The wall stands firm: 50 years of 'Deewaar'

Yash Chopra's 1975 film drew from mythology and societal upheaval to create a resonant work of popular art. Its reverberations are still being felt today

- Akshay Manwani

Tul Sabharwal has a distinct childhood memory from growing up in Agra. As a four- or five-year-old in the early 1980s, Sabharwal would wake up every morning to his father playing the dialogues of Deewaar, Yash Chopra's 1975 film, on his tape recorder while doing the accounts of his shop. "Day after day," recalls the writer-director, "on loop, he would listen to the album of Deewaar, and I would wake up every day to 'Mere paas maa hai'."

Deewaar was a film of its time. It released 50 years ago, on 24 January 1975, a few months before the Emergency. Salim-Javed's script touched on a host of evils plaguing society: greedy capitalism, worker exploitation, smuggling, blackmarketing, hoarding, unemployment and hunger. Framed around these overarching issues, the film's story-about two brothers, Vijay and Ravi, who find themselves on opposite sides of the law-captivated viewers.

The film's dialogue has been codified into modern Indian psyche. Lines such as the one Sabharwal woke up to, or the defiant Main aaj bhi phenkey huey paise nahin uthaata (Even today, I don't take money thrown at me), are a ready punchline irrespective of context. And Amitabh Bachchan, as dockworker-turned-gangster Vijay, changed Indian cinema. After a promising start in Saat Hindustani (1969), Bachchan had a spate of flops. Salim Javed recommended him as the vigilante cop-protagonist for their script that would become Zanjeer (1973). Bachchan never looked back, his explosive anger in Prakash Mehra's film earning him the moniker 'Angry Young Man'.