Fifty years after its release, Sholay continues to resonate across generations. A timeless saga of friendship, vengeance, and morality, it blurs past and present, uniting nostalgia with cinematic immortality. Ashis Ghatak brings the past back to the present.

Sholay at 50 is more than a film — it is India’s eternal cultural epic. Its unforgettable characters, dialogues, music, and stereophonic innovations make it a living legend, blurring nostalgia with relevance. Passed through generations, referenced in daily conversations, and celebrated across theatres and digital platforms, Sholay has transcended cinema to become a shared memory and collective heritage. Its timeless storytelling continues to inspire filmmakers and audiences worldwide, ensuring that Sholay remains not just history but an eternal, living experience.

Once upon a time in a remote village nestled in the arid mountains of rural India, a notorious bandit terrorised the villagers with his relentless attacks. After a gruelling battle, a police officer managed to capture and imprison the bandit, but at a devastating cost. When the bandit escaped, he returned to exact revenge, wiping out the officer’s family and brutally severing his hands. Determined to avenge his loved ones and restore peace to the village, the officer remembered two clever yet morally upright prisoners he had once captured. He decided to seek their help to avenge the massacre committed by the bandit. And so, one day…

This might sound like a grandpa’s tale that transcends the boundaries of time and space. Some fables and stories are passed down to future generations as part of the elders’ moral teachings, or as bedtime stories where sleep-defying kids are scared with a fake serious tone, “so jao nahi to Gabbar aa jayega”.

From Nolan to Nostalgia

A group of friends, clad in the latest fashion and sporting weird hairdos, munch on popcorn from a thousand-bucks bucket, glued to the dystopian universe of Christopher Nolan. They snap quick selfies for Snapchat, debate the decline of content in Marvel classics, and drool over certain Turkish web series. They often flaunt their intellect by dissecting modern avant-garde non-English films, sometimes sarcastically questioning the logic of Hindi movies. This community of cinephiles is piqued by subverting the conventional and challenging the logic of linear narratives in today’s absurd universe. Why this universe only, when their minds travel to metaverses, listen to cosmic sounds, and interact with digital beings through virtual and augmented reality technology, even betting their farms to fly and watch a Coldplay concert! In an era where their identities are reduced to impersonal ‘users’ immersed in a nuanced soundscape that mimics real-world acoustics, one of them just happens to click on a link that begins to play an unfamiliar tune.

A jailor descends from a train on a deserted platform, meets a man awaiting him, and rides on a horse kept for the two. The crescendo of the rhythm guitar, followed by the mellowed tones of the French horn, takes one’s mind to a different realm. As the horn’s melody flows through, it unveils layers of vistas unfamiliar to his ears, seasoned with digital sound, drawing him into it. He might have heard echoes of it in his father’s ringtones, but now his curiosity is piqued to witness the scene. His computer screen or even the widescreen TV projection feels confined. The whistle wanders from valleys to the pastoral settings of an idyllic hamlet. The rocky wild west terrain transitions with tarshehnai, madal, and mandolin into a much softer rural landscape filled with life. By the time the jailor and Ramlal, his escort, gallop back to the brown mountains on horseback, with hooves pounding in rhythm with the guitar strokes and a captivating whistle, he is transported. The real and the virtual blur. The ear accustomed to Spatial Audio hears a tune from a distant time when children listened to bedtime stories from a grandpa, lulled to sleep with the timeless opening words, “Once upon a time in a…”

“Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.” (T. S. Eliot. Burnt Norton)

Sholay Across Generations and Time

Sholay when spoken from the viewpoint of it being a 50 year old film, defines a time that is fixated on the past and simultaneously co-exists in the same plane of the present. Stories of Sholay start with it being shot in the mega canvas of 70mm with the stereophonic sound mixing, something reminiscent of the modern day avant-garde soundscape. We stare at the screen with wide-eyed wonder watching the dazzling spectacle of thunderous horses kicking dust from their galloping hoofs running parallel to the goods train hooting frightful whistles and the a three men army fighting the hell out of the terrifying bandits. 50 years have passed since the time Sholay dazzled the screen with the heroics of two ethical outlaws Jai and Veeru and the stern police officer gun battling with the rampaging dacoits in the sensational opening sequence. But has the time really passed!

