men pushed to the edges of respectable society.

Dev Anand’s importance was never simply that he was stylish. He became the face of an India negotiating a difficult question after Independence: what would it mean to be modern without becoming culturally alien, socially free without abandoning collective responsibility, and cosmopolitan without surrendering the idea of an Indian nation?

His films did not always answer that question. Often, they made it visible.

That is also why socialism matters to the Dev Anand story. The Bombay film world of the 1940s and 1950s was crowded with writers, theatre workers, filmmakers and lyricists shaped by the Progressive Writers’ Movement and the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). They brought questions of class, inequality, exploitation, communal harmony and social justice into popular culture. The Progressive Writers who moved into Bombay’s film industry included Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and a wider circle that overlapped with Chetan Anand, Balraj Sahni and other figures of the progressive cultural movement.

Dev Anand’s Navketan became one of the places where that cultural politics met commercial Hindi cinema.

The first significant clue was Baazi in 1951.

Dev had met Guru Dutt during Hum Ek Hain and the two had made a pact: if Anand ever became a producer, Dutt would direct his film. When Anand launched Navketan with Chetan Anand, that promise eventually became Baazi. Dutt made his directorial debut; Sahir Ludhianvi wrote the lyrics; S.D. Burman composed the music; Balraj Sahni was involved with the writing. The result was not a conventional sermon about poverty. It was a crime film, a romance and a suspense drama — but one in which the city itself became part of the story.

Its hero, Madan, is unemployed and desperate to support his ill sister. He enters a gambling racket because legitimate choices are scarce. Opposite him is a doctor who treats poor patients without charging them.

The politics of Baazi is not delivered through speeches. It lies in the circumstances that make illegality attractive and in the film’s refusal to divide its characters neatly between saints and sinners. Navketan’s early cinema repeatedly allowed morally compromised people to occupy the centre of the frame. Contemporary accounts of the studio have noted how its films dealt with the social anxieties of a newly independent country without adopting the more explicitly didactic mode associated with some other filmmakers of the period.

The rebel hero, therefore, was not necessarily a revolutionary.

He was something more interesting: a man produced by a society whose promises and realities did not always match.

That became Dev Anand’s speciality.

In Jaal, he played a smuggler with little of Madan’s moral alibi. In Taxi Driver, he became a cabbie living on daily earnings in a Bombay of bars, dancers and crime. In House No. 44, the urban outsider exists on the margins of property and respectability. His characters could be selfish, opportunistic or even criminal. But they were rarely inert.

The city kept moving, and so did they.

This was where Guru Dutt’s visual language and Dev Anand’s persona became particularly consequential. Baazi helped establish a Bombay noir vocabulary in which shadows, nightclubs, crime, desire and precarious urban lives could coexist with popular romance.

And then there were the poets.

If Dev Anand supplied the body of this new hero, Sahir supplied some of his conscience.

Sahir Ludhianvi belonged to the Progressive literary tradition and was deeply associated with themes of inequality, exploitation, war and social injustice. He was a communist sympathiser, although he did not formally join the Communist Party of India. His collaboration with Anand extended across films including Jaal, Taxi Driver and Hum Dono. In Hum Dono, Anand specifically wanted Sahir to write the songs, and the partnership produced songs that could sound romantic while carrying a distinctly reflective, sometimes melancholic view of life.

The politics of those songs was not always overt.

That was their strength.

The Progressive tradition had already demonstrated that poetry could enter mass culture without surrendering its political vocabulary. Sahir, Majrooh and their contemporaries helped turn the Hindi film song into something more than an interruption between scenes — a place where private desire could collide with poverty, alienation, loneliness and social hierarchy.

When Sahir’s relationship with S.D. Burman broke down, Majrooh Sultanpuri entered more prominently into the Navketan musical world. Nau Do Gyarah carried Majrooh’s words; later collaborations included Kala Pani and others. Majrooh was not merely another lyricist filling a vacancy. He came from the same broad progressive milieu and had been jailed by the newly independent Indian state in connection with his political writing and activism.

This is where the Dev Anand story becomes larger than Dev Anand.

The star’s apparently Westernised clothes, cosmopolitan manners and restless individualism existed alongside a cultural ecosystem deeply concerned with socialism, class and social transformation.

He did not have to look austere for those ideas to enter popular culture.

That may be one of the great paradoxes of his career.

By the 1960s, that modernity had moved beyond the urban underworld. Asli-Naqli placed its hero between wealth and a poorer neighbourhood, while Guide pushed the question of respectability into more complicated territory.

Guide is particularly important because it resists a neat socialist interpretation of Anand. Raju is a tourist guide who becomes an impresario, a manipulator and eventually a spiritual figure. Rosie moves from being socially stigmatised as a dancer to becoming the celebrated performer Nalini. The film simultaneously engages with modernisation, gender, social respectability, performance and spiritual self-realisation. Its modernity is therefore not simply economic or political; it is also about who gets to reinvent oneself.

Even the songs carry that tension. Guide’s lyrics were by Shailendra, not Sahir, and its soundtrack moved between romance, melancholy, folk idioms and spiritual reflection. That distinction matters because Dev Anand’s progressive cultural world was never reducible to one poet or one ideology. It was a network of collaborators whose ideas sometimes converged and sometimes pulled in different directions.

The wider cultural climate also travelled beyond Bombay.

Indian cinema became an important part of India’s cultural relationship with the Soviet Union after Independence. At the first major Indian film festival in Moscow in 1954, films dealing with social justice, rural poverty and the realities of a newly independent country resonated strongly with Soviet audiences. Dev Anand was among the Indian film personalities who travelled to the Soviet Union during this period of expanding cultural exchange. Between 1954 and 1991, nearly 210 Indian films were screened in Soviet theatres, illustrating the scale of that relationship.

Dev Anand, however, was never simply the polished face of a political doctrine.

His cinema contained the friction between socialism and aspiration, collective ideals and individual freedom, social responsibility and personal reinvention.

That tension eventually appeared outside the screen.

During the Emergency, Anand refused to appear on Doordarshan in support of the government. After the Emergency, he led a group of film personalities against Indira Gandhi during the 1977 election and subsequently founded the National Party of India, which was later disbanded after he could not find suitable candidates.

It would be too convenient to read that later political intervention backwards into every film he had made.

But it does make one part of his career clearer.

Dev Anand had spent decades playing men who did not fit comfortably inside prescribed identities — respectable or criminal, rich or poor, believer or sceptic, insider or outsider. His politics in real life was similarly rooted in a resistance to being entirely contained by institutions.

That is perhaps why his relevance now is less about nostalgia than about a question.

What happened to the India that Dev Anand helped make desirable?

Not an India without contradictions. His films were full of them. Not an India in which socialism, individualism, religion and cosmopolitanism had been reconciled. They had not.

Rather, an India in which these tensions could coexist visibly — in the same film, the same song, sometimes even the same character.

Dev Anand made that unsettledness look glamorous.

Guru Dutt gave it shadows. Sahir gave it poetry. Majrooh gave it another political vocabulary. Navketan gave it a commercial vehicle.

And Dev Anand gave the whole argument a face that refused to stand still.