So Far Yet So Near: The Sholay I Carry Within

Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt once said something like nations aren’t built by borders -- they’re held together by stories. I’ve come to believe Sholay is one of those stories; not because it is flawless, but because it knows how we live in friendships and feuds, in jokes and grief, in long silences and louder vows.

By Tathagata Chatterjee

How far is Ramgarh from Calcutta’s Jyoti Cinema Hall?

An afternoon show of Sholay, sometime in the early 1980s in Calcutta’s Jyoti Cinema Hall in Dharamtala gave me the paradoxical answer -- so far, and yet so near.

That’s how a little Ramgarh occupied a memory space in my head.

On August 15, 2025, the all-time blockbuster in Bollywood celebrated its 50^th year of release. After the flags are hoisted, salutes are exchanged, and singing is completed, I retreat there-like Gabriel García Márquez had the fictional Macondo in his Noble-prize winning epic, One Hundred Year of Solitude; like my father, who was born in a village, had his Gobordanga, a moffusil township not so far from Calcutta.

I was born in Calcutta but I have Ramgarh.

It’s where my doubts argue with my courage, where memory keeps watch, where the dust never quite settles. The horizon shimmers. A plume of dust rises. Hooves drum beyond the ridge.

And then RD Burman’s Western-tinged theme begins-half Morricone, half- heartbeat, reminding me that danger often approaches so beautifully -- before it breaks you.

This year, Ramgarh returned to me in stereo. In late June, an uncut, 4K-restored Director’s Cut-204 minutes of the film we carry in our bones -- played in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore before thousands of cinephiles. It was restored by the Film Heritage Foundation with Sippy Films and L’Immagine Ritrovata --  the audio was rebuilt from the original sound negatives and magnetic tracks. To see the official festival listing read,  ‘RECOVERED & RESTORED’ felt like the universe annotating our collective memory.

And just a few weeks later, Iran -- in a gesture as surprising as it was moving -- posted a full-page newspaper tribute to Sholay, with its Mumbai Consulate calling the film a cornerstone of Iranian memories of Bollywood. The post wasn’t nostalgia alone, it was recognition that this Indian story crossed languages and borders long ago and never came back.

The Ramgarh in My Head

I return to Ramgarh because it helps me make sense of India. In my mind, Gabbar is never a single bandit; he’s the many-headed menace of hate, disinformation, and the easy ‘Us vs Them’ that eats away at trust. Jai and Veeru (Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra) remind me that dosti is public virtue -- solidarity across difference is how citizens outflank fear.

Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar), maimed yet unbending, teaches that the rule of law may be scarred, but it must stand, brick by painstaking brick. Radha (Jaya Bhaduri) is grief’s quiet ledger. Basanti (Hema Malini) is democratic stamina. Dhanno (the female horse) is the uncomplaining labour that keeps the cart moving.

Imaam Saheb remains my moral barometer; sightless, yet seeing more truth than most, holding the death of his son Ahmed with a dignity that indicts the rest of us. Ramlal whispers that invisible work is nation-work. Mausi ji is prudent with a pulse. Surma Bhopali reminds me that satire isn’t a sideshow; when truth is risky, laughter becomes a shield.

The jailor is our institutions, sometimes theatre, sometimes folly, still obliged to choose justice over spectacle. Kaalia is the helpless voice inside me when fate leans in and asks, “Tera kya hoga, Kaalia?”

This is a question that freezes you before the fight begins.

Sambha is the echo chamber-perched high yet thinking small, who only repeats after his master, “Pure pachaas hazaar,” inflating the boss’s worth and billings, never daring to speak his mind. The Banjo Player is the everyday artist who can either give courage to the people or set the stage for power games. And the Gypsy Dancer  (the great Helen) -- Mehbooba Mehbooba – (in RD’s incredible voice) is instinctive joy in defiance, unless choreographed as distraction.

That’s the inner topography. But Sholay is also a living history. How India looked, sounded, sold, and dreamed in 1975. The story of how a ‘flop’ for two weeks became a fable for five decades.  

The Sound That Changed How We Watched

When the film arrived, it wasn’t just a film, it was a technological event. The Sippys pursued epic scale, 70mm blow-ups, stereophonic sound, and post-production finished in London, because Indian facilities couldn’t meet the audio ambitions yet. Kolkata’s Jyoti Cinema, one of the rare 70mm screens in the East, upgraded projection and sound to showcase it much later.

The film ran there for a remarkable 103 weeks.

