50 Years Of Sholay: Restored And Timeless

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5 days ago

The restored Sholay will keep film scholars busy for a while; but I hope it claims a small place in the consciousness of an audience born many years after it set screens on fire
On Friday, 27 June, the fully restored uncut version of Ramesh Sippy's Sholay had its world premiere at Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy. 'It was a magnificent evening in Bologna yesterday to watch the restored Sholay play out for the first time on a giant screen in the Piazza Maggiore in front of an audience that filled the seats, the steps around the square and even the floor as they watched one of India's most iconic films come back to life 50 years after it was released," Mumbai-based Film Heritage Foundation, which has painstakingly restored the classic, posted on Facebook.
This version includes the film's original ending—changed due to objection from the censors—and deleted scenes. This work by the foundation could be the most important such project in India till date, given the near-mythical status that Sholay enjoys in our cinema.
Sholay, billed as 'the greatest story ever told", was released on 15 August 1975. It went on to earn a still-standing record of 60 golden jubilees (50-week runs) across India, and was the first film to celebrate a silver jubilee at over 100 theatres. It was screened continuously at Bombay's 1,500-seat Minerva theatre for over five years.
As a pre-teen schoolboy in Bombay, I watched it on Sunday, 18 August. Some 25 years later—I had watched Sholay many times more by then—quite by chance, the uncut version came to me, the one that Ramesh Sippy had originally submitted to the Censor Board. A colleague had bought a bootlegged CD of the film in Kuala Lumpur and watched it over the weekend. On Monday, a very puzzled man walked into my cabin. 'Sir," he asked, 'did Thakur Baldev Singh kill Gabbar Singh?"
'No," I said. 'He's about to, when the police arrive and stop him." 'But here he does!" my colleague said, producing his CD. I immediately knew that he had inadvertently bought a rare gem. It was fairly well-known among fans that Sippy and screenwriters Salim-Javed had originally killed off Gabbar, but the censors had insisted on getting the climax reworked. I borrowed the CD and watched it that night.
The uncensored version is of course longer than the current one available to the public, but two scenes stand out.
Young Ahmed, played by Sachin Pilgaonkar, is captured by Gabbar's men and brought to his den, where he is resting. Chunks of meat on a skewer are being roasted on a fire behind him. The bandits tell Gabbar: 'This boy is from Ramgarh. He was going to the station and we found him on the way." Gabbar thinks for a few seconds, watching a fly crawling down his forearm, then smiles and slaps it dead. The next sequence is Ahmed's horse, carrying his corpse, walking into Ramgarh. This is what see in the current censor-certified version.
In the uncensored film, after he kills the fly, Gabbar shouts: 'Have you heard, all of you? The people of Ramgarh have started running away from the village now!" Ahmed asks Gabbar to let him go. The bandit replies: 'Tum jaante ho main kaun hoon? Hum Ramgarh ke baap hain, baap ('Do you know who I am? I am Ramgarh's father)." He then asks Ahmed to rub his nose on the ground at his feet.
When Ahmed does not move, an enraged Gabbar yells at him to come forward. The young man tries to attack him and the bandit brings him down with one blow. His men are about to shoot Ahmed, but Gabbar stops them. 'You think a man feels any pain when a bullet kills him?" he says. 'Isko toh main tadpa tadpa ke maarunga, bahut tadpa tadpa ke maarunga (I'm going to give him a painful death, a very painful death)." He picks up a sharp iron rod from the fire, yanks Ahmed's head up by his hair and holds the rod next to his eye. We then see Ahmed's horse carrying his master's corpse home.
In the current Sholay, in the climactic fight sequence between Thakur and Gabbar, a bloodied and exhausted Gabbar is lying on the ground and Thakur is about to kill him by stamping his face with his hob-nailed sandals when the police arrive and dissuade him.
In the uncut version, the bloodied and exhausted Gabbar is still staggering around. Thakur is about to strike him again when he notices that right behind Gabbar is a sharp iron rod protruding from one of the two stone pillars which the bandit had used to string him up to hack off his arms. Thakur leaps, hammering Gabbar on his chest. Gabbar falls on the rod, gets skewered and dies.
Veeru then drapes Thakur's shawl round his shoulders and holds him tight. Thakur rests his head on Veeru's shoulder and weeps uncontrollably.
