50 Years Of (Almost) Seeing Sholay | Sholay ’s most intriguing life has been off-screen — living as a cassette, as a rumour, as a village that belonged to everyone and no one, and as a fragment of the nation itself. | | Vikram Phukan | | THERE WAS A SUDDEN RIPPLE of excitement among casual cinephiles when the Film Heritage Foundation teased a mystery screening at Mumbai’s Art Deco jewel, Regal Cinema, on August 13. By sundown, a snaking queue had formed, curling into the inner lanes of Colaba. It was unusually long for a Wednesday night show, and the line was buzzing with guesses. The only clue was that it would be a director’s cut never seen before in India, and the rumour mills instantly went into overdrive. Many of us instinctively wagered on Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay (1975), poised to turn fifty just two days later, on Independence Day. The most irresistible whisper was the lost director’s ending, finally playing in its intended form. Originally, Thakur (a glowering Sanjeev Kumar) kills Gabbar (a smouldering Amjad Khan ) in a long and harrowing sequence, but the censors intervened, insisting that justice belongs to the state, so in the released version, the police arrive in time to take the dacoit away. At Regal, the tantalising possibility was that this ‘lost’ ending, long wrapped in myth, might finally get its first Indian theatrical showing. The audience only learned the truth when the lights dimmed and the screen flickered instead to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), a Vietnam War epic of brooding intensity. Stream live sports, blockbuster films and hit shows across 30+ platforms with OTTplay's Power Play monthly pack, for Rs 149 only. Grab this limited-time offer now! | Over the years, there have been murmurs of an alternate ending in which Amitabh Bachchan ’s swashbuckling Jai survives, with a subtle hint of widow remarriage for Jaya Bhaduri’s Radha — a narrative considered taboo in mainstream cinema at the time. During the film’s initial slow period, the makers considered reshooting the climax so Jai would live, but word-of-mouth soon rescued the film, and the idea was shelved, even if the speculation remained alive. The original unedited version turned up on VHS in the UK in 1990, and later on DVD releases abroad, with clips eventually surfacing on YouTube. But these were home-viewing curiosities never seen in India in a big cinema, in full Cinemascope. | Beyond Gabbar’s grisly end, the original ending carried extraordinary emotional weight. Thakur, after years of numbed grief, finally breaks down, and Dharmendra’s Veeru steps in to console him. Far more affecting than the clichéd last-minute police arrival, Veeru and Thakur’s exchange revealed raw vulnerability and solidarity — a catharsis that could have made the suppressed climax a classic scene for the ages. Debuting just weeks into the Emergency, Sholay hit theatres in a climate thick with censorship and political tension. The state was tightening its grip. Gulzar’s Aandhi (1975) disappeared from screens weeks after release because of the misappropriation of Suchitra Sen’s character in campaigns against Indira Gandhi, even though the film itself made no political statement. All the prints of Amrit Nahata’s Kissa Kursi Ka (remade and released in 1977) were destroyed because the film satirically alluded to Sanjay Gandhi’s auto-manufacturing plans. Sholay , by contrast, slipped through with spectacle and escapism. Its masala narrative perhaps shielded it from interference, allowing the film to reach audiences relatively intact during fraught times. It is tempting to speculate that the tensions of that year may have drawn even more viewers to the safety of cinema. The changes it did suffer, largely the altered climax, were relatively minor, yet no doubt weighed heavily on Sippy and his team. For years, that single change in a popular film fuelled the perception of draconian censorship, a reminder of the pressures filmmakers faced during the Emergency. | In 1975, Sholay had premiered at the now-vanished Minerva Theatre, the fortress of blockbusters perched on Lamington Road in what was then the city’s humming cinema district. With its vast 1,500-seat hall, pioneering 70 mm projection and six-track stereophonic sound, Minerva was among the rare Indian theatres that could give audiences the widescreen spectacle Sippy had crafted. The film’s uninterrupted five-year run set an Indian record for the longest-running film, a record unbroken until Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) finally surpassed it at Maratha Mandir circa 2000. In a neat twist of cinema history, Maratha Mandir reclaimed the record baton it had first carried with the three-year marathon run of K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam (1960), before passing it to Minerva. Due to this history, for many in the 1980s generation, Sholay existed everywhere and nowhere all at once. In our house’s friendly neighbourhood VCR, a constant churn of Amitabh Bachchan tapes brought neighbours and friends over to watch past titles and new releases alike. Yet Sholay remained in the void on the shelf. Every time we checked the video rental parlour, we drew a blank. I cannot supply a documented reason for that gap — this was in insurgency-era Shillong — only the lived fact that it eluded us for years, and not because demand outstripped