Sholay, in fragments: a 50th anniversary tribute

[Wrote a version of this piece for Mint Lounge, as part of a tribute to Sholay on its 50th anniversary. Have written about the film before, of course – including a 40th anniversary piece which you can read here – and it doesn’t feel like much new can be said. But I took a personal slant here, likening the film to a famous oral epic, imagined and experienced in bits and pieces, never quite “finished”]

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Is it possible for the most iconic and mythologised film in your life – the one that is most thoroughly familiar – to also feel like a jigsaw puzzle that took a long time to put together?

Like any other super-fan, I have my personal Sholay history, and it includes this confession: even though the film is central to my pop-cultural journey, looming forever on the horizon like those boulders against the sun in Gabbar’s domain, there have been many gaps in my viewing. Of course I have watched it in the conventional way from beginning to end, at least five or six times (as opposed to the dozens or hundreds claimed by other devotees) – and yet it always feels like I came to it piecemeal through a melange of things heard and read, narratives constructed, back-stories related in magazines and books… and finally, prints with scenes missing in them.

Here’s how this can happen.

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You’re six or seven, and going for a rare family outing to a hall, to see a film that’s less than a decade old but already fixed in legend. Someone dawdles, you reach 10 minutes after the show has begun, walking into a noisy action sequence involving a train, bad guys on horses, and three leading men whom you recognise. It’s exciting but you’re overwhelmed, and lost about who is doing what: why is one of the “heroes” in police uniform while the other two look roguish, though they all appear to be fighting on the same side?

Then, in the very next scene, Sanjeev Kumar – the cop on the train, energetic and youthful – is older, tired, speaking slowly. You’re not sure what’s going on: the concept of the flashback and flashforward, the idea that these images can jump rudely from one period to another, is not something you have fully assimilated. Anyway, a few moments later the other heroes, Dharmendra and Amitabh (your childhood crushes), looking the same as before, are goofing around on a bike, singing, clowning about in jail.

It’s a night show, you may be drifting off now and again. The spectre of Gabbar Singh arrives: first his name, spoken fearfully many times, and later the man himself. But even amidst the terror of his first appearance, with the minatory music and the belt being dragged along the rocks, you feel confusion: you think he resembles one of the dacoits on horseback – curly-haired, green shirt – from that train scene, and wonder if there’s a link you missed.

A mid-film flashback where Sanjeev Kumar is young again. Through blurry eyes you register the shifts: black moustache to grey moustache, hands to no hands, police uniform to sombre shawl. Later, a fragmented viewing at someone’s house will leave you with more confusion about the two major flashbacks, and more questions about the sequence of events.

Which is to say that there was a time in my childhood when the plot of Sholay was as much of a maze as a convoluted David Lynch or Christopher Nolan film might be.

Navigating the labyrinth was complicated by the fact that for a while it was done simultaneously along two mediums: listening to the famous double audio-cassette of the film’s dialogue, and watching a videotape that was much cherished but also problematic.

The audio-cassette was unnerving: you had to identify characters by their voices; it didn’t feature entire songs, playing only the first couple of bars of each familiar tune, before returning to the prose scenes. Some excitement lay in the details – I was tickled to bits by the line “Thakur ne hijron ki fauj banayi hai”, not having expected to hear a word like that in a film – but on balance I preferred to watch Sholay, not hear it.

The videotape, one of my favourite childhood possessions, came for some reason from faraway Lagos, brought by a visiting uncle who had been assured that the thing I wanted most in the world was my own Sholay cassette. I was ten now, we had just got a video player at home, and I must have worn it out over days with this tape. The train flashback now made sense to me, as did the overall chronology (though there was still some disorientation in, for instance, seeing Gabbar’s henchman Kaalia alive and gloating in a flashback after he had been bumped off in that sadistic roulette scene).

At last I was getting to watch the complete film, from start to finish. Or so I thought.

There were abrupt cuts here and there, especially in the first hour – it took some time to realise that chunks had been snipped to fit the VHS’s 180 minutes. Which meant that years after my first, mysterious hall viewing as a small child, some things still had to be figured out.

