Shree 420's most striking quality is its continuity with myth. Raj, as a manifestation of the mythic trickster archetype, has much in common with the tricksters of other cultures — Loki, Reynard, Raven, Br'er Rabbit, Ananse, Coyote — and in the case of the Hindu mythos, Krishna. In fact Raj carries Krishna's pipe in his coat pocket! His stumbles — everything from the physical pratfalls of his Chaplin-inspired antics to the tactical errors wherein his deceptions are thwarted by naïve honesty — are characteristic of the trickster. For instance, he has his audience fooled and is making money hand over fist by selling them sand as a tonic, but when one of Seth Sonachand's men asks him the ingredients, he naïvely admits his deception and becomes the focus of an angry mob.

Where Krishna is in the custom of seducing cowherds, Raj seduces a schoolteacher. "I don't understand why you dress and behave like a clown," complains an exasperated Vidya, to which Raj replies "You need to stand on your head to see the world straight." The moment at which we know that Raj has hooked her — before Vidya herself knows — comes when Raj lures her into the sea. As in the rain scene later in the film, the water symbolises a surrender to eros: Vidya, having told a bothersome Raj that he ought to go and drown himself, runs to his aid when she sees him about to do exactly that. The moment when she perches on the rock, glancing left and right, powerful waves crashing round her, uncertain whether to jump in, is her, and the story's, turning point. (I'm reminded of DH Lawrence's Women in Love: "The terrible, massive, cold, boundless surface of the water terrified her beyond words. Would he never come back? She felt she must jump into the water too, to know the horror also.) When she emerges from the sea in a Bollywood-typical clinging wet saree, the physical violation of the boundary implemented by her clothing operates as a metaphor for erotic violation of her resistance to the trickster Raj.

It seems significant that the poor residents of their section of Mumbai live on a footpath, because this story is one of paths. In the opening scene, Raj arrives at a crossroads and chooses a path to Mumbai. The rest of the film is about his choice of path between truth and deception, Vidya and Maya. Raj has insight into what is happening to him, and wants to tread a middle way between the practicality of Section 420 and the ideal of virtue. But his attempt to combine the two worlds, by bringing Vidya into Maya's world on the occasion of Diwali — his attempt literally to clothe Vidya in Maya's garment (recall the significance of clothing, its power as a barrier or a cover, from the early scene in which Vidya plunges into the sea), only backfires when Maya recognises the purloined saree and uses it to embarrass Vidya. Raj recognises the two faces of Lakshmi, virtuous and avaricious, when he says of Sonachand's palace, "this is her temple, and these are her devotees." In the climactic aftermath, when Raj stumbles drunk back to Vidya, the camera shoots from Raj's perspective, framing (clothing) her between two fistfuls of rupees.

In a more abstract sense this notion of the power of clothing, or of image in general, comments on the Britishness (or in particular the Englishness) of postcolonial Indian society, and identifies this Englishness with the avaricious, money-conscious and class-conscious face of Lakshmi. Raj's trickster antics mask his educated status, and to make a point of his education and nobility he carries round in the pockets of his bedraggled suit two articles: his B.A. diploma and his college medal for honesty. Though he readily pawns his honesty, he holds the diploma close, and it's only when he uses it to prove to schoolteacher Vidya his educated status that she becomes willing to see him in a new light: "I'm sorry," she says when she sees the diploma — not when she sees Raj himself, but when she sees his diploma. Even Vidya, it seems, isn't immune to a certain sort of class prejudice.