Sholay
Sholay is a 1975 Indian epic action-adventure film directed by Ramesh Sippy, produced by his father G. P. Sippy, and written by Salim–Javed. The film follows two criminals, Veeru and Jai, who are hired by a retired police officer to capture the ruthless bandit Gabbar Singh. Hema Malini and Jaya Bhaduri also star as Veeru and Jai's love interests, Basanti and Radha, respectively. The soundtrack was composed by R D Burman.
Filming took place in the rocky terrain of Ramanagara, in the southern state of Karnataka, over a span of two and a half years, beginning in October 1973. After the Central Board of Film Certification mandated the removal of several violent scenes, Sholay was released theatrically as a 198-minute long film. The first version of the director's cut became available on home media in 1990. In 2025, the fully restored Director's Cut was released worldwide as Sholay: The Final Cut.
Sholay is a Dacoit Western, combining the conventions of Indian dacoit films with that of Spaghetti Westerns along with elements of Samurai cinema. It is also a defining example of the masala film, which mixes several genres in one work. Scholars have noted several themes in the film, such as glorification of violence, conformation to Indian feudalism, debate between social order and mobilised usurpers, homosocial bonding, and the film's role as a national allegory.
Sholay received negative critical reviews and a tepid commercial response during its initial release. However, favorable word-of-mouth publicity helped it to become a box office success. It then went on to break records for continuous showings in many theatres across India, and ran for more than five years at Mumbai's Minerva theatre. The combined sales of the original soundtrack, scored by R. D. Burman, and the dialogues, set new records at the time. In addition, the film's dialogue and certain characters became extremely popular, contributing to numerous cultural memes and becoming part of India's daily vernacular.
Sholay is now regarded as one of the greatest and most influential Indian films of all time. It was ranked first in the British Film Institute's 2002 poll of "Top 10 Indian Films" of all time. In 2005, the judges of the 50th Filmfare Awards named it the Best Film of 50 Years. It was also an overseas success in the Soviet Union. Sholay was also at one point the highest-grossing Indian film ever at the time, and was the highest-grossing film in India up until Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!.
Plot
Theatrical release (1975)
Jai and Veeru are small-time crooks who are released from prison, where they are recruited by a former Inspector Thakur Baldev Singh to capture a notorious dacoit named Gabbar Singh wanted for, as the duo had saved Thakur from a train robbery, which makes Thakur recruit them for the mission with an additional reward. The duo leaves for Thakur's village in Ramgarh, where Gabbar is residing and terrorising the villagers.After reaching Ramgarh, Veeru falls for Basanti, a feisty, talkative horse-cart driver. Jai meets Thakur's widowed daughter-in-law, Radha, and falls for her; she later reciprocates his feelings. The two thwart Gabbar's dacoits, who came to extort money and goods. Later on, the three dacoits, including Kaalia, are killed by Gabbar. During the festival of Holi, Gabbar's gang attacks the villagers, where they corner Jai and Veeru, but the duo manage to attack and chase them away from the village. The duo is upset at Thakur's inaction and considers calling off the mission. Thakur reveals that a few years ago, Gabbar had killed his family, and had both his arms cut off; he concealed the dismemberment by always wearing a shawl, the sole reason he could not use the gun.
Realising how much Thakur has suffered, Jai and Veeru take pity by taking an oath that they will capture Gabbar alive, free of charge. After learning the duo's heroics, Gabbar kills Ahmed, the local imam Rahim Chacha's son, to threaten the villagers to make Jai and Veeru surrender to him. The villagers refuse and instead get the duo to kill a few of Gabbar's henchmen in revenge for the boy's death. Gabbar angrily retaliates by having his men capture Veeru and Basanti. Jai arrives and attacks the hideout, where the trio can flee Gabbar's hideout with dacoits in pursuit. Shooting from behind a rock, Jai and Veeru nearly run out of ammunition. Unaware that Jai was wounded in the gunfight, Veeru is forced to leave for more ammunition and also to drop Basanti at a safe place.
Jai sacrifices himself by using his last bullet to ignite dynamite sticks on a bridge from close range, killing Gabbar's men. Veeru returns, and Jai dies, leaving Radha and Veeru devastated. Enraged, Veeru attacks Gabbar's den and kills his remaining men, where he catches Gabbar and nearly beats him to death. Thakur appears and reminds Veeru of the vow to hand over Gabbar alive. Thakur uses his spike-soled shoes to severely injure Gabbar and his hands. