Sholay: The Evergreen Blockbuster 
By IndiaFM News Bureau, August 13, 2004 - 06:33 IST
img src="http://www.indiafm.com/feature/04/aug/1308sholay/still1.jpg" align="right">
Ramesh Sippy's mega film Sholay – the biggest blockbuster of all times is getting revived. The film that released on the Independence Day of 1975 is being brought back to life on the big screen once year after 29 years on August 13, 2004. Rehmat Enterprises have acquired the rights of Sholay from G.P.Sippy Productions and are upgrading the film to the current cinemascope version with fourth track sound, from its original 70 mm print and stereophonic sound format.
The film ran to packed houses for a period of 6 years in the Minerva theatre of Mumbai and created box-office history at that time.
On its 29 th anniversary, IndiaFM takes you to a trip down the memory lane refreshing the evergreen classic in your minds with Tarun J Tejpal's take on the film .
Before Internet, before television, before newsmagazines, before colour supplements, before hype and hardsell and promotion, one morning one suddenly became aware of Sholay . Not in Bombay, not in Delhi, not in the just-beginning-to-fatten metropolises of seventies India, but in a sleepy-small town tucked away in the farthest pouch of the north- east. Jorhat is the kind of town you never forget if you have lived in it, but if you haven't then you have no reason to have ever heard of it. It lacks the exotic musicality of Kalimpong and Jalpaiguri, and the political significance of Guwahati and Aizawal. It sits obscurely on the Brahmaputra delta, sporting a flying strip where tourists land to proceed to Kaziranga. It was here, where nothing happened, that one day suddenly became aware of Sholay It. was obviously through some kind of bush drum, beating itself through the thickets of this vast country, carrying the news of a multi-star block buster film unlike any to have ever escaped the confines of the Bombay film industry. With every day the drumbeats grew louder, insistent on the senses like torrential rain against glass. Soon enough my parent decided to throw the casement open and let it wash all over us.
People have all kinds of strange mnemonics to do gear their memories. I date my life through films and Hindi film songs. A snatch of a song wafting out of a radio or a public address system can cast me back in time, making vivid years, places and people long forgotten. So it's a cool clear winter morning. A Sunday, and the air is clean, and I am steadily pumping the pedals of a ladies cycle over an empty cracked-tar road, rising off the high seat every now-and then to rustle up some extra zip. At heel, peddling a rattling cycle is Bideshi Lal, my father's batman, and our man for all season. We are traveling from Gar-ali, the military suburb, to the heart of town and we are heady with expectation. In the next two hours, I will sit on a wooden bench in a government school at draft an essay in a district level inter-school writing competition, while Bideshi Lal sits outside clutching two magical tickets, and then we will race to Elle, the posh cinema hall in the heart of the bazaar. At the time it is also the throbbing heart of town, the hub where all roads end. For all those who saw it when it was first released, Sholay is such a special film that it has no equals. It promised a cornucopia, and it delivered on its every promise as no other film ever has. It had a cast of stars that could fill the covers of a film magazine for a whole year. It had a cracking storyline that – as the best do – led you up and down the valley of tears and laughter even as it waltzed with difficult questions of morality and redemption. The dialogue was unforgettable, and immediately entered the daily lexicon of the rich and poor. The songs hummed, the music haunted, the action exploded. And all of this was sewn into a seamless experience that left you rapt, exhilarated, sated, saturated. The film was edited for speed, written for emotional impact, and acted out with divine inspiration.
When I was asked to write this piece, I took the effort of acquiring a VCD of the film to refresh my memory. I managed to re-view it in many snatches over successive nights. I was amazed at how much of the film I still carried crystal clear in my head. Every dialogue popped up in my head before it was spoken on screen; I saw every scene before it actually appeared. Even more amazingly, this total recall did not dull my enjoyment of the film one with. The folklorish story of two lay about thugs, who get sucked into battling a heinous dacoit, con- fronting themselves, and achieving redemption, had worn superbly well. If anything, I felt a fresh wave of awe sweep over me. And curiously came up against a few surprises.
For one, the big question that had dogged everyone when the film first stormed the country – Was there any one star who had outshone the others in this mega movie? At the time, the opinions had swung wildly. The debutant Amjad Khan, unforgettable as Gabbar Singh, essayed with the relish of pure evil, mouthing dialogues that still ring in our ears. The thespian Sanjeev Kumar, the policeman – thakur with the iron will, whose burning eyes were more persuasive than his missing arms. Hema Malini, the sexy tongawalli , whose runaway banter enthralled the frontbenchers. Jaya Bhaduri, cloaked in grief and white, whose silent presence provided a potent diminuendo of gravitas in a film full of thrilling crescendos. Amitabh Bachchan, the laconic, macho Jai (Clint Eastwood, with the ability to act), who is doomed because he has a trick coin and a moral core. And Dharmendra, crook, comic, captain courageous, who will drink in the face of an arbitrary life, and be denied the glory of death!
