Sholay at 50: How Ramesh Sippy’s film captured India’s angst and anxieties

When the cop rounded up the six men, it was revealed that they, one by one and then collectively, had been showing her films at the theatre. One of them took her for a morning show, then handed her some money to watch a matinee, a second man tagged along for an evening show and finally, all seven went together to catch a late-night screening. The girl, sheepishly, ratified this version of events.

In the shadow of the Emergency

This generation of movie-crazy maniacs would be inconceivable to the modern film buff who spends hours sifting through endless glittering arrays of movies stacked up to infinity on Netflix, or flicking up hundreds of mini-stories on Instagram reels. During the 1970s, films were the only source for millions of Indians seeking relief from the drudgery of their everyday life.

In a world without smartphones, social media or even television the way we understand it (unless you call a few hours of black-and-white broadcast on one dedicated channel ‘television’), the only way to be entertained was to find escape in cinema halls. As demonstrated above, visiting the cinema several times a day wasn’t unheard of (today, visiting the cinema several times a month may well be unheard of).

Movie tickets were cheap, and it was the working class, not the English-speaking elite, that made up a majority of the theatrical audience, and most filmmakers had them in mind as primary consumers. It was them that Salim-Javed, Manmohan Desai, Prakash Mehra and Ramesh Sippy were speaking to.

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On August 15, 1975, the day Sholay was released, India had been in a state of Emergency for 51 days. In his Independence Day address to the nation, President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, who had originally announced the proclamation, said that the Emergency was a ‘passing phase’ and that ‘liberty’ shouldn’t be allowed to “degenerate into licence”, words that ironically tried to mask the unprecedented scale of political repression that was unfolding.

Scores of journalists, political rivals and dissenters were arrested. In response to a strike organised by the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), more than 30 thousand workers were put behind bars. Civil liberties were suspended and press censorship was enforced. People were agitated, angry and afraid at the same time.

A celebration of masculinity

It was under these circumstances that Salim-Javed and Ramesh Sippy’s magnum opus exploded on Indian screens. Whether how Sholay was ultimately received had anything to do with post-Emergency sentiments is anybody’s guess. But there were thematic elements in it that might have proven cathartic to many.

The moral ambiguity of our twin protagonists, for instance. Jai and Veeru (Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra), though heroes of the piece, aren’t exactly paragons of virtue. They happen to be career criminals and don’t flinch while planning to clear out the tijori (vault) of their benefactor, the old Thakur Baldev Singh (Sanjeev Kumar), a retired Police Officer.

Their daring heist of Lalji bhai, the grocer from Daulatpur, is referenced early on. In the opening scene, the jailor asserts that there’s hardly any prison these two crooks hadn’t graced. And yet, the audience rooted for them and cried copious tears when one of them bit the dust. It could be surmised that the frustrated, disillusioned populace had had their fill of goody-two-shoes heroes in the preceding decades. The country was going to the dogs regardless, and clean-cut morality didn’t appeal to them. In that place, the seemingly harmless crookedness of Sholay duo seemed refreshing and relatable.

Another reason for the naiveté of post-Independence India frittering away was the extent of corruption that had seeped into the system, so much so that people had learned to live with it, in many ways. Street crime as well as organised crime was at its peak, and law enforcement had proved ineffective in checking them.

Under the circumstances, the idea of vigilantism, albeit on film, seemed particularly attractive. An educated man, an ex-police officer who upheld the law for a living, was now hiring thugs to fight a bandit that had killed his family, instead of turning to his old colleagues. Partly because he no longer had faith in that justice system, and partly because the film then would be a crushing bore.

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That Sholay is a celebration of masculinity is no secret. The soiled denims, the tousled hair, affected swagger, and the ubiquitous gun all seem to underscore that it is a world of virile men with matching tempers. When Thakur Baldev Singh fails to pick up a gun at his feet to save their lives, Jai and Veeru aren’t pissed off at him because he didn’t help them. They are miffed because he isn’t Mard enough. During the flashback, the strength of Thakur’s arms is highlighted, as he holds Gabbar in his iron grip. Later, Gabbar cuts those arms off, and the emasculated Thakur eventually finds his two ‘arms’ in Veeru and Jai.

How it reinforced social hierarchies

The strength of his arms is thus restored. But the sophistication of Salim-Javed’s writing also ensures that the women in the film are not just onlookers. The stoic Radha (Jaya Bhaduri-Bachchan and the loquacious Basanti (Hema Malini) provide counterpoints to the men’s stories. Basanti speaks her mind, and resists Veeru’s advances when she feels he doesn’t respect her enough.

As for Radha, it is only because of her and her story that Jai’s demise feels like a gut punch. It is Radha who is also instrumental in changing their minds when they try to rob the Thakur. Jai and Veeru’s homosocial bonding is a central conceit of the film. Their on-screen friendship and its manifestation through the Yeh dosti song (and Jai’s sacrifice) attained mythical proportions — it remains a popular ‘dosti anthem’ in several quarters.

Sholay also mirrors — and reinforces — social hierarchies at various levels. The ‘Thakur’, the zamindar, is a stock character that populated Hindi films of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. They were either bloodsucking vampires exploiting their ‘subjects’, or noble, larger-than-life patriarchs protecting them from evil. Baldev Singh of Sholay happens to be the latter. He is the benevolent patriarch, the father-figure of a feudal lord who takes it upon himself to protect his people, the poor farmers. Though the film is devoid of explicit class references, the fight between the Thakur can also be seen from that lens.

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While the Thakur is the very image of entitlement, the uncouth Gabbar Singh probably hails from a lower strata who picked up a gun to fight for his rights and in time, turned into a monster. He could be the famed ‘baaghi’ spoken in Chambal narratives, where oppressed farmers disappear into the ravines and reemerge as bandits, fighting their class enemies, often the landlord. Jai and Veeru possibly hail from marginalised communities, choosing a life of petty crime for survival more than anything else.

A cultural artefact

Then there is the mighty Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan), representing the epitome of lawlessness. He can easily slip out of jail, incur his wrath on Thakur’s unsuspecting family, and go back to his den without any consequence. He’s like a rural north Indian (though Ramgarh is likely situated in the north, the film was shot in south India, about an hour’s drive from Bengaluru) variant of Al Capone. There’s a spine-chilling scene in which Thakur’s grandson engages in a staring contest with Gabbar, as the bandit trains his barrel on him.

The camera looks away, and we can hear an ear-splitting (and heartbreaking) gunshot. Javed Akhtar, poet-lyricist and one-half of the Salim-Javed duo, says that the reason people — even kids — admire Gabbar so much is because he represents unbridled power, the potential to commit any crime and get away with it. While that notion might be true (and a little problematic), this could very well be one of those instances when the real-life inhabitants of an increasingly lawless society, found resonance in a lawless bandit.

There is a long-standing debate on whether art — in order to be called that — needs to be intentional. Salim and Javed have, on various occasions, indicated that while creating these characters, all they cared about was telling a great story. The various meanings and layers we find in these stories is essentially in retrospect, once we seemed to have observed their impact on societies and communities.

Much of it is essentially speculation, a product of our own biases and leanings. Be that as it may, it is undeniable that Sholay captured the anxieties, concerns, and dreams of common Indians, back in the day. Its legacy has cemented its status as a cultural artefact, continuing to be relevant even now, a good half a century after its release.