It was a warm but amiable night in Bologna. By the time the open-air screening started at the north Italian town’s sprawling Piazza Maggiore, it was already 10 pm. Yet, at least 2,000 cinephiles, mostly Italians, had turned up. This was Sholay’s restored, uncut version — an intimidating three hours and 24 minutes in length — at the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival. “But the audience was glued, watching in pin-drop silence. When the film ended at 1.30 am, the cheering was incredible. Sholay is timeless,” says Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, whose Film Heritage Foundation has restored the film.

If the viewers’ reaction in Italy in June reaffirmed Sholay’s enduring appeal across countries and generations, an X post made by Iran’s Consulate General in Mumbai in July revealed the film’s abiding impact. “Many Iranians still associate #Bollywood with this epic,” it said, adding that a newspaper in Iran had published a full-pager commemorating the movie’s 50 years.

There’s something about Sholay. Even the biggest blockbusters eventually recede from memory. With director Ramesh Sippy’s multi-starrer, the obverse seems to be true. Sholay never left us. The movie breathes in our lives through its dialogues, which have become like proverbs, and lives in our heads through its characters. When anyone says, ‘Basanti’, we know who. In India, there’s only one Basanti. As filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt says, “Nations are not built by borders. They are held together by stories. Sholay has transcended cinema. It is one of the stories that holds India together.”

The film talks to different generations in different ways. For old-timers, Sholay is inseparable from their youth, a living memory of life as it used to be. For their progeny, and their progeny, it is a family fable they have imbibed like food, and consequently discovered on TV, internet or OTT. “Some films refuse to fade because they don’t just entertain us, they actually become us,” says Bhatt. The film is a connector.

How Gabbar got embossed in our lives
The marketing men of Polydor, a record company with the film’s rights, were critical to the tattooing of Sholay into our collective consciousness. In her award-winning book, journalist Anupama Chopra writes how Polydor executives, worried at the lukewarm sales of the music album, noticed the audience being captivated by Salim-Javed’s dialogues. Within a month, a 58-minute long-playing record was released. It turned out to be a stroke of marketing genius. A TOI article noted in 1976, “the earthy outpourings of the Sholay film track” has sold “phenomenally well”. Sholay was the first film that India heard as much as it saw.

Seventies India was an audio world. This was a time when the middle-class lined up to buy rationed sugar. For most, television was just a photograph shown to nursery kids to teach the letter, ‘T’. Even record players were restricted to a thin socio-economic band. India was primarily a radio country. Paan shop transistors would tune in to Radio Ceylon or Vividh Bharati through the day.

Against this backdrop, Sholay’s dialogues blared for months at homes, in shops, markets and fairs in Inner India’s small towns, kasbahs and mofussils. By repetition of listening, even pre-teens could recall every dialogue, just like multiplication sums. Some remembered the film by heart.

The first time this reporter saw the film at a theatre, the experience was mixed. A guy sitting in the row behind would pre-empt every dialogue. He stopped only after someone told him that all of us could do the same and there was no need to show off.

This was also the first film where the most popular dialogues were delivered by the bad guy, Gabbar, played superlatively by Amjad Khan, and not the hero. “The dialogues reached a transcendental level. They are proverbial, aphoristic, dramatic. And they are fundamental to an Indian imagination in a filmy sense,” says social scientist Shiv Viswanathan.

The dialogues became unforgettable because the characters were unforgettable. “Sholay is an archetypical memory. Every character from Gabbar to Basanti to Raheem chacha, is archetypical. They all create a culture, a memory and possibility of new imitations,” he says.

Even the smallest of characters haven’t been forgotten. “Keshto Mukherjee’s cameo of a barber named Hariram is still remembered,” says film director Anil Sharma.

Stories, real and apocryphal
Mac Mohan acted in over 300 movies. In Sholay, his presence was reduced to sitting with a gun on a faraway rock. He got to say just three words, “Poorey pachaas hazaar”. But Sambha, his character’s name, became his lifelong identity. Just like Viju Khote, the recipient of Gabbar’s simple but scary one-liner, “Tera kya hoga, Kaalia?”.

In a 2015 interview, Khote told this reporter that the temperamental horse he rode threw him off at least six times. His remuneration for the aches and bruises was just Rs. 2,500. Fortunately, he did not break any bones.

Real or apocryphal, there is another story, wherein a groom refused to take the sacred vows unless the film’s dialogues were played. The missing record was brought and played. The wedding was solemnized.

For a film that has turned into lore, it is hard to believe that Sholay was dismissed as a flop in the early days of its release. In his autobiography, And Then One Day, actor Naseeruddin Shah writes about watching Sholay, running in its second week, at a “half-empty” theatre in Andheri, Bombay. Shah also writes that the blame for the failure was pinned on newbie Amjad.

Sharma, director of the megahit, Gadar, recalls coming home after watching the movie and being told by a film industry client of his father, an astrologer, “‘Sun rahe hain film flop ho gayi. Log Sholay ko Chholey (chickpeas) bol rahe hain.’ I had liked the film and told them so. But they were dismissive and said, you are too young to know about the film business. We got into a row.”

Sharma also loved the film’s impressive stereophonic sound. “When the coin was tossed and tinkled after falling on the ground, people would start looking for it beneath their seats,” he remembers.
Critics admitted to Sholay’s technological excellence but roundly panned the movie. The Illustrated Weekly of India (now defunct), a sister publication of The Times of India, said in its review: “There is nothing in the script of Salim-Javed to make this ‘the greatest story ever told’, it is just another dacoit tale on the lines of Mujhe Jeene Do, Gunga Jumna, Mera Gaon Mera Desh.”

The Statesman (New Delhi edition) said: “For nearly four hours, this film assaults one’s senses psychologically, emotionally and at the end almost physically.” Sunday Standard called it “a shaggy dog Western, sporadically funny, ludicrously heroic, monstrously violent and sprawled in loose limbed abandon”. Most reviews, barring Weekly, also ignored Amjad’s performance. The film received just one Filmfare award — for M S Shinde’s editing.

But over the decades, the film has been reappraised. In a classic case of overcompensation, Sholay was declared ‘The Best Film of 50 Years’ by Filmfare in 2005. In 2002, a British Film Institute poll hailed it as the ‘greatest’ Indian film ever made. The good times continue. “The movie is set for gala screenings at festivals in Toronto, London and New York in the coming months,” says Dungarpur.

But the critical re-evaluation aside, Sholay has become more than a movie, it has become a myth. Sharma sums it up, “Sholay now belongs to the public, not to the maker. The film has ruled over people’s hearts for 50 years. It will continue to do so for another 50 years.”

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