Sound historians now mark this super entertainer as a watershed in Indian film audio, early stereo strategies, multi-track recording, and an auditory spectacle that turned exhibition into immersion. Even recent scholarship highlights how it expanded the sonic palette of mainstream cinema

Showmen from that era and critics alike still recall how that stereophonic mix altered both economics and expectation. You can even hear the apocrypha in the foyer: when a coin hit the ground in a 70mm hall, patrons ducked to look under their seats. The point isn’t whether it literally happened. It’s that we believe it could have -- because Sholay taught us to listen as intently as we watched.

The India That Heard a Film

Seventies India was an audio nation. Paan-shop transistors tuned to Radio Ceylon and Vividh Bharati, homes echoing with jingles and serials. It’s why Polydor’s most subversive idea wasn’t a song, but a record of a speech. Watching queues repeat Salim-Javed’s lines word for word, the label realised audiences were leaving theatres with dialogues lodged in their heads. Record sales of the music were sluggish -- the lines were the recall.

Within weeks, Polydor cut a 58-minute LP of dialogues-pressed for an India that could listen even when it couldn’t watch. The records flew. EPs followed: Veeru ki Sagai, Hame Jail Jana Hai, Soorma Bhopali, Radha ki Kahani -- and, towering above them, Gabbar Singh.

A villain’s so-called ‘squeaky’ voice had become a national soundtrack!

I grew up in that listening culture. I’ve sat in theatres where someone behind me tried to pre-empt every line until the row collectively told him we can, too. We weren’t being rude -- we were announcing a fact that this movie had moved from cinema into proverb.

From there, culture did the rest. Britannia’s ‘Gabbar ki asli pasand’ Glucose-D campaign took the unthinkable leap, putting a beloved villain in a children’s biscuit ad.  It shouldn’t have worked. It did.

Research backed what the stalls already knew: kids were quoting Gabbar in schoolyards. Advertising merely followed the theatre.

(Javed Akhtar even suggested riffing on Gabbar’s introduction scene -- the Sippys loaned costumes and guns -- the film ad was shot like a campfire tale retold.) You could say the brand managers were clever, or that this film was already managing the brand called India.

I was in a cinema hall with my parents when I watched that engaging advertisement. And though I was a little kid (and wasn’t allowed a chance to watch the film till then), I vowed to watch it on the big screen when my time would come. Watching Sholay alone thus became a rite of passage for me.

From ‘Chholey’ to Classic

It is easy to forget that critics panned the film on arrival. The Illustrated Weekly of India dismissed it as “just another dacoit tale,” and The Statesman lamented that it was an assault on the senses. Within two weeks, trade gossip called it “Chholey,” a flop.

And yet, from the third week, word-of-mouth turned gravity on its head. Audiences returned.

Then, they returned.

Yet again.

Again and again.

The rest is box-office folklore.

Minerva Theatre’s uninterrupted 286-week run in Bombay, more than five years on a single screen, and a carnival of silver and golden jubilees across India. This entertainer became epical.

Over time, reputations flipped. In 2002, the British Film Institute poll hailed Sholay as the greatest Indian film. In 2005, Filmfare called it the “Best Film of 50 Years,” a ceremonial apology for the lone editing award it had given MS Shinde in 1976 in its celebrated annual Filmfare awards. The late bloom proved durable.

Amjad Khan, or How a Stranger Became the Face of Fear

Gabbar Singh: The role almost went elsewhere.

Danny Denzongpa, the first choice for Gabbar, left for a clashing schedule. Panic in the camp. Several names were floated.

Then a chance Bandra Bandstand encounter: Salim Khan ran into Amjad Khan, remembered his theatre work, and walked him to Ramesh Sippy. The audition is legend now: Amjad filled the doorway, Ramesh, reclining on a diwan, craned his neck from a low angle.

The man seemed to loom. Thickset face, curly hair, a presence more than a person.

Something clicked.

Costumes would be found at Chor Bazaar, the fatigues weathered, the teeth blackened. But the performance had to be earned.

Early takes were stiff. The hands too rehearsed, the voice not yet anchored in menace. So Amjad did something simple and hard: he lived in Gabbar’s skin -- till the cadence grew natural and the silences spoke louder than the shouts. The rest is gravel and legend.

(The other story is that Javed Akhtar spotted Amjad Khan in a play in Delhi.)

And Then Came the Strangest Endorsement -- from Satyajit Ray. 

Andrew Robinson notes that Ray, who could be flinty about “Bombay actors,” wanted good Urdu and the right face for a weakling king. After Sholay, he saw what he needed.

Producer Suresh Jindal received Ray’s letter (March 26, 1975) about starting the Shatranj Ke Khiladi screenplay by mid-August. By October 1976, amid Sholay’s aftershocks, Amjad Khan was Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, chosen in part because his features echoed the Nawab’s portrait.

That leap from rock quarries and spiked boots to the languor of a dethroned, refined, aesthete, proved what the audition had whispered: this was not a one-note “bad hat” -- but an actor of reach.

The Ending We Were Denied (and Finally Got Back)

The version seared into our minds ends with Gabbar’s arrest. But the original, shot by Ramesh Sippy, had Thakur administering justice with spiked shoes crafted by Ramlal, in keeping with a moral equation the film had carefully set up.

Days before release, the censor board asked for a change. Emergency might be over, but that decision’s shadow lingered for decades.

In 2025, the restored Director’s Cut, including the original ending, finally premiered in Bologna. For those of us who’d lived with the other ending, it felt like a page torn out of our schoolbook quietly being pasted back in.

Making the Myth: Location, Labour, Grammar

The Ramanagara granite outside Bangalore gave the film its breadth. The landscape itself asked to be filmed wide. 

Dwarka Divecha’s camera wrote a new vocabulary for Indian spectacle. MS Shinde’s editing suggested more than it showed, letting the mind complete what the eye could only begin. And beneath the gossip, there was the grind two-and-a-half years of shooting on Ramanagara’s copper-grey granite outside Bangalore, a township built from scratch by the art team, the prison set reconstructed outdoors to match the sun.

Dwarka Divecha’s camera carved out a new grammar for spectacle while Shinde’s editing suggested violence more often than it actually showed, making the film feel more dangerous. Much of this record lives in Anupama Chopra’s book, Sholay: The Making Of A Classic, and even thumbnail bios of the crew nod to how Sholay devoured the 1970s to make itself.

I imagine walking those ‘Sholay Rocks’ years later. The wind still whistles through the same stone corridors. You stand on the ridge where Sambha once perched, and the landscape explains why the film is big, while the land itself asked to be filmed wide.

Selling the Myth: Billboards, Taglines, and a Villain as Brand

“The greatest story ever told.” The line, borrowed with a wink from biblical epics, wasn’t mere swagger. It primed audiences to expect a scale Indian cinema rarely attempted.

Then the market pushed back with its own logic: dialogue marketed by Polydor as LP, villain as endorser, theatre as echo chamber. In a way, Sholay’s success was less about outspending competition and more about listening to what the stalls were repeating, to what the kids were mimicking, to which lines felt like proverbs. The advertising that followed -- Britannia’s Glucose-D -- didn’t invent the craze. It caught up with it.

Bologna to Bombay to Tehran: A Fifty-Year Echo

Bologna’s ovation wasn’t nostalgia tourism. It was recognition that this story -- of friendship, fear, and the long road to justice -- reads fluently in any square where the night opens like a book. Tehran’s salute said something similar in another language: for many, Bollywood begins with Ramgarh. The cross-talk between piazzas and press cuttings is its map: far and near, east and west, then and now.

The Characters I Consult (A Quiet Roll-Call)

When the outside world tries to script a darker sequel, I hold counsel in my head --not to preach, not to prescribe, simply to remember how character behaves under pressure.

Jai and Veeru’s bond reminds me that courage is social. Thakur’s scarred patience argues for the long game. Radha’s hush counts the cost of violence in the ledger of daily life. Basanti’s chatter, carried by Dhanno’s tireless stride, turns the banal into stamina. Imaam Saheb’s dignity in grief sets a standard words can’t match, a living proof that moral clarity is possible even in loss.

Ahmed becomes our future we gamble away when menace is normalised.

Ramlal’s quiet hands keep things stitched. Mausiji’s counsel is the kind that saves families from ruin -- without headlines. Surma Bhopali’s jokes open a window when the room is short of air; laughter as armour when truth is risky.

The jailor, ridiculous as he can be, still wears a key we mustn’t lose. Kaalia’s frozen gaze is the first defeat to avoid, that helpless voice when fate asks, “Tera kya hoga Kaalia?” Sambha, perched high, is what happens when echo replaces thought. The Banjo Player, depending on the day, can be courage or collusion. The female Gypsy Dancer is proof that joy can be resistance -- until someone pays to make it a diversion.

Each one teaches a usable civic habit. Each one maps to someone I know. And sometimes, uncomfortably, to parts of myself.

I think part of why I guard my inner Ramgarh so fiercely is because it’s my personal compass. When public life turns into a shouting match, those dusty lanes help me sort signal from noise, loyalty over opportunism, courage over convenience, justice over spectacle. Sholay, for me, is less a film I re-watch, than a place I revisit, to calibrate my bearings before I step outside again.

Why the movie Still Belongs to Us

Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt once said something like nations aren’t built by borders -- they’re held together by stories. I’ve come to believe Sholay is one of those stories; not because it is flawless, but because it knows how we live in friendships and feuds, in jokes and grief, in long silences and louder vows.

And it knows something about endings.

For 50 years, again and again, we have argued about who should have finished Gabbar. The censors fenced off an answer, the restoration gave it back. But the bigger ending has always been ours to write.

In the republic I want, Gabbar is hauled in, not because restraint is pretty, but because a maimed Thakur stands taller when the law stands with him. In the republic, I fear, Sambha sets the rates and the banjo player sets the mood, while the real deal is cut in the shadows. Most days are somewhere in between.

When I think of that Jyoti Cinema afternoon, in Calcutta’s humid and sticky heat, and that first shock of stereophonic sound, I realise how the film stretched my idea of a country.  It taught me that a village with 40 characters can feel like an atlas. As Anupama Chopra quotes Javed Akhtar: ‘He ( Gabbar) belonged to a place, “somewhere between Mexico and Uttar Pradesh”.

It taught me that technology matters when it deepens feeling. It taught me that marketing can be an art when it becomes folklore. It taught me that a villain can be a more efficient courier of a nation’s anxieties than a hero. And it taught me that some films refuse to fade, because, as Mahesh Bhatt says, they don’t just entertain us, they actually become us.

I’ve also learned to trust the oddest sources, an Iranian full-pager, a piazza in Italy, a theatre ledger from Bombay, as proof that our stories travel better than we think, return richer than we sent them out, and sometimes come home with lost endings restored.

I make a silent vow in that dusty square in my head to be a little more Jai in courage, a little more Veeru in loyalty, a little more Thakur in resolve, a little more Basanti in grit -- to carry Radha’s quiet, heed Mausiji’s wisdom, honour Ramlal’s labour, guard Imam Saheb’s trust; to refuse to be the fall guy like Kaalia, to keep the Banjo Player’s, pulse and the Gypsy Dancer’s pulsating dance alive.

In one of the songs, part of the lyrics by the legendary Anand Bakshi, went as,

"Tesan se gaadi jab

Chhoot jaati hai to

Ek do tin ho jaati hai"

Because as the theme track recedes to a steady thrum, the train leaves the station with Veeru and Basanti in their eternal embrace, one truth stands up taller than the rest: Sholay doesn’t belong to its owners. It belongs to us, the audience that turned it into folklore, ordinary folks like us who keep revisiting Ramgarh.

To remember what courage, complicity, seduction, and resistance look like. It is part of our cultural commons, our shared moral memory. If we’re paying attention-past the banjo’s tune, past the Mehbooba swinging sway, past Sambha’s echo --we might keep writing the better ending.

Yes.

Together.

Sources & Acknowledgments (selected)

·        Anupama Chopra, Sholay: The Making Of A Classic (Penguin India, 2000).

·        Balaji Vittal, Pure Evil: The Bad Men of Bollywood (HarperCollins India, 2021).

·        Balaji Vittal, Amjad Khan: Outside the Embers, Outlook India, 7 Feb 2024.

·        Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (I.B. Tauris, 1989).

·        Il Cinema Ritrovato official listing for Sholay - Director’s Cut (4K restoration- Piazza Maggiore premiere- restoration partners and materials).

·        Indian Express on the original ending and CBFC’s intervention- restored ending’s world premiere in Italy. The Indian Express, June 25, 2025.

·        Times of India (Kolkata) on 70mm blow-ups, stereophonic sound completed in London -- Jyoti Cinema upgrades and run. The Times of India, August 13, 2025.

·        Sholay, Stereo Sound and the Auditory Spectacle - a paper by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, hosted at https://www.degruyterbrill.com/

·         Polydor’s 58-minute dialogue LP documented in Anupama Chopra’s Sholay: The Making of a Classic- Kolkata recollections of the record’s impact.  The Times of India, August 14, 2025.

·        Early critical reception (Illustrated Weekly -- subsequent reappraisal- Minerva’s 286-week run- jubilees). Gulf News (Septembr 15, 2018), Filmfare (September 18, 2018), India Today (2025).

·        Iran’s full-page tribute and Consulate’s public note; Cross-border resonance- NDTV.com (July 16, 2025)

---

Tathagata Chatterjee is a Gurgaon-based marketing strategist who likes to say he’s “in a meeting” when he’s re-watching a film for the 12^th time. An alumnus of Presidency College, Calcutta, and JNU, Delhi, he claims to be extremely busy, but somehow has an enviable amount of free time for popular culture, books, music, and making ambitious promises about “starting a book this year.”

All images in this article are AI-generated.