There was an era in Hindi cinema when reincarnation was a popular trope in the movies. In these films, the protagonist would die and later be reborn, and punish the criminals who caused their death. Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala-starrer 1958 film Madhumati brought this idea into the mainstream but Rajesh Khanna and Hema Malini’s Mehbooba and Kudrat made it popular. So when Subhash Ghai thought of partially adapting the 1975 film The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, and making Karz with Rishi Kapoor, he believed he had something promising. However, the result wasn’t what everyone expected.

Rishi Kapoor overshadowed by Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘angry young man’ phase

Karz, starring Rishi Kapoor, Simi Garewal and Tina Munim, released in 1980, and to their shock, it wasn’t successful at the box office. Rishi Kapoor, who had been a part of many multi-starrers until then, had been braving the Amitabh Bachchan ‘angry young man’ era and was desperately looking for a hit as a solo hero. He had had a few hits but Bachchan-mania had completely overshadowed his time at the movies so far and with Karz, he was hoping for a major turnaround.

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In Karz, Rishi played Monty, a musician who starts getting visions of another man’s death. During a vacation in Ooty, he finds the locations that appeared in his visions and starts putting the pieces together. This is when he finds out that he is the reincarnation of Ravi Verma (played by Raj Kiran), who was killed by his wife Kamini (Simi Garewal). Monty makes it his mission to avenge Ravi’s death, and fight for justice for the sake of Ravi’s mother and sister. The film was a commercial potboiler and had everything going for it, even the music by Laxmikant – Pyarelal (despite the famous hook tune being plagiarised).

Rishi Kapoor sank into ‘deep depression’ after Karz

In his autobiography Khullam Khulla: Rishi Kapoor Uncensored, Rishi shared that even though Karz did “decent business”, it was nowhere close to what they had expected, and for them, it was Qurbani that stole the show as it released just a week after Karz’s release. At a 2017 event with Ghai, Rishi said that Karz released at a time when only action films worked, unless they were extraordinary. “When Karz released, it was accepted well, but it wasn’t a big film in the sense that Qurbani was,” he said and added that Qurbani had the star factor – Feroz Khan, Vinod Khanna, Amjad Khan and Zeenat Aman, was shot in international locations, had many titillating scenes and “equally good music.” “Qurbani shook us a bit,” he said.

Rishi Kapoor with Simi Garewal and director Subhash Ghai on the set of Karz.

Rishi, in his autobiography, had said that he sank into “deep depression” after Karz failed. So much so that at one point, he couldn’t even face the camera anymore. “I was so demoralised that I couldn’t face the camera anymore. I would tremble on the sets and feel faint. I’d sink into my chair, go to the makeup room and ask for water,” he wrote and said that when the film didn’t get the praise he had expected, he was “shattered.” He even started questioning his career as an actor and believed that his “acting days were numbered” and that he had “hit rock bottom.”

Rishi Kapoor was ‘traumatised’ after Karz failed

The shock of Karz’s failure was such that it started affecting his other films. Rishi was working on four films at the time – Naseeb, Deedar-e-Yaar, Zamaane Ko Dikhana Hai and Prem Rog – but he was a no-show for the next few days. “The entire cast and crew of these films would wait for me to turn up,” he wrote and added, “I just couldn’t get up and look at the camera.”

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Rishi was in the middle of a massive mental health crisis and his father Raj Kapoor, who was also directing him in Prem Rog, was quite worried for him. “Doctors were called in to analyse my condition, psychiatrists were consulted,” he wrote and recalled that his father took him to their farmhouse in Loni, Maharashtra. “He thought a change of scene would do me good and give him the chance to have a heart-to-heart chat with me,” he wrote and recalled how his father also accompanied him to Shirdi, and often read out quotes from Bhagavad Gita, but Rishi, by his own admission, wasn’t very receptive as he was quite “traumatised.”

But while Rishi was going through this phase, he did not realise that it was a direct result of Karz’s fate at the box office. Such was his condition that he found himself resorting to drinking alcohol on most evenings. “Trembling with fear,” Rishi started getting “paranoid” and feared that a light might fall on him on the set.

“I would regain some of my lost confidence when I had a drink in the evening with my friends. But on set the next morning, I would tremble with fear. I became paranoid and kept fearing that one of the big set lights was going to fall on me. But in my brief moments of clarity, I also knew that I had to pick myself up and get back to normal. And although the process was slow, I managed to climb out of it and regain normalcy,” he wrote.

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Rishi Kapoor began to blame marriage with Neetu for failure

All this while, Rishi was a newly married man and his wife, Neetu Kapoor, bore the brunt of Karz’s failure. At one point, Rishi started blaming Neetu, and his now-married status for his decreasing fan following. “The Karz vs Qurbani stand-off at the box-office happened in June 1980, five months after Neetu and I had got married. I now began to blame my marriage for my diminishing fan base,” he wrote.

Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Kapoor were newly married when Karz released.

Because Rishi was known as a ‘romantic hero’, he feared that his marital status had made him undesirable. “I blamed Neetu for it (his films flopping), believing marriage had robbed me of my charm. I went into a depression and could not bring myself to face either the public or the camera,” he wrote. At the time, Neetu was pregnant with their daughter Riddhima, and had to put up with everything that was happening in Rishi’s career. “Neetu was pregnant with Riddhima and had to endure my breakdown in that fragile condition,” he said.

Even though Karz was overshadowed by Qurbani when it released, Karz emerged as the winner in the long run. The music of the film inspired many film titles – Ek Hasina Thi, Aashiq Banaya Aapne, Om Shanti Om, and many others. In 2008, the film was remade with Himesh Reshammiya in the lead role and was titled Karzzzz. It was even remade in Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. The Hindi version might not have emerged as a winner back in 1980, but nearly 45 years later, Karz is the film that’s often seen as the typical mainstream Hindi film, which relied completely on suspension of disbelief.

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