supply. | The absence of Bachchan’s films on television was even more pronounced. Doordarshan favoured Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s middle cinema, but even his well-regarded collaborations with the superstar were absent from the Sunday canon. Only Chitrahaar, the weekly showcase of film songs, offered glimpses — Silsila in rotation, and on Holi, that one song from Sholay featuring villagers in revelry before an attack by dacoits, those few seconds of extra footage trumping the song itself. The result was a peculiar form of cultural memory. One in which we did not watch Sholay so much as recite it. Dialogue cassettes circulated like scripture, in a double album from HMV, with key sequences memorised and repeated, even as minor dacoits like Sambha (Mac Mohan) and Kalia (Viju Khote) became household names. | As the masala cinema of Salim-Javed was becoming increasingly the mainstay of Hindi cinema, Sholay had all the choice ingredients. It brings together a comic track, a prison skit, romance in two registers, an item song, slick action choreography, a revenge melodrama with a tragic core, and even a buddy film dynamic. And yet, none of it feels like excess. Its tonal shifts flow without jarring; everything passes through an internally consistent world. The writing is calibrated, the performances pitched to the same key, and the editing maintains a rhythm that keeps the mood taut. The songs, composed by RD Burman, punctuate the happenings without seeming like diversions. | What came after tells its own story. The spin-offs and homages tended to be noisy and without coherence. Horror flick Purana Mandir (1984) borrowed a Basanti and Gabbar thread as a gag. Aandhi Toofan (1985) brought back Hema Malini, the original Basanti, as a Thakur stand-in in a gender role reversal leaning into the avenging angel trope popular in the 1980s. Soorma Bhopali (1988) got his own film, which couldn’t be rescued even by the special appearances of Bachchan and Dharmendra. China Gate (1998) had the bones but not the flesh. Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag (2007) was a cautionary tale despite the casting of Bachchan as a new-age Gabbar. This is why it is useful to pair Sholay with Varma’s Satya (1998): both are seismic, both convinced everyone that the landscape had changed, yet both failed to build a living lineage. They changed what people expected from cinema, but not the way it was made. The craft, the living ecosystem that had brought them into being, could not be summoned at will. Sholay’s international antecedents are much more reputable, even if traced in reverse. Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), its Hollywood spin-off The Magnificent Seven (1960), and the buddy western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) all come to mind. The first two provide the skeleton: mercenaries who become protectors and the village that must be defended. Sholay compresses the motley crew into just two men, as in Butch Cassidy , which gave us the duo’s chemistry, classic banter and fatalism. None of this is simple imitation. The film’s achievement is to metabolise influences and return them as something that feels both Indian and bigger than the local. | It’s a universality that is reflected in Ramgarh, a village that is an everywhere village. No caste grid is visible. The landowners are benevolent creatures, all overt evil being outsourced to dacoits. The token of inclusive secularism arrives as Imam Saab, played by AK Hangal. This world feels recognisable yet deliberately depoliticised, a national allegory scrubbed of the messy particularities of rural India. It made the film legible to the widest possible audience. It also told you, most significantly, what kind of nation the movie was imagining in 1975, despite the country’s prevailing (and much more fractious) social realities. | Today, skirmishes over alternative endings are often accompanied by new technology. The AI-generated “happy” coda of Raanjhanaa (2013), mounted without the consent of its makers, tells you that control over closure continues to be both a legal and ethical problem. That controversy is not the same as recovering a censored reel from 1975, but it is a reminder that endings are battles over memory, over what the audience is allowed to take home, and who gets to decide when a story has finished saying what it needed to say. Which brings me back to last night at Regal. Apocalypse Now is its own fever dream, but still, I wanted Sholay , not out of reverence but because the film’s most interesting life has always been off-screen, and always a little out of reach. It lived as a cassette, as a rumour, as whispers in a queue for another film, as a village that belonged to everyone and no one, as a piece of the nation itself. Every time it is re-released (a 3D version in 2014, and this year’s extended run that raked in 10 crores), it is a test of whether a country at fifty years’ remove looks at justice, law, and friendship the same way. I suspect the answer is no, which is exactly why the film still works. | Like what you read? Read more of what you like: Subscribe to our (free) newsletters , visit the website or download the app , and follow @ottplayapp on Twitter , Facebook and Instagram . We'd love to hear from you! Know someone who'd love this newsletter? 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