Over the years, Ramesh Sippy has said in several interviews that he did not agree with the cuts that the censors demanded, but had to comply because this was during the Emergency—a time of tough censorship. Even after the censored Sholay was released, there was a furore in the media about its 'extreme violence and cruelty"—that the film should have been certified Adults Only. By today's standards, the violence in Sholay is rather mild. And there is remarkably little blood that we see on the screen—only a few bullet wounds.
Yet, in my opinion, Sholay is one of the few Indian films that the censors actually improved a bit, though absolutely accidentally. Film Heritage Foundation has recovered a priceless historic artefact of Indian cinema, but is the uncut version better than the one we are familiar with? My answer is no. The cruelty in Sholay lies in the acts that Gabbar commits, but the gory violence directly associated with them is off-screen. We do not see Thakur's arms being chopped off or his grandchild being shot by Gabbar.
When Gabbar swats a fly dead, we know that the innocent Ahmed will be killed and the effect is far more chilling than a graphic description of how he is killed. The latter—with its iron skewer—is merely stomach-churning. The censors gave the scene a haunting—and aesthetic—subtlety by leaving the details of Ahmed's horrific end to the viewer's imagination.
But the original ending with Gabbar dying exactly where he had chopped off Thakur's arms is much more emotionally satisfying than the current one. It is poetic justice, neatly closing the loop between the atrocities that Thakur suffered and the punishment that Gabbar deserved. I will certainly enjoy a Sholay with this sequence replacing the current one. But the dacoits chasing Basanti's horse-carriage for a full five minutes, which is a very long time in a movie? I can live without that. Or more of Soorma Bhopali and the jailor? We do not need that.
Sippy himself pared Sholay down a few times. The film I watched in its 100-th week re-release was shorter, with a few sequences dropped or shortened from the 15 August 1975 one. The current DVD and streaming platform versions are even shorter.
In 2007, I had the dire misfortune of watching Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag, Varma's unauthorised remake of Sholay. The next day I wrote a column in the newspaper I was working for then that it was an act of barbarism—Varma had no clue what made Sholay… Sholay. Salim Khan, co-writer of Sholay, read the piece and took the trouble of finding my phone number, and called me. The conversation lasted more than an hour.
I asked him about the various Hollywood films that he and Javed Akhtar had 'lifted" ideas and entire sequences from—after all, the basic Sholay storyline itself is redux The Magnificent Seven, a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Some of these sources are well-documented—Once Upon A Time In The West (the train robbery sequence and Gabbar killing Thakur's grandchild), The Professionals (the final chase as Veeru and Jai are escaping Gabbar's den with Basanti), Garden of Evil (the card draws inspired Jai's coin-flipping tricks that underpin the entire narrative)—and so on.
I told him that I thought that every copied sequence was done far better in Sholay than the originals. Then I asked him the question that he must have faced a thousand times.
'Who was the real writer in Salim-Javed?" I asked. 'That's a wrong question," he replied. 'The man who sits outside a post office, a pen stuck behind his ear, waiting to fill up money order forms for poor illiterate people—he too writes (Woh bhi toh likhta hai). The correct question is 'Sochta kaun hai (Who is the thinker)?" I did not press that point.
He revealed that Sippy was upset that some upstart had remade his epic, but he had told Sippy that Varma's misbegotten attempt would only add to Sholay's glory and make its status in the Indian film pantheon even firmer. Varma's film, I assume, would have been withdrawn by the theatres within a week.
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I intend to watch the uncut Sholay when it is released in theatres in India. Of course Gen Z-ers may find it boring—it is almost three and a half hours long—and even insipid—computing power has made action sequences incredibly more awesome. Some may find it misogynistic. But like all great films, Sholay's fundamental themes remain universal and timeless—justice, loyalty and sacrifice. The restored Sholay will of course keep film scholars busy for a while; but I hope that it also claims a small place in the consciousness of an audience born many years after the film set screens all across India on fire.
The reviewer is former managing editor of Outlook, former editor of The Financial Express, and founding editor of Outlook Money, Open, and Swarajya magazines. He has authored several books. He tweets @sandipanthedeb. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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New Delhi, India, India
First Published:
July 01, 2025, 14:00 IST
News opinion Opinion | 50 Years Of Sholay: Restored And Timeless
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