The Sholay opening scene, revisited

As part of a class on film criticism recently, I showed the Sholay opening-credits scene (which I have written about before in this post) and was reminded again of what a fine establishing sequence it is. Very rewarding to show in a class too, being a relatively under-analysed segment of an otherwise hugely familiar and well-loved film. I enjoyed the way the students responded, pointing out little things that hadn't occurred to me. There was even a short discussion of the use of lengthy takes – in the early shots of the two riders moving across the screen from left to right – and the compression of time and space. And naturally there was much appreciation of R D Burman’s superb score, which moves from a guitar-dominated motif to a more recognisably Indian one when the village of Ramgarh appears on screen.

Some talking points, further to what is in the earlier post:

– Aspects of the sound design, such as the clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves being incorporated into the musical theme just as it begins. The hoof-sound is vivid and percussive and has a clear echo; you wouldn’t call it an authentic aural representation of galloping horses, but it is very effective, and reminded me of the sound designer Resul Pookutty’s notes about "manufactured reality" in his memoir Sounding Off. Here is an example of sound design that makes a scene more poetic and emotionally resonant – for a few seconds – without being “realistic” in the narrowly defined sense.

- The striking visual contrast between the harsh outdoors and the warm, communal setting of the village can be said to parallel the divide between primitive and civilised ways of life in the classic American Western. At its core, the Western as a genre is heavily allegorical as it deals with the good-evil confrontation, often setting the barbaric Old West against the coming of a more genteel, more “civilised” world, represented by the railroad, the cattle farms and lawmakers. (It’s another matter that some of the best works in the genre allow us to question these distinctions.) The symbolic nature of Sholay’s mise-en-scene is made obvious in this opening scene, with its contrast between the swathes of rough, barren landscape (where the dakus presumably run rampant) and the village of Ramgarh, where people live together in a community, leading ordered lives, but constantly in danger from the evil that lies beyond. 

Into this setting come two men who have no roots, who have never had a family or a community, and who will, over the course of the story, learn about taking on responsibility and becoming part of this larger world - when they might so easily have slipped into Gabbar's world instead. (Dibakar Banerjee’s one-line summary of Sholay, from my conversations with him last year, had nothing to do with what we usually think of as the film’s plot, or the Thakur-Gabbar face-off. It was simply: “Anaath bacchon ko family mili.” Two orphans find a home.)

- The huge boulders here are just as arresting as the vistas of John Ford’s Monument Valley (and in fact part of the sequence reminds me of the opening-credits scene of Fort Apache), but they are also reminders that Gabbar and his men live in the nooks and cracks of these natural structures, in places where the law, literally and otherwise, has no hands.

– During the class, when I made the point about the artful use of music in the scene, one of the students, well-versed in classical music, corrected me: “That’s the mridangam, not the tabla,” he said.

I was fairly certain there was a shehnai in there somewhere too, but I didn’t want to put my own hoof in my mouth – later, I turned to this passage from Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal’s excellent book on R D Burman:

Vibrant guitar chords, the French horn and percussion, including a tabla tarang, accentuate the two horsemen’s ride from the railway station towards Ramgarh in the opening scene. As they canter past open fields and villages [...] the chords and the beat of the music alter to a very folksy and rustic tone, ending with Dakshina Mohan Tagore’s taar shehnai before it cuts back to the initial chords on the acoustic guitar and the French horn in the final lap as the horsemen reach their destination at Thakur Baldev Singh’s bungalow.

There is a certain twang in the acoustic notes that is reminiscent of the Wild West. The hollow sound of the horn is ominous - a sense of the impending war in the gorges of central India. The French horn, nicknamed 'jalebi' by sound recordist B N Sharma because of its unique shape, has been used sparingly in Hindi movies, and never really to this effect.

(That book is a must-read for any serious fan of Hindi-movie music, by the way, and an honest and extremely well-researched addition to our film literature. Meanwhile, I'm stopping the Sholay talk here for now, though I'm sure I'll remember something new immediately after clicking the "Publish" button.)