The 70s kids undergo a déjà vu of delight when their stooping shoulder gets livened up with this scene when he comes back home, channel-surfs and bumps into it. The experience that he is having now and the one that he had stored in his heart makes the passage of time blurred. With time the situations have lost its contextual significance, the fear and foreboding gone to a distant, they have become some set pieces, each one of them caters only to the joy of reliving the past. Thus the cameo appearances of Soorma Bhopali and Angrez zamane ka jailor are two separate yet two complete accounts. The vibrant story of a happy and extended family of Thakur, of an elderly vivacious mausiji staying with her nubile niece who runs a tonga for survival, the poignant tale of a young widow resigned to fate, the heart wrenching loneliness of a blind imaam losing his son to the fury of a dacoit are all separate episodes. The melange of people and their stories is like the fictional characters of Malgudi with their individual idiosyncrasies yet, they are so alive and palpable. The entire film becomes a gripping anthology of short stories compiled in one volume which we love to flip through off and on, day in and day out.

Talking about Sholay after 50 years proves that time is not a 'dimension' as an observed sequence of events, envisioned as a trajectory across spacetime. But it is we, the observers who generate the phenomenon that we call the passage of time. The film might have been screened five decades back for the first time, but the memories are so much marinated with our being that we have gone old, the film hasn’t.

The Eternal Flame of Sholay

Not that Sholay blazed the trail with 70mm screen projection in Hindi films neither it bore the torch of stereophonic sound mixing. In a land where people live on films and film music, there are hundreds of examples that went beyond the spatio-temporal barriers. The opulence of Sheesh Mahal sequence where the paragon of beauty sings the iconic Jab Pyar Kiya to Darna Kya at the backdrop of thousands of glittering mirrors reminds one of the unparalleled visuals. A powerful image of a grime-filled Nargis in Mother India with her weathered face pulling a plow in a field, representing an immense struggle and hardships of women in rural India, is permanently etched in viewers’ minds.

The black and white song sequence of a Chaplinesque Raj Kapoor and his paramour Nargis wading through the rain under a solitary umbrella has been the archetype of star-crossed lovers of Hindi film music. There are examples galore and depending on one’s subjective preferences there would be bagful of references. These scenes have crystallised the glory of celluloid, the dream-maker peddling dreams for people spanning generations. But these edifices of the past glory seem to have got wrapped in a time warp. These examples are synonymous with respective films, yet, a single film with a lot many examples is rare. Sholay cuts above the rest.

According to film sound scholar Gianluca Sergi, stereophonic mixing made it possible to create an extra off-screen space in which part of the focus is left for the viewer to imagine. Stereo sound also made it possible for the viewer to engage with the sound’s directionality. One of the first stories that go round is the hearsay of people looking at their feet when Jai tosses the coin and it drops on the earth vertically. Then the piano glissando in the interlude of Yeh Dosti slides past the ear as the lady the two friends bumped in runs out of sight. The sound of Gabbar’s boot crunching on the stone as the camera slowly pans up to reveal the menacing expression of the stung villain, accentuates the foreboding of something terrible to come and when the massacre is perpetrated on Thakur’s family the empty swing that oscillates gives a terrifyingly shrill sound that speaks of the eerieness of the most macaberesque act. The stereophonic mixing gives such sounds a different entity that helps extending the audience imagination that extrapolates into something beyond the immediate context. This facilitates an emotional connect of the audience with the situations and these extrapolations form that off-screen space in the minds of the viewers, untouched by the passage of time.

Alongside the medium of sound, with the story being told, audience live on the characters and the emotions that they once generated. Thus each one of us becomes a character of the village, ravaged by the robbers, who run with their produce to propitiate the leader of the gang. It is we who suffer the collective loss of their brother when the lifeless body of Ahmed arrives and a strong sense of dramatic irony grips as his blind father fails to sense the gut-wrenching tragedy of his life. We find ourselves standing below the water tank witnessing the nautanki of Veeru. The compassion that the villagers extends to each other touches us too. This oneness ultimately forms the binary of good versus evil and avenging the atrocities of evil perpetrators becomes a common objective. We get these emotions now when see the movie or when people saw it back then, 50 years before. The mind can’t distinguish the time that passed. So a nostalgia and a sense of immediacy co-exist.

