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, Sholay stopped being just a film. It became a shared cultural lexicon. Dialogues were pressed on vinyl, later sold on cassettes. Lines like “Kitne aadmi the?” (How many men were there?) or “Basanti, inn kutton ke samne mat nachna” (Basanti, do not dance in front of these dogs) and, my favourite, “Maine toh aankh pehle hi band kar rakhi hai” (I have already kept my eyes closed), escaped the screen to live in everyday speech. In 1985, a decade after its release, I watched it on a big screen in then Madras’s Satyam theatre. A man wandered in 10 minutes late, and whispered to his neighbour in Tamil, “What happened so far?” The reply was equally casual: “First time?” It did not matter that we were in the heart of the south—Sholay spoke a language beyond geography. Every re-release felt like a festival. I once watched it in Mumbai in the early 2000s, and the entire hall mouthed the lines in unison. Infuriating? Yes. But also a reminder that this was their film as much as anyone’s.
Iconic scenes: Stills from Sholay
And yet, despite its place in the pantheon, Sholay has been subjected to a string of indignities. A family feud over rights splintered control. The iconic R.D. Burman soundtrack with contributions from many maestros including Pandit Shivkumar Sharma and Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia was “enhanced” by a new composer decades later, in effect vandalising the original. Then came the baffling 3D conversion, a gimmick in search of a market. Today, there is no way to legally watch the untouched original in high quality. Streaming versions are altered, DVDs are long out of print except for second-hand finds. And let’s not speak too long about Ram Gopal Varma’s remake—the courts fined him, but the real damage was cultural. In short, we have treated our most beloved film the way we treat most of our heritage: with lip service in public, neglect in practice.
It has taken outsiders, in a sense, to remind us of what we have. The Film Heritage Foundation, working with international partners, has restored Sholay in 4K. Why must the lesson in that sequencing—our treasures are validated abroad before they are reintroduced to us at home—continue in this day and age? But the story of its restoration is not just about cinema; it is about us.
Why call Sholay the mirror of a nation? Because its arc is our arc. It was born in an era of state control, learned to survive censorship, became a people’s possession, and then was mismanaged by its own keepers. Its afterlife mirrors the way we handle legacies: reverence without responsibility. It also embodies the contradictions of modern India—the ability to be both hyper-local and universally resonant, to speak in the dialect of one village while reaching every corner of the country. The fact that the Karnataka government once planned to recreate Sholay scenes in virtual reality for tourism tells you how potent the film’s hold is half a century later.
The afterglow of Sholay has never faded. The afterlife has been messy. They are not the same thing. We can bask in the former without protecting the latter—but only for so long. Products, parodies, and homages have kept it in circulation. From tea marketed as Thakur’s preferred choice to a Google ad featuring a son taking his father to Ramgarh, where Sholay’s story unfolds, the film has proved endlessly adaptable. But adaptability is not the same as preservation.
The original negative, the unaltered soundscape, the film as it was meant to be—these deserve as much care as the Taj Mahal or the Ajanta caves. Cinema is no less a part of our civilisational heritage. The last decade in India has seen a shift: a public revival of culture that had long been kept behind private nostalgia. We have started to honour the past not only by celebrating it, but also by owning it. The restoration of Sholay belongs in that continuum. When it plays again, as it did in 1975, we will see ourselves—not as we are in this moment, but as a continuum of a people. Fifty years on, Sholay still asks us the same question: “Kitne aadmi the?” How many of us are left who care enough to keep the reel—and the reality it reflects—alive?
Gautam Chintamani is a film historian and author