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Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975)
In the Berber-language film Adiós Carmen (2013), a boy in 1970s Morocco spends his days watching Hindi musicals at the village cinema. One of the shows is Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay. The audience, riveted even without subtitles, hisses at Gabbar Singh, the sadistic villain played by Amjad Khan, and hoots at dancer Helen as she shimmies through the raunchy campfire number, “Mehbooba Mehbooba.” This scene got me thinking of Sholay’s travels in the 50 years since its release in August 1975, especially to places where Hindi cinema gets further with a song than Hollywood does with all its glamour and industrial clout. Since the 1950s, Hindi films have found loyal audiences in Russia, China, pockets of Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East—and Sholay, India’s first 70mm film, was no exception. I can picture viewers singing along to “Yeh Dosti” in Kingston, shouting encouragement to Dhanno the horse in Ulaanbaatar, cheering on heroes Jai and Veeru in Fenyang, jeering at Gabbar in Tehran.
It’s generally accepted that Sholay is the greatest popular Hindi film ever made. It was, for almost two decades, the highest-grossing film in the country; it’s still estimated to hold the record for ticket sales. It played for months in cinemas—even years, in some cases—and then for decades on TV screens, until everyone knew it backwards. Sholay is often called a “curry western,” but a more fitting nomenclature might be “masala western.” The Hindi term for mixed spices has long been used as a descriptor for the kind of popular movies made here. Masala films are strong, flavorful, and suited to robust palates, blending melodrama, music, romance, poetry, comedy, and action in ever-varying combinations. From its inception, Sholay was designed as the masala film, an entertainment on a scale no one had seen before.
In Hindi film-industry parlance, a logline, or elevator pitch, is “one line.” Sholay, expansive before it even started, had four lines. Anupama Chopra writes in Sholay: The Making of a Classic that screenwriting duo Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar (collectively known as “Salim-Javed”) pitched it thus to director Ramesh Sippy and his father, producer G.P. Sippy: “An army officer’s family gets massacred. He remembers two junior officers who had been court-martialed. They are rascals but they are also brave. The retired officer decides to enlist them in his mission for revenge.”
Remarkably, through a difficult production that lasted two years, Sholay remained true to these four lines. There was one tweak: the retired army officer became a former police inspector, Thakur Baldev Singh (Sanjeev Kumar). He arranges a meeting with Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra), petty thieves he’d once arrested. Fresh out of jail, they’re made an offer: 20,000 rupees, plus the official reward of 50,000, to bring him Gabbar Singh—who is terrorizing Thakur’s village of Ramgarh—alive. The rest of the film unfolds in the fictional Ramgarh, somewhere in the Hindi heartland, sometime in the late ’60s or early ’70s.
The Sippys knew they needed multiple stars to sell a violent three-hour western. They went out and got some, and also got lucky. Dharmendra and his wife-to-be, Hema Malini, who plays chatty tonga driver Basanti, were massive stars. Sanjeev Kumar was extremely popular as well, and Jaya Bhaduri—cast opposite her husband, Amitabh Bachchan, as Thakur’s widowed daughter-in-law, Radha—had had a hit with Guddi (1971). Bachchan was a lanky brooder with a string of flops when he signed, but Salim-Javed vouched for him, and by the time Sholay was released, Zanjeer (1973) and Deewaar (1975) had made him the biggest box-office draw in the country. Amjad Khan, however, was an unknown theater actor, cast at the last moment and with some trepidation after the filmmakers’ first choice withdrew. Once the film opened, he was all anyone could talk about.
Soon after Jai and Veeru’s arrival in Ramgarh, they repel an initial advance by Gabbar’s gang of outlaws, but are nearly outgunned in a more organized attack led by Gabbar himself. Thakur is strangely inert during the shootout, standing motionless despite Veeru’s frantic calls for assistance. “Do you want to know why I didn’t pick up the gun?” Thakur asks Veeru later. Instead of offering an answer, Salim-Javed send us into a long flashback. We see a younger Thakur, in his police-force days, arrest Gabbar. The dacoit swears revenge, soon breaks out of jail, and captures Thakur. Then comes the film’s most electrifying image: Thakur tied to stone columns, arms outstretched on either side. Gabbar looms over him, a sword in each hand, repeating menacingly, “Yeh haath humko de de, Thakur” (Give me these arms, Thakur). As the swords swish down, there’s a cut to the present day, and a quick pan up and zoom out as a gust of wind blows off Thakur’s ever-present shawl, revealing that he has no arms. It’s a stunning bit of writing and direction, skirting a moment of violence that would never have made it past the censor board, but retaining its emotional devastation.
