THE MIRROR WE FORGOT TO POLISH

At 50, Sholay's afterglow has not faded, but its afterlife has been messy

- BY GAUTAM CHINTAMANI

There are films that entertain, and there are films that enter the bloodstream of a nation.

Sholay did both—and then some. It was not merely a movie; it was a weather system that altered the topography of Indian cinema, redrew the boundaries of storytelling, and spoke in a visual and sonic language that seeped far beyond Hindi-speaking India. And yet, for all its glory, it has lived half its life in neglect, mishandled by the very custodians who should have been its guardians.

The paradox of Sholay is also, in some way, the paradox of India: we celebrate in the moment, then lose interest in preservation. We revel in the afterglow, but forget the object that cast the light.

The Emergency was just a few weeks old when Sholay opened. The country’s newspapers were censored, political dissent muzzled, and civil liberties suspended. To release a film in such a climate—one with outlaws, revenge, and the moral elasticity of justice—was to test the boundaries of the permissible. The shoot had been a marathon: nearly three years of production, 70mm grandeur, stereophonic sound that was mixed in London, where equally illustrious predecessors like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) were mixed. But the film’s first days at the box office were muted. Audiences did not quite know how to receive it. A veteran projectionist famously told director Ramesh Sippy not to panic, that people just needed time to adjust to its scale. He was right. Slowly, word spread. This was no ordinary film. In its fusion of western shootout aesthetics with Indian emotional intensity, Sholay became the “Curry Western”—a term almost inadequate for the way it cleaved Hindi cinema into “before” and “after”.

Soon,