The universality of these emotions make it contemporary the way, Shakespearean tragedy remains relevant beyond the passage of 400 years. But unlike Shakespeare’s dramas or films, a re-enactment of the original couldn’t produce the same magic. There have been lame attempts of reworking on the theme, like China Gate, Aandhi Toofan, Army and let alone, the atrocities of Ramgarh ka Sholay, a clear example of the director’s atropy of imagination. But while Farhan Akhtar dares to redefine Don and successfully lends a modern chick parlance to the classic, Sholay is held as sacrosanct. The emotions that generate out of the film, cannot be recreated as they are not held high somewhere on a distant pedestal, but visited and revisited in our inane daily existence, day in and day out. This makes the film timeless and the celebration of 25/30/50 years are just the mere signposts to its journey towards eternity. So the oft-quoted “itna sannata kyun hain” doesn’t have the gloom of an ominous foreboding, but the most loved way of breaking the ice. Veeru’s exaggerated hurling invectives “Basanti in kutton ke samne mat nachna” has been parodied thousands of times and now it has become an archetypal part of a comic script in daily conversations. Basanti’s frenetic calling “Chal Dhanno” has become immortalised as the words are inscribed in stylish calligraphy behind the tonga in every village where tonga still plies. Same goes with the virulent words of Gabbar. The fearful reaction of hearing the terrifying bandit mouthing ‘Kitne aadmi the’ in his chillingly gruff voice now transforms into a drastically different response when today one sees the words at the back of a truck stuck in a traffic jam. The original context may be gone, a new kind of delight has taken its place. Or, how else could you justify the stinker of a villain morphed into a much loved persona that arguably went even higher than the heroes of the film! With time all different and heterogeneous emotions have become one single emotion of joy. And when you see the film now you just skim through that surf of delight which is in a deeper plane than the immediate impacts of the filmic situations.

Reliving the moment of history

In a special screening of the film’s 75 years people line up. There’s an option of audience watching it in flat screen and also on holographic and volumetric displays that churn up three dimensional images all over the auditorium. The haptic seats toss and turn with the sequence of events. It even generates wind and emits smells leading the audience into a complete immersion. The train sequence explodes into a three dimensional reality. Steam billows around the audience, smell of burnt coal fill the air. Sounds of bullets ricochets wall to wall. The horses that run frantically billowing dusts float all around. Audience’s eyes are blurred with smoke and dust and their skin gets a feel of water sprinkling on it as one of the dacoits being hit by a bullet plunged into the wetlands. While the grey headed, wrinkled skinned people watching on the two dimensional projection, revisit the time past and prompts the dialogues of the succeeding scenes, newer children of millennials jump up and down in their haptic seats.

Sounds of a bustling village — goats bleating, utensils clanging, horse-drawn carts galloping — fill up the space with a hyper realistic detail. On a parallel level, the dialogues like Kyunki lohe lohe ko kat-ta hai… yeh haath mujhe de de Thakur… poore pachas hazar — start floating in the air. Magic happens in both dimension when Jai and Veeru go to bust the hideouts of Gabbar. The grainy, classic frame of sepia tone and Helen dancing on the frenetic rhythm of Mehbooba Mehbooba floors the elders with nostalgia. And on another dimension, Helen would no longer be a dancing queen on screen. R.D Burman’s voice would surround the audience from all around as if the sound itself is a physical reality moving through the space. The audience is inside that cavernous space and looking at the gyrating diva at a volumetric projection, the youngsters are tied to their seats may be by social norms but surely with a seat belt getting fastened around them automatically as they want to leap.

With all the diverse moods juxtaposed, at a particular point of time, all divisions merge. Time past, present and future come at one planetary communion. The embers of love bind generations. Silence stealthily settles in. On the corridors of Thakur’s haveli the auburn lamplight is gently dimmed by a quiet Radha. The old house stands silhouetted against the night sky. A silvery cascade of moonlight floods the screen. A lonely melancholic tune in harmonica floats in the air, the unspoken words of love, a wistful longing to transmit the yearning of a heart, a poignant journey into one’s own inner self, a gentle resignation to fate, or a desperate effort to dream, may be a transitory wish-fulfilment that comes from the demure glance of the lady! A kind of hush falls in as the tune on harmonica wafts all over and rests on every one’s soul. Fingers clasped, eyes moistened, time merges in one single epiphanic moment of bliss for all.

And the greatest story ever told lives on. “Once upon a time in a …..”