Sleuthing, carefully matching the video footage with the audio on my dialogue-cassette, I realised that the scenes involving Soorma Bhopali (Jagdeep) and the Hitler-like jailer (Asrani) had been excised in the former. That makes some sense if you have to cut 15 minutes: those sequences are fun and show off the skills of two fine character actors, but they are dispensable to the main narrative, and they greatly delay Veeru and Jai’s arrival in Ramgarh.

Even so, I feel cheated that it took me years, maybe decades, to realise that the beloved Keshto Mukherjee had a small role in Sholay (in the jailer scene).

Things were also complicated by the fact that Sholay’s characters were continuing with their lives in other forms and media. Gabbar Singh was selling glucose biscuits in ads long after he had been vanquished (or killed, in the ending that was shot but not released). In the late 1980s came a film called Soorma Bhopali with Jagdeep, featuring Dharmendra and Bachchan in cameos unrelated to their Sholay roles; after that, Ramgarh ke Sholay, which seemed cheap and B-grade-ish, being filled with star-impersonators, but which still had the real Amjad Khan (looking much paunchier, as if Gabbar had taken his role as biscuit mascot too seriously).

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Between all this, during my video viewings, Sholay did perform the epiphanic functions that a landmark film is expected to. For instance, I can never forget the tense scene where the villagers turn hostile towards their mercenary protectors, because this was the moment when the idea first entered my nascently movie-obsessed head that a camera movement is a deliberate, engineered thing that builds meaning: when the line “Kab tak jeeyoge tum, aur kab tak jeeyenge hum, agar yeh dono iss gaon mein rahe?” (“How long will we stay alive if these two remain in the village?”) is accompanied by a camera swish that places Veeru and Jai at the centre of the frame, precisely on the words “yeh dono”.

I learnt about the mysteries of personality too, and how a creative work can bring catharsis or draw out aspects of yourself that you hadn’t fully processed yet. As a painfully shy and quiet child with a taste for sardonic humour, there was every reason for me to relate to Bachchan’s Jai; instead I was always more drawn to, and even felt a kinship with, the boisterous Veeru.

But that Nigerian tape was also responsible for the biggest of my Sholay gaps – one I was unaware of until well in my thirties. That’s how old I was when I watched Sholay’s great opening-credits sequence for the very first time. While that might not be a big deal for most Hindi films of the period, in Sholay the craft and attention to detail begins right here – in the scene where the manservant Ramlal leads a policeman on horseback from the railway station to the Thakur’s haveli.

My tape had the credits only until the names of the six principal actors; there was a sudden cut after the title "And Introducing Amjad Khan". This is a major bone I have to pick with the anonymous tape-editor sitting, in my mind’s eye, in some squalid little Lagos bootleggers’ shop. Because, watching the full sequence on DVD decades later, I saw how it sets the stage, giving us a detailed view of Ramgarh and its surroundings, long before the narrative actually takes us there. The superb RD Burman background score changes from a guitar-dominated tune as the riders move through a barren, American Western-like setting to a more Indian sound, with mridangam and taar shehnai, as they pass through the village. The symbolic nature of Sholay’s mise-en-scene is made obvious here too, with the contrast between swathes of rough landscape (where the dacoits, creatures of the wild, perch like vultures) and the village, where people live together in an ordered community – a setting that will soon welcome two rootless men who will learn about taking on responsibility and integrating into a larger world.

So here was a clear case of me watching a segment of Sholay as an adult with no pre-conceptions, seeing something new and being utterly impressed. When I screened and discussed the sequence in classes, the discussions were perceptive, intense and wide-ranging – even when they involved students who had never actually watched the film. (Yes, there are now many such movie buffs.)

It is widely acknowledged that Sholay was the most polished and fully realised of the Hindi films of its era, the most flawless technically, the one with the best action scenes and sound design, the fewest loose ends or awkward cutting. The sort of mainstream film that even Satyajit Ray could (grudgingly?) admire. But however complete it may be, I think of it as a series of unforgettable moments that are so deeply embedded in one’s consciousness (and so easily accessed from the mind’s old filing cabinet) that it almost doesn’t matter which order those fragments come in – there are any number of entry points. It’s a bit like knowing key sections of a legendary epic – say, the Mahabharata – and still feeling like you know it in its entirety. But the possibility of being surprised by a detail here, or a fresh re-watch, still exists, even for old fans who thought there was nothing more to learn.