At the time, if I remember correctly, the frontrunners for the crown had been Amjad Khan, Sanjeev Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan. For most of us – and certainly for me – the laurel belonged to Amitabh. Wry, handsome, implacable, he was a force of nature whose time had come. Riding the glories of Zameer, Abhimaan and Deewar, he was on meteoric curve that would redefine the very notion of a megastar. Sholay showcased him in the role of the avenger of a higher moral order that lay outside the pale of the law. He wasted no words; he heeded not society's diktats; he didn't seem to need women; and he feared nothing. It was all so impossibly romantic. Of course there were those who thought that Sanjeev Kumar with his barely controlled rage, his morally furious demeanour, his pivotal positioning had seized the film. But the film belonged to Gabbar Singh. K.N.Singh, Pran, Jeevan, and later Prem Chopra, Ranjit, Shakti Kapoor, and the biggest baddie of them all Amrish Puri have all been memorable villains, but if there is one role of villainy that towers above all it is Amjad Khan as Gabbar Singh. Normally the most compelling villains are those with some redemptive qualities, but Gabbar is an exception: his appeal is that of pure evil, pure evil married to panache and the immortal quip.
But now as I saw it again, it was not Bachchan, nor Sanjeev Kumar, nor Amjad Khan who had outdone himself. It was that old faithful, the good-looking hunk, the evergreen Jat, Dharmendra. Cast as the garrulous, tipsy, huckster, Veeru, he had been tasked to be both comic and vengeful – To play both the buffoon and the avenger. And so stellar is he at booth that on the basis of Sholay alone he has to be ranked as the most underrated matinee star of the last few decades. While the other three male leads have dramatic, emotional (romantically charged) roles written in, Dharmendra is in difficult, less larger-than-life terrain. He is a lowlife Romeo, an incontinent chatterer and a compulsive boozer. In a cast of hard etched, he is a soft, wobbly number, full of minor charlatanry. He is never accorded the grand moment, he is not accorded the glory of death; at the end he has to settle for banal life and mediocre marriage. And yet he holds his own, and charms with his comic abilities and his handsome rage. But if there is something greater than the star in Sholay , it is the script. It has to be good for good cinema to emerge. In Sholay , Salim Javed are at the peak of their prowess, and are incapable of writing a slack line. The bon mots sparkle, the exchange fizz, and every dialogue is memorable and is repeated till today. And look at the monikers. Even of minor characters. They have never been forgotten. Kaalia, Samba Soorma Bhopali! Mercifully the directorial vision too holds together. It does not betray the script, as is the norm in Hindi cinema. The setting is unreservedly rural, the terrain unstintingly harsh, death an inevitable consequence of life, and redemption vague and unclear. There is no attempt at softening the below. No attempt at asserting a moral universe where perhaps none exists. Gabbar dies, but so does Jai – leaving Jaya Bhaduri, in a way, twice widowed. Ramesh Sippy cuts his shots like Tarantino on speed, the scenes hustling along with an inevitability and momentum that still dazzles. And as is necessary in every successful Hindi film, the music zings. R.D. Burman not only makes the songs hummable, but he also creates those unforgettable bars of ominous music that accompany the presence of Gabbar and chill to date. Twenty-nine years later what would I, if I could, choose to leave out of Sholay . Not jailor Asrani, not Soorma Bhopali, not dancing Helen, not weeping Hangal. If I could I would cut short the Holi scene of the unwed Jaya, and a whole lot of banter of Hema Malini. There is a cutness to it that pales now. I could do with a little more of Bachchan-but then when it was being shot that was all he commanded and, wonders, ranked fourth in the billings, behind Dharmendra, Sanjeev Kumar and Hema Malini. Of course by the time it was released, and with it, he became the superstar never to be surpassed.
That morning in 1975, I won the essay competition, and 23 years later went to meet Bachchan as a writer. It is nice to imagine that in a designless universe – as rivettingly essayed in Sholay – it is possible to playfully conjure up design.
The Author
In an 18-year career, Tarun J Tejpal has reported for The Indian Express and The Telegraph, and been an editor with the India Today and The Indian Express groups. Before launching Tehelka.Com , he was the Managing Editor of Outlook . He is also a co-founder of the publishing house Indialink. He has written for several international publication, including The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Financial Times , and Prospect
|
