Angry Young Men – The Salim-Javed Story

From my review of Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag:

The basic one-liner sketch of Sholay is simply this: Bad Guy polishes off Good Guy’s family. Good Guy hires a couple of Bahadur-equivalents to bring down Bad Guy. Period.

But you know and I know and everyone knows that when it comes to Sholay, its story is so not the point. What Ramesh Sippy crafted, along with Salim-Javed, wasn’t a great movie so much as an unstoppable train of great characters and great moments that retroactively added up to a great movie. There’s very little organic greatness in Sholay. It’s a cheerfully unapologetic pastiche of bits from – among others – Once Upon a Time in the West, Mera Gaon Mera Desh and that genius Kishore Kumar vehicle Half Ticket, and even the staunchest of its defenders would be hard-pressed today to conceal an embarrassed smile at some of its more dated conceits, like the climactic image of Sanjeev Kumar single-handedly (rather, single-leggedly) bringing down Amjad Khan’s dreaded dacoit with a lethal combination of flying kicks and a fixed expression that suggests not rage so much as acute constipation.

And yet, each time Sholay shows up on TV, we can’t tear our eyes away – and that’s because of scenes such as the one where AK Hangal’s Imam sahib discovers that his son (played by Sachin, who contributes a cameo in Aag as well) has been killed. The way this sequence spools out is a master class in masala-movie screenwriting. Just a little earlier, we’ve seen Sachin reluctantly take leave of his aged, blind father, and now, as his horse returns to the village of Ramgarh with its lifeless rider (who’s been murdered by Gabbar Singh), we already feel for Imam sahib. After all, the son didn’t want to go; it’s the father who forced him to take up a lucrative job in a beedi factory in another town, and it’s during the travel to that other town that the boy met his untimely end.

And the scene keeps building. A crowd gathers. Jai and Veeru haul the body off the horse, just as Imam sahib joins them and breaks down. Kashiram reads out a note from Gabbar, which says that unless Jai and Veeru surrender, there will be many more such deaths. The terrified villagers urge Thakur to see reason. And then, Thakur lifts what has so far been standard-issue melodrama into the realm of myth. He issues a rallying cry, pointing out that down the ages – “Yug yug se…” – people have fought back against tyrants, and such efforts have always involved an element of sacrifice.

But the villagers are still unconvinced. They protest, “Hum is musibat ka bojh nahin utha sakte,” that they can’t bear this burden anymore. And then comes the stunning closure to the scene, the big bang that releases the slow-fuse tension that’s been building all along. Without raising his voice, Imam sahib rebukes the cowering villagers by reminding them of what he’s just lost, saying that if he is willing to support Thakur, the others had no business opposing him. And look how beautifully he puts this thought across, by picking up on the word bojh that was tossed around barely a moment ago: “Jaante ho duniya ka sabse bada bojh kya hota hai? Baap ke kandhon par bete ka janaaza.”

That, among other things, is what Sholay is about – not just the plot, but magnificently sculpted dialogue like this one, and the one that Jai utters when Veeru considers giving up a life of petty thievery by buying a plot of land in Ramgarh and taking up farming. (But how will they farm, Veeru wonders, considering that they don’t know the first thing about wielding a plough. And Jai responds, with a casual dash of existential philosophy, “Buraai ne bandook chalaana sikha di thi… neki hal chalaana sikha degi,” that if their opting for a life of crime had taught them how to handle a gun, their choosing the good path would automatically guide them in their new career.)

We often laugh at masala movies, and if we can appreciate them anymore, it appears to be purely from a retro-kitsch angle. But consider how, in that Imam sahib scene, a simple moment of conflict and tragedy has been elevated to deeply affecting popular art. And when Ram Gopal Varma expressed his admiration for Sholay – he’s apparently seen it dozens of times – these were the things you thought he’d pick up on, the things he wanted to repackage for a new generation. You thought he’d show us what we’re missing in our mainstream cinema, by going back to – among other things – the way songs were used in Sholay, which was a virtual textbook on the various genres of the Hindi film song. (The happy and sad versions of the friendship song, the festival song, the item number, the keep-the-clock-ticking-till rescue-arrives dance in the villain’s den, and the roothna-manaana song, with the hero pacifying the cross heroine.)