You can draw a line from Sergio Leone’s villains to Gabbar. But really, Gabbar stands alone, in Indian cinema and the western movie canon. He’s an astonishing creation, a sadist with a gift for ornate speechifying: magnetic, reprehensible, and uncontrollable. He’s the bandit as rock star, self-eulogizing on the fly, referring to himself in the third person: “Gabbar ke taap se tumhe ek hi aadmi bacha sakta hai, ek hi aadmi: khud Gabbar!” (Only one man can save you from Gabbar’s wrath: Gabbar himself!) Amjad Khan’s teasing voice extracts every bit of juice from Salim-Javed’s unhinged poetry. When a henchman begs for his life, saying “Maine aapka namak khaya hai” (I’ve eaten your salt), Gabbar deadpans, “Ab goli kha” (Now eat lead), and shoots him. Everything Gabbar says is memorable: he’s the reason a special LP featuring the film’s dialogue became a massive success.
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The dacoit (from the Hindi daaku, or bandit) had been a stock villain since the silent era. In the ’60s, they became more complex figures: killers bound by honor codes, outlaws softened by love or conscience. But it was only when a tougher Hindi action cinema began to take hold by the decade’s end that dacoit films more fully adopted the look and attitude of westerns. This ranged from incorporating genre tropes (the lone gunslinger, the climactic pitched battle) to lifting scenes wholesale from Sergio Leone films or Hollywood hits from the previous two decades. The freeze-frame ending of Kuchhe Dhaage (1973) recalls Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), while the boisterous Khote Sikkay (1974) is essentially The Magnificent Seven (1960) crossed with For a Few Dollars More (1965) and a soundtrack of barely altered Morricone hits.
Even as Hindi cinema seemed to be building up to a great western in the ’70s, India was breaking down. The first generation of independent Indians was growing restless. The dreams of newly won freedom had faded. Unemployment was rising. There were student protests, and strikes. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi saw her popularity plummet, and in June of 1975, she announced a state of nationwide emergency. Civil liberties were suspended and severe restrictions placed on the press and political opposition. It was lifted two years later.
It was into this fractured, cynical India that Sholay emerged. The film is self-evidently, intentionally, a western, yet it’s unlike any other western ever made. It synthesizes three strands of the genre: the darker, post-’50s Hollywood variant; the spaghetti western; and the homegrown “dacoit” film, which combined musical melodrama with action and rural politics. Sippy’s epic is in conversation with the genre, working with its rules and motifs, but it also introduces a dazzling array of shadings, innovations, provocations, and stray delights. There are six musical numbers. There are severed limbs. There’s dancing on broken glass. There are two romances, two revenge plots, a horse-carriage chase, a plea for widow remarriage (long verboten in India), a train hijacking for the ages, and a ton of slapstick. It’s a lifetime in three hours and 20 minutes.
With their scripts for the vigilante action film Zanjeer and the warring-brothers drama Deewaar, both of which starred a seething Amitabh Bachchan, Salim-Javed had pushed popular Hindi cinema into tougher, angrier territory. But Sholay was something else. All the humor and color can’t hide the bleakness at the film’s core. The villagers are resigned to their fate; the police are powerless. Thakur must lose his family and his arms to realize the impossibility of lawful revenge. Jai and Veeru are honourable thieves whose dreams of settling down with a plot of land are undone by violence and a broken system. This pessimism echoed the “angry young man” persona Bachchan was popularizing in the 1970s—an everyman figure that audiences, burdened with similar indignities, responded to with unprecedented fervor.
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Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) was, famously, a western stitched from other westerns. In crafting the story, Leone, Dario Argento, and Bernardo Bertolucci envisioned an homage, studded with references to dozens of classic films. Sholay is often described, erroneously, as a reworking of Leone’s opus, probably because of its straight lift of the scene in which Henry Fonda’s Frank murders a settler family. The only difference in Sippy’s version of this scene is that each time a member of Thakur’s family is shot by Gabbar, the frame freezes, the jolt of film technique replacing the on-screen violence Indian censors wouldn’t allow. Sippy also assigns the plaintive harmonica played by Charles Bronson’s character to Jai, though Bachchan plays a sweeter tune.
