Sholay — the ultimate classic

A stern-looking immigration officer at New York’s JFK Airport waved actor Mac Mohan through because he had watched Sholay and instantly recognised Sambha — the man on the rock with a gun. A Jaipur housewife became so obsessed with Veeru played by Dharmendra in Sholay she compelled her husband to rename himself after her screen hero.

A black-marketeer at Delhi’s Plaza Cinema earned a small fortune selling Sholay tickets at a premium ultimately buying a house for himself in Seelampur which he decorated with posters of the film. There are auto-rickshaws in Patna named after Dhanno, the mare in Sholay which ran like hell to save the heroine from being waylaid. And the most potent cocktails in five-star bars are called Gabbar — Sholay’s iconic villain and Bollywood’s most recognisable bad guy.

I picked up these gems from Anupama Chopra’s book on the film directed by Ramesh Sippy, which was first screened 40 years ago on August 15, 1975. These anecdotes crystallise the runaway success of one of the world’s most watched Hindi films better than tags such as ‘milestone’, ‘landmark’ or ‘benchmark’.

Chopra rightly says that Sholay has become a part of India’s heritage. “Its characters — Veeru (Dharmendra), Jai (Amitabh Bachchan), Gabbar (Amjad Khan) Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar), Basanti (Hema Malini) and Radha (Jaya Bhachchan) — are as familiar as Ram and Sita [Hindu deities]. The peripheral players too — Soorma Bhopali (Jagdeep), Jailor (Asrani), Kaalia (Viju Khote) and Sambha (Mac Mohan) are the stuff of folklore. Sholay is the ultimate classic — the ultimate box office gold standard.”

Interestingly, the film was released in cinemas in Pakistan in May this year, four decades after it took India by storm. It did well across the border too, presumably lowering tensions between nuclear neighbours — at least temporarily.

Rauf Ahmad, former Filmfare editor, vividly remembers Sholay’s premiere at Minerva Theatre where the film was destined to run for five years. Ahmad had gone to Sanjeev Kumar’s Mumbai home on August 15, 1975 to interview him — August 15 is a red letter day anyway, being India’s Independence Day — and Kumar, who had overslept dragged Ahmad to the premiere, promising to do to the interview on the way.

“I enjoyed watching it but didn’t think it was a great film”, Ahmad, one of the country’s most well known film journalists and biographer of Rajesh Khanna, Shammi Kapoor and Mehboob Khan, told tabloid!. “I was hugely intrigued by Amjad Khan. He was a mind-boggling villain. I was also very touched by Jaya’s cameo as a widow; it was brilliant. But I thought that Sholay had killed music! Except R.D. Burman’s superb Mehbooba Mehbooba there were no other hit songs. It made music look redundant. Music — the soul of Hindi films — suddenly lost its relevance. The trend continued with Trishul and Kala Paththar. But music did stage a comeback with Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak.”

Ahmad remarked, in retrospect it’s clear that Sholay — shot in panoramic 70mm cinemascope — revolutionised filming standards. “Ramesh Sippy’s Seeta Aur Geeta and Andaaz had done very well; in his third film — Sholay — he wanted to excel himself. It was a technical marvel, much ahead of its time in shot-taking, background sound and action choreography. It upgraded the standard of action films. The technological revolution in Bollywood had already begun. Experts were being flown in from abroad and Indians were fast learners.”

Ram Gopal Verma, featured in the BBC series, Bollywood Bosses, and acknowledged as intellectual fountain head of new age Indian cinema, said Sholay created a benchmark for technical excellence.

The film’s social commentary is equally fascinating. It flirted with the idea of widow remarriage — still a taboo in the 1970s — but eventually dropped it like a hot potato. Widow Radha’s romance with Jai is nipped in the bud by his tragic death. In that sense, she is twice widowed. Some argue that Sippy had no option but to kill Jai because widow remarriage, although a progressive idea, was too hot to handle in the socio-political climate. The film, however, struck a blow for women empowerment. Basanti is portrayed as a bimbette and a chatter-box raising the hackles of some feminists but the underlying message simply is that if Dhanno despite being a mare can pull a horse-cart, why can’t Basanti being a woman drive one to be financially independent? A career-oriented woman definitely cocked a snook at the male-dominated society of that period.

