What ‘Sholay' is not

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Ramesh Sippy's Sholay turns 50 on August 15. The revenge drama, written by Salim-Javed, stars Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra as the ruffians Jai and Veeru. They are hired by retired police officer Baldev Singh (Sanjeev Kumar) to capture the vicious dacoit Gabaar Singh (Amjad Khan). Hema Malini plays the tonga driver Basanti who jabbers her way into Veeru's heart, while Jaya Bachchan plays Radha, who enchants Jai.
Sholay is considered one of the greatest Indian films ever made. To mark its 50th anniversary, Sippy Films and Film Heritage Foundation carried out a new restoration that reinstates Ramesh Sippy's original ending. Premiered at the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna in June, the restored Sholay will be screened next at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
What did Sholay accomplish in its time, what did its success mean for its director, and what has been its impact? In an insightful and provocative essay, writer-director Atul Sabharwal (Powder, Berlin, Jubilee) analyses the film's mythos and legacy.
'Do you think you are writing Sholay?'
Sholay is not a successful film.
In the 2002 edition of Sight and Sound magazine's poll of the greatest film of all times Citizen Kane topped the chart. That was my first year in Mumbai. I did not have much idea about classic American cinema or European cinema or the Japanese. Indian films I could converse on, Hindi anything and quite a fistful of Tamil and Bengali films, all thanks to Doordarshan. Even in 2002, 27 years after its release, Sholay was still a part of the conversation – as an influence, as the guiding light that, when applied as a template, might steer the movie ships to the shores of success away from the docks of the flops.
Every story sitting that I was a part of, whether the film went anywhere beyond that' stage or not, whether the film being developed was similar in genre or story to Sholay or not, Sholay would invariably come up. Sometimes it was, if these actors come on board, this could become Sholay. At other times, when my ambition on the page outran the producer's appetite for risk, I also got to hear, do you think you are writing Sholay?
The context of what Sholay meant to the people who, back then, lived through the times when Sholay was being made and when it hit the cinemas, I got from a conversation I had with Rishi Kapoor while we were working together on my film Aurangzeb.
One evening in Nainital, Chintuji, as he was lovingly called, but only if he would permit you (I had seen him give a scathing response to someone over a call who dared call his elder brother 'Dabboo'. 'He is Mister Randhir Kapoor!' Rishi Kapoor shot back), invited me over to his hotel room to share a meal and a Black Label. As the evening unfolded into the night, we talked about his films, his hits and misses, his Sargam and Bobby and Prem Rog and Amar Akbar Anthony. He was fondly recounting – that one was silver jubilee (six uninterrupted months at the cinema of release), and that other one was golden jubilee (one uninterrupted year). Special 'Bobby' buses ran from the rural areas of Karnataka to Bangalore so that people could watch Bobby – that one was platinum jubilee (two years).
'Which of your films went beyond platinum jubilee?' I asked.
'What's beyond platinum jubilee?' He growled at the lameness of my question. But, as memory from decades ago rose over the wisps of whisky, he melancholically added, 'Only Sholay went beyond platinum jubilee. It ran for five years uninterrupted at Minerva. I was not in it.'
An uninterrupted run of five years is like a platinum jubilee raised to the power of two and then an added golden jubilee. It was so unprecedented that the film industry did not have a jubilee term for Sholay 's box office run.
Citizen Kane, which topped the Sight and Sound List, was voted as the number one film from 1962 to 2002. That's quite a feat for a feature film that was dead on arrival and buried before its release. Citizen Kane doomed the twenty-something Osron Welles's career. Welles would never touch the pinnacle of Citizen Kane again ever in his career.
Citizen Kane was not as fortunate as Sholay. And yet, it is Citizen Kane that has influenced filmmakers across generations and nations, many of whom have spoken about how Welles's craft broke every rule in the Hollywood's syntax of filmmaking and gave filmmakers a film that set them free from the tyranny of formulae.
In making Sholay, its director, the twenty-something Ramesh Sippy, also broke free from the tyranny of locally imposed syntax and infused the film with craft across all departments. If mainstream Hindi films in general were extravagant, loud and full of flourishes, Sholay was an exercise in restrain and minimalism – be it the background score, understated performances, editing, or cinematography.