Unlike Leone and his collaborators, Salim-Javed had a practical, rather than cinephilic, approach to borrowing: anything that fit their story, whether they saw it in a western or war film or silent comedy, would be used, with neither expectation nor worry that someone would recognize the source. Sippy’s film takes its basic structure—though not much else—from Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 chanbara classic Seven Samurai (or its American western remake, The Magnificent Seven). Instead of seven men protecting a village from bandits, here there are two, though the driving force is really Thakur’s desire for vengeance. Gabbar is at least partly inspired by Gian Maria Volonté’s psychotic Indio in For a Few Dollars More, with his gurgling laugh punctuating sudden acts of violence. Ebullient Veeru and reserved Jai recall the relationship between Butch Cassidy and Sundance.
There’s also a nod to Buster Keaton’s comic masterpiece The General (1926) during the train attack. And the buffoonish, “British-era” jailer is comedian Asrani’s take on Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940), down to his Hitler moustache and globe. Ideas came from lesser-known films too. The 5-Man Army, a 1969 spaghetti western with a terrific action sequence on top of a train, was cited by Akhtar as an inspiration. In a 1954 American western called Garden of Evil, Richard Widmark gets Gary Cooper to leave a potentially fatal shootout along with Susan Hayward by tricking him at cards. This scene is echoed in Sholay, when Jai flips his silver rupee coin to decide who’ll hold off the dacoits at the bridge and who’ll rush to the village with Basanti to pick up ammunition (Veeru never suspects that it’s a two-headed coin). It’s a typically deft lift by Salim-Javed: recognizing the potential in a stray scene, filing it away, and finding the perfect fit for it decades later. That Sholay ended up a tapestry of global cinema influences is one of its incidental pleasures. Sippy and Salim-Javed were concerned only with getting the right blend of masala.
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Time has done little to disturb Sholay’s centrality in Indian cinema. After 50 years of stripping it for parts, directors and writers still find things to steal. Every talky, sadistic villain in its wake has a bit of Gabbar in him; every sweet-sour lead duo has some of Veeru and Jai. The average Indian moviegoer can easily quote a dozen of its lines on command. In a poll conducted by the Indian web publication Film Companion in 2023, a pool of over 150 critics, directors, and industry professionals voted Sholay the best Indian film of all time, ahead of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) and Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957). Indians of my generation, born in the ’80s, likely saw it piecemeal before they saw it whole: a song here, a scene there, fragments scattered across the cultural landscape. Most of the famous scenes—nearly all the ones involving Gabbar—I already knew when I watched it for the first time. This might have been the first film Indians experienced in meme form before the real thing, through homages, reminiscences, parodies, advertisements.
Back in August 1975, Sholay got off to a slow start at the box office; reviews were mixed and audiences took a couple of weeks to come to grips with the film’s scale and violence. This uneasy start caused many involved with the production to panic. They almost convinced Sippy to reshoot his downbeat ending—which itself was rewritten and reshot to accommodate the censors. In the theatrical-release version, just as Thakur looks to take cathartic revenge, a deus-ex-machina police troop appears and cuts him short. Jai is dead, Radha is bereft once again, Veeru and Basanti are together but headed into an uncertain future. Thakur is left with even more regret and guilt. Maybe Gabbar breaks out of jail again. But Sippy’s intended ending was bleaker still: the once-upstanding Thakur kicks Gabbar to death with spiked shoes.
In June, a new 4K restoration of Sholay by the Film Heritage Foundation and Shehzad Sippy (the director’s nephew) played at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. It replaces the theatrical-release ending with the one Ramesh Sippy and the writers intended, and includes two deleted scenes that weren’t in the 1975 cut. In a country where proper restorations are rare and physical-media culture is nonexistent, I’m wary of a revisionist cut (albeit one that honors the original vision) supplanting the version that became a part of India’s history. That said, I couldn’t be more excited to see Sholay, properly restored, on the big screen. So much of its legend centers on Salim-Javed and Amjad Khan’s Gabbar that even fans tend to underestimate what a well-directed film it is. There are so many memorable flourishes that don’t stem from writing or performance: the smoothness of the one-shot opening scene; the deft montage of ambient village sounds; the Peckinpah-like slow-motion action when Jai and Veeru lay a trap for the bandits; the haunting image of Radha extinguishing the lamps at dusk as Jai looks on and plays harmonica.
In a recent viewing, I was captivated by a series of shots preceding Jai and Veeru’s ambush of the dacoits. Six men on horseback gallop across the horizon, silhouetted against a blood-orange sunrise. This is followed by a zoom into the sun, filling the entire screen with mustard yellow. These 20 seconds are unlike anything else in the film. Fifty years of Sholay and still there are treasures hiding in plain sight.
Uday Bhatia is a film critic with Mint Lounge in Delhi, and the author of Bullets Over Bombay: Satya and the Hindi Film Gangster.
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