This month 40 years ago saw the release of Sholay. Directed by Ramesh Sippy, the film had a slow start. In a now infamous review in a magazine, a well-known cinema writer of the time dismissed the film as a failure. Little was he to know, or even Sippy and the Sholay crew to imagine, that the film would go on to become the mother of all blockbusters. It remains a cult film, among the most successful in Indian history.
So far reaching was the influence and impact of Sholay that it outgrew many of the films it had borrowed from. The Magnificent Seven and Once Upon a Time in the West, of course, remain classics. Yet, who remembers North West Frontier, a now forgotten British film from the 1950s that sees the British Raj caught between a young Hindu prince and his rebellious Muslim subjects?
More an adventure movie than a political narrative, the film may have sought to convey the subliminal message that the British spent their time in India keeping disaffected natives from killing each other. Its Sholay connection is in its climactic sequence, where rebels on horseback try and hijack the train taking the prince to safety. This inspired the train scenes at the beginning of Sholay, and became a signature of the borrower rather than the original.
The most arresting character in Sholay is Gabbar Singh, the fearsome and almost eerie villain, played by Amjad Khan. It was his first major film and his greatest role. While he acted for years afterwards, Khan never topped the peak of Sholay. Indeed, Khan’s father, the character actor Jayanth, had had a long and distinguished film career, including as a villain in numerous films, but with Sholay, the son outdid anything the father had ever achieved.
In contemporary Hindi cinema, the villain is almost always a terrorist or occasionally a crazed psychopath. In an earlier and simpler age, villains were different. They followed a hierarchy of sorts — the rural bandit or dacoit; the street-smart, sadak-chhap chor or petty pickpocket/safecracker in the city, usually a good guy gone astray; and finally the smuggler (how rarely one hears the word in Hindi films these days).
In some films, as the narrative moved from the village to the metropolis, the villain graduated from bandolier and saddle to shiny suit and big car — showing upward mobility from daku to gangster. The sartorial changes and the transformation in language, even in the names of the henchmen, reflected this. To illustrate that turn to another of Amjad Khan’s films, Parvarish, starring Amitabh Bachchan and Vinod Khanna, where the village bandit (Khan) eventually becomes a city don.
Films like Parvarish (1977) came at the cusp of Hindi cinema’s evolution from the rural idyll (and occasionally rural badlands) to a setting almost entirely devoted to the urban landscape. It is worth noting how the old-mode dacoit rarely if ever interacted and intersected with the city. The two lived in hermetically sealed compartments. This shift represented the gradual urbanisation of India, which had reached a sufficient size by the 1970s and progressed rapidly in the 1980s and after. It left the purely rural film far, far behind. Today, hardly any mainstream Hindi film is set in a village. Many are not set in India at all.
Sholay is a member of the last generation of dacoit movies. Gabbar Singh was the most compelling of a set of rural bandits who have over the years become Hindi filmdom’s best-known villains of their type. Two of these characters were anti-heroes, more than out-and-out villains: Dilip Kumar, playing Ganga in Gunga Jumna, and Sunil Dutt, as Birju in Mother India.
Gunga Jumna and Deewar (1975) were made about 15 years apart. They have almost exactly the same story. The anti-hero is the angry brother, forced by an unsympathetic society to break the law. He uses his earnings to pay for his younger sibling’s education. The younger brother eventually becomes a police officer, commits to bringing the wayward one to book, and is finally forced to pull the trigger.
Gunga Jumna was one of Dilip Kumar’s finest films and Deewar among Amitabh Bachchan’s most riveting performances. They were so similar and so apart — one set in the unforgiving fastness of eastern Uttar Pradesh/western Bihar, and the other in the equally unforgiving universe of Bombay’s dockyards.
Two other cinematic dacoits who stand out, for this writer at least, are Raka (played by Pran) in Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai, and Jabbar Singh (Vinod Khanna) in Mera Gaon Mera Desh. Made about five years before Sholay, Raj Khosla’s Mera Gaon Mera Desh was a comparable film. Some would even prefer it. It is a fair bet that if Sholay had never been made, Mera Gaon Mera Desh would have gone down as the defining film of the dacoit-vigilante genre.
The movies had much in common. The very names — Jabbar Singh and Gabbar Singh — have led to suggestions that Sippy had paid a silent tribute to Khosla while making his magnum opus. However, this appears to have been a coincidence. Writer Salim Khan (Salman Khan’s father) insists he named Gabbar after a bandit his (Salim’s) police officer father had combated in the Chambal Valley decades earlier. Amjad Khan, in fact, prepared for his role by reading a book Jaya Bhaduri’s Bhopal-based father, the journalist Taroon Bhaduri, had written on Chambal dacoits.
Mera Gaon Mera Desh starred Dharmendra as small-time crook, persuaded and almost emotionally blackmailed by his mentor, played by Jayanth (Amjad Khan’s father in real life), into protecting a village from the terror of Jabbar. It was one of Dharmendra’s best roles, and as an actor he will probably cherish it more than even Sholay. Vinod Khanna as Jabbar matched him inch for inch, including in a finale that borrowed from High Noon, with Dharmendra reprising Gary Cooper’s titanic single-man battle against a bunch of bandits, down the deserted streets of a forsaken town/village.
Watch the film and the climax if you can; it is a fitting complement to Sholay — Veeru to its Jai. Or Jabbar to its Gabbar: the bandits they don’t make anymore.
The author can be reached at malikashok@gmail.com