Sholay also stood up for the physically challenged depicting them as winners and not losers. The armless Thakur’s revenge against the man who maimed him shows that the disabled are not weaklings but capable of settling their own scores if the going gets tough. Earlier, the disabled were shown as vulnerable individuals to arouse sympathy in film goers. But Sholay prepared the ground for films such as Black and Khamoshi. Moreover, Sholay encashed bromance, or male bonding, heralding a new trend in Bollywood. The friendship of Jai and Veeru is cited as one of the main reasons for the film’s astounding success. The winning formula spawned Kai Po Che, Chashme Baddoor, Dil Chahta Hai, Rock On!! and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.

“Friendship is a theme that boys and men easily relate to. It takes them down memory lane. And we seem to have a monopoly on this theme”, Rohan Sippy, Ramesh Sippy’s son, had said in an earlier interview. His Nautanki Saala capitalised on bromance. So has other films made by the Sippys — such as Bluffmaster starring Abhishek Bachhchan and Riteish Deshmukh and Taxi No 9211 featuring John Abraham and Nana Patekar. Go Goa Go and Rangrezz belong to the same genre.

I have always maintained that reviews in English have no impact whatsoever on Hindi films in India because the common man hardly knows the language and has no time for reviews anyway. He goes by word of mouth. The Times of India has just reproduced some of the horrible reviews Sholay got when it was released.

The now-defunct Illustrated Weekly of India, published by The Times of India Group, wrote in its August 31, 1975 issue: “It is just another dacoit tale on the lines of Mujhe Jeene Do, Gunga Jumna, Mera Gaon Mera Desh… The stereophonic sound and other technical innovations redeem Sholay from the shallows. Ramesh Sippy has introduced a feeling of verve and some of the action is gripping. But no sooner you are out of the theatre, it is gone: you realise that a story built on negative emotions like hatred and violence can have no lasting impression on the mind… Where the film falls is in its music — there is not one song that can be singled out as a noteworthy composition.”

The Indian Express was even more unkind. It wrote that Sholay plagiarised from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bad Day at Black Rock, Bonnie and Clyde and Secret of Santa Vittoria [and] adds up to a shaggy dog Western, sporadically funny, ludicrously heroic, monstrously violent and sprawled in loose limbed abandon”.

The Hindustan Times warned that the “plot is laden with moral snapping implications. Which police officer or, for that matter, judge will not get cold feet in dealing with or sentencing a dangerous criminal after seeing the plight of Sanjeev Kumar in the film? Sholay manages to raise screen violence to almost unimaginable heights. And thanks to our censors, children may relish it too. Thematically, it is an exercise that verges between the two peaks of inanity and insanity.”

Sholay didn’t bag the Filmfare Award for the Best Film in 1975. It lost to Deewar. But Filmfare Awards and Sholay kissed and made up 20 years later. In 2005, the film received the Filmfare Award for The Best Film of 50 Years, capping the controversy one and for all.

— S. N. M. Abdi, Indian journalist and commentator, writes across Gulf News

SHOLAY: A FEW LESSER-KNOWN FACTS

• There was actually a bandit called Gabbar Singh in the Gwalior region who used to chop off ears and noses of policemen in captivity. Javed Akhtar proposed debutante Amjad Khan’s name for the role after watching him in the play Ai Mere Watan Ke Logon but wanted him out when he found his voice too weak. By this time, however, Ramesh Sippy persisted with Khan who wanted to give his critics a physical thrashing for subverting his prospects.

• Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri got married four months before shooting of Sholay started in October 1973. Jaya was pregnant with Shweta during the shooting which led to delays because of her condition. Shatrughan Sinha was considered for Jai’s role which Bachchan ultimately bagged transforming him from a star to a superstar despite dying in the end.

• Dharmendra was initially keen to play Thakur. But he settled for Veeru instead when told that he would be paired with Hema Malini. He is known to have bribed the light boys to spoil shots so that retakes were ordered giving him more time with his sweetheart.

• Sanjeev Kumar had proposed to Hema Malini before the shooting and she had turned him down. Because of the awkward situation, she didn’t want any scenes with him.

• Writers Salim-Javed had first approached filmmaker Manmohan Desai with the screen-play. But he was preoccupied with Chacha Bhatija to realise its box-office potential. Post Sholay the script-writers got a much better deal in Bollywood; gone were the days of measely payments.

• It took 21-days to shoot the song Yeh Dosti. And 20 days to shoot the scenes of Radha, played by Jaya, lighting a lamp at sunset although it was shown for less than two minutes in the film. Mac Mohan, who played Sambha, travelled 27 times from Mumbai to the location although he had to say precisely three words — poore pachaas hazaar [Full Rs50,000].

• Manna Dey was supposed to sing the Mehbooba Mehbooba but after it was recorded in composer R. D. Burman’s voice, Dey liked it so much that he wanted it to be left as is.