Making sense of 'Sholay'

Is it possible for the most iconic and mythologised film in your life—the one that is most thoroughly familiar—to also feel like a jigsaw puzzle that took a long time to put together?

- Jai Arjun Singh

Sholay is widely acknowledged as the most polished and fully realised Hindi film of its era, the most flawless technically, the one with the best action scenes and sound design, the fewest loose ends or awkward cutting. The sort of mainstream film that even Satyajit Ray could (grudgingly?) admire. But however complete it may be, I still think of it as a series of moments that are so embedded in one's consciousness (and so easily accessed from the mind's old filing cabinet) that it almost doesn't matter which order those fragments come in—there are any number of entry points. It's a bit like knowing key sections of a legendary epic—say, the Mahabharat—rather than every last detail, and still feeling like you know it in its entirety.

Like any other super-fan, I have my personal Sholay history, and it includes this confession: though the film is central to my pop-cultural journey, looming forever on the horizon like those boulders against the sun in Gabbar's domain, there have been many gaps in my viewing. Of course, I have watched it in the conventional way from beginning to end, at least five or six times (as opposed to the dozens or hundreds claimed by other devotees)—and yet it always feels like I came to it piecemeal through a melange of things heard and read, narratives constructed, back-stories related in magazines and books... and finally, prints with scenes missing in them.

Here's how this can happen.

You're six or seven, and going for a rare family outing to a hall, to see a film that's less than a decade old but already fixed in legend. Someone dawdles, you reach 10 minutes after the show has begun, walking into a noisy action sequence involving a train, bad guys on horses, and three leading men whom you recognise. It's exciting but you're overwhelmed, and lost about who is doing what: why is one of the "heroes" in police uniform while the other two look roguish, though they all appear to be fighting on the same side?