Film critic and author Anupama Chopra in her book Sholay: The Making of a Classic calls the narrative 'an unhurried tale'. In one of the office lobby conversations I had with my then producer Ram Gopal Varma, he said about Sholay that it has 'such a strong directorial presence'.
What is craft to a movie, anyway? It's a completely unnecessary element as far a viewer's enjoyment of a film is concerned. The analogy I always relate to and can draw a parallel to when it comes to explaining craft in movies is from Daniel W Hillis's The Pattern on the Stone. In this book, Hillis illustrates how computers work and writes, 'Learning a programming language is not [difficult], since the syntax is relatively simple and vocabularies are rarely more than a few hundred words. But, there is a big difference between being able to understand the language and being able to write it well. Every computer language has its Shakespeares, and it is a joy to read their code. A well written computer program possesses style, finesse, even humor - and a clarity that rivals the best prose.'
The negative inference of Hillis's statement is that you may not be the Shakespeare of coding and yet your computer programme may function well for a user. Hillis devoted his life to studying these nuances. He is a contemporary of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, perhaps as talented in computer science if not more. In Po Bronson's book on the Silicon Valley of the 1990s The Nudist on the Late Shift, the chapter dedicated to Hillis is titled The Dropout.
Craft is a choice that most choose not to accept because craft is tough. The nuance, the finesse, demand the patience of an artisan and craftsman.
But that's not the Sholay that I heard about in conversation when I started working in the film industry. Sholay had been reduced to a 'blockbuster', a 'multi-starrer', a 'box office record setter', a 'money-spinner'. It seemed that the message Sholay had driven home to the practitioners of the industry was: cast stars, as many stars as possible, shoot scale (easier said than done, even if you have the budget). Even when the technicians behind the film were spoken about, it was mostly its writer duo Salim-Javed. 'The money that Salim-Javed charged after that film', 'the writers who could demand a fee as big as the film stars,' are the phrases repeated until date.
MS Shinde, the editor of Sholay, lived and died in abject poverty. Ritesh Soni, the editor whose editing room shared the wall with the editing room of Aurangzeb at the Yash Raj Studios told me that Shinde, impressed by Ritesh's work in on Veer Zaara, had invited him over for tea to his house. Ritesh was heartbroken to see that the man lived in a one-room apartment of an old building in Parel. In that room, somewhere on the shelf was the Filmfare trophy that Shinde had won for Sholay. Shinde's financial condition later forced him to move to an even smaller dwelling in Dharavi, where he breathed his last.
The way this industry treats its genuine scissorhands of image and sound will need another article. That Sholay did not make fortunes of all associated with it is not a running strand through its general folklore.
I was myself twenty-something, studying for a completely different career in Agra when Anupama Chopra's book on Sholay came out. It was the first behind-the-scenes book that I had ever read which covered a film that I knew inside out as a viewer.
By the time I came to the chapter which stated that although Ramesh Sippy was studying at the London School of Economics, '…his heart wasn't in it. He missed the smell and noise of studios', a dam burst somewhere inside me. I conveyed my decision to my mother, who then spoke to my father, to let me go to Mumbai to work at those smelly and noisy film studios.
It took my father a year to make up him his mind, or make peace with my decision, but he eventually relented. For the first time, my father is going to learn about this and hold Chopra responsible for a lot of things. Back then, my father dropped me at the Agra Cantt station to board the train for Mumbai, a city I had never been to before. That day was Holi, coincidentally.
As I poured over Chopra's book, I understood why, as far as the cinematic language of cuts, dissolves, foleys, rhythms and lensing is concerned, the prose of Sholay is Shakespearean. Not just in its broad strokes, like the movement of Gabbar's swords transitioning to the shawl flying off from Thakur's shoulders and revealing his amputated arms – even in its feather- touch nuances, Sholay is immensely rich in its craft.
One such nuanced touch is the moment after the Holi song where Gabbar, having laid siege on Ramgarh, decides to make Jai and Veeru fall at his feet. Veeru doesn't move. Jai contemplates, steps forward. Gabbar glows in glee. Jai bends down, only to swiftly flick some colored powder into Gabbar's eyes. As Jai jumps aside, the shot cuts to Gabbar in a low angle shot, harsh noon sun glares up above him in the sky, hitting the lens directly and blinding the audiences' eyes, accompanied by an unpleasant riff of music by RD Burman. With that sun in the shot, the technicians behind Sholay gave its audience the same burning sensation in their eyes as Gabbar must have felt in the moment.
