A scene from the film Sholay.TIFF/Supplied
Kitne aadmi the? (How many men were there?)
Waiting in line, half an hour prior to the screening of the Hindi film Sholay, I must have heard people recite this and other memorable lines from the film at least a dozen times. Celebrating its 50th anniversary along with the Toronto International Film Festival, the movie was screened twice as part of the festival’s gala presentations, co-presented by TIFF Classics. I attended the second screening last Saturday evening.
The festival was winding down, the celebrities had come and gone, and exhaustion had set in. But a sense of relief at the prospect of returning to civilian life was palpable for those attending the festival for the past nine days.
The ennui hadn’t beset Sholay fans, however, who joined the line snaking outside the Royal Alexandra Theatre into side streets, dressed up to watch the film they had seen in their youth – either in a theatre, on pirated VHS tapes or via one of the endless reruns on cable TV. Inside the theatre, grandparents and preteen grandkids dove into popcorn bags together. Two employees from ICICI Bank Canada, the Indian multinational, pored over a spreadsheet of 50 colleagues to ensure each one found their seat.
After all, this is the picture that has everything. In the words of one of the central characters, Veeru (Dharmendra), “Is story mein emotion hai, drama hai, tragedy hai.”
For foreign audiences, Sholay may be reminiscent of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns featuring a lawless world and personal codes of honour or Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films about the struggle between individual morality and societal duties.
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We Hindi cinema lovers, however, have grown up with the film almost imprinted upon our collective consciousness. The dialogue, the characters’ mannerisms, the songs and soundtrack have been repeated or recreated so often, usually since childhood, that they’ve become part of our body memory.
We’ve all mouthed the lines, such as the droll “Tumhaara naam kya hai, Basanti? (What’s your name, Basanti?)” for all manner of social interactions, long before social media memes were even a thing. We’ve all involuntarily swayed, if not danced with outright abandon, to the hypnotic tune of Mehbooba Mehbooba.
For some of us, it’s as if the villain Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan) willed his own ruthless reputation as a dacoit, and by extension Sholay’s lore, into a timeless warning: If a child doesn’t go to sleep at night, their mother tells them to get to bed, otherwise Gabbar will appear.
Sholay’s plot follows a familiar arc of revenge being sought for a grave injustice. Thakur Baldev Singh (Sanjeev Kumar) was once an upstanding police officer who bravely fought looting bandits. During his exploits, he comes across two petty thieves, Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru, who impress him with their bravado. In retirement, Baldev seeks out Jai and Veeru to help him get rid of Gabbar, who has been terrorizing Baldev’s village.
Baldev’s vendetta is also personal. He once captured and jailed Gabbar, who escaped and massacred Baldev’s family, save for his now widowed daughter-in-law, Radha (Jaya Bachchan, née Bhaduri), and faithful retainer Ramlaal.
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Jai and Veeru take up Baldev’s challenge to capture Gabbar alive. Romance blossoms between Veeru and Basanti (Hema Malini) in the middle of multiple rounds of mayhem, as well as several moments of comedy, before the ultimate showdown between Jai, Veeru, the henchmen, Gabbar and Baldev.
Perhaps no one was more excited about watching Sholay on the big screen than my mother, who asked me to book tickets for her and my sister the minute she found out about the screening. When I asked if she had seen the movie in a theatre in her youth, she scoffed, “The right question is who hasn’t seen Sholay in my generation.”
My own memory of watching the film for the first time was at a party my parents took me and my sister to when my father, a former diplomat, was posted in Lagos. While the adults talked, the children had been corralled into a room and plonked in front of a TV with a VCR. The grainy footage of the VHS tape had likely been copied more than a few times but nonetheless enthralled me as a five-year-old, even if I didn’t fully understand the film at the time.
The version presented at TIFF for the landmark movie’s 50th anniversary has been restored in 4K by India’s Film Heritage Foundation, in collaboration with Sippy Films, which produced Sholay (along with many other blockbuster Hindi films). It was also director Ramesh Sippy’s uncut release, including the original ending and two deleted scenes, and ran 204 minutes. The presenter introducing the film noted there would be an intermission, to which the packed theatre responded with whistles and claps.
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When the movie started, with a steam engine slowly chugging into a station, the audience broke out in cheers again. There was a palpable thrill as the familiar, bright-red credits scrolled across the screen, accompanied by R.D. Burman’s orchestration – the strumming guitar, the trumpet notes and conga beats.
The crowd sang along to the first song, Yeh Dosti, about forever friendship. An hour into the film, when Gabbar first strode onscreen, the theatre filled with an anticipatory din.
The script by Salim-Javed (the duo of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar), which peppers in ideas of Muslim integration, non-violence and widow remarriage along with the action, still resonated.
And we all swooned for Helen cavorting in full technicolour.
The original ending and two cut scenes, once deemed objectionable by the Indian film certification board for their violence and lawlessness – the film was originally released during the Emergency period in India, when civil liberties were suspended – were tame compared with the gruesome depictions of violence we see these days.
The film ended, but the excitement continued outside, with audience members capturing images of having seen Sholay at the Royal Alex and reliving its moments on the ride home.
Is it a perfect film? No. A judicious editor would find plenty to cut. But that’s not the point. As its TIFF screening made clear, Sholay is a mood. One I look forward to revisiting with my own kids for years to come.
Special to The Globe and Mail