That shot of Gabbar is not even a five seconds. It need not have been low angle shot, the unit could have settled for a close-up of Gabbar rubbing his eye. The unit need not have waited for the sun to reach the right position in the sky for the frame. But the fact that the unit did, is their commitment to the craft. That shot is from my memory of my first viewing of Sholay upon its re-release in Agra. It has lasted.
The real failure of Sholay is somewhere else, though. To understand what is failure, one must try and understand what marks success. The definition is subjective.
I narrow down success to two types – the one that liberates, and the one that enslaves. The success of Citizen Kane is the one that liberated a generation, gave them guts to take risks, break the rules, go against the studio system, leading to the emergence of the Hollywood of the 1960s and the 1970s. Sholay 's success is the success that enslaved.
Sholay became its own set of formulae, not just for the film industry, but even for those who made Sholay. In Shaan, Ramesh Sippy's directorial follow up, you get everything that Sholay gave you – loveable crooks, a villain who would kill his own henchman in his introduction scene because he/they dared bring him bad news, hero(es) on a bicycle chasing upset heroine(s) riding a public transport, a multi-starrer. In Saagar, he even cast Kamal Haasan, perhaps to make it pan-Indian.
The rest of the industry fared far worse.
I have used the word syntax quite a few times in this article. It's in the Hillis quote too. But, most importantly, I've recently heard it on a few podcasts featuring people from the industry. As the films from Hyderabad and Chennai break box office records, producers, directors, exhibitors, both veteran and young, have chided the directors working in the Hindi film industry to have 'forgotten the syntax of a good Hindi film'.
I wondered what is the 'syntax' of Manoj Kumar's Shor, a hit film from 1972, where the protagonist loses his wife to an accident and his son ends up mute due to damaged vocal chords. Driven by his desire to hear his son speak again, the father goes through hardships to raise money for his son's surgery and in the process faces an accident himself that ruptures his eardrums. When the son gets his voice back, the father loses his ability to hear. The film ends.
Raj Kapoor's Prem Rog, a jubilee success, is one of the darkest mainstream Hindi films. Rishi Kapoor was in it, and he is terrific.
Despite such examples, if you take a risk and fail miserably at the box office, the industry tells you that you have committed sacrilege. Fair. But if you take a risk and the film succeeds, you are told that you have merely dodged a bullet, that luck may not be so rewarding the next time.
Sholay empowered a few to enslave a whole bunch. Since Sholay, the industry has elusively hoped to be rewarded with similar successes without investing time, effort and money towards the craft, towards risk-taking, towards upending the formula. There have been many box-office successes since Sholay. But there are hardly any among those films where a cut, a sound, a dissolve, would become unforgettable in viewers' minds.
While it was under-production and up until a few weeks after its release, it was rumoured that Sholay would fail. When it succeeded like no other, the same industry, it seems, took its revenge on Sholay. It reduced Sholay to a template for fortifications – de-risk through stars, de-risk through tropes, de-risk through canvas. It was forgotten that while it was under-production, Sholay itself was not that fortified. It was vulnerable to failure. And it was forgotten that while fortifications may get success in numbers, the true power that lies with filmmakers is vulnerability.
How the industry interprets box office success is something I learnt through Ram Gopal Varma, 'Ramuji' for us then and now. Gadar and Lagaan were released on the same day. Ramuji and I were at his office that weekend. Trade analysts were lauding Gadar 's success but were dismissive of Lagaan 's run.
I had loved Lagaan and being new in the industry I was upset that the trade's Chinese whisperers were deriding such a well-made film. I shared my feelings with Ramuji. He replied, 'The industry will never acknowledge something like Lagaan and they will always be cheerleaders of Gadar because to make a film like Lagaan they will have to work hard on detailing. Gadar they think they can make again.'
How bloody prophetic Ramuji, in a Shakespearean sense.
Atul Sabharwal is the writer-director of the television series Powder, the films Aurangzeb, Class of '83 and Berlin, as well as the writer of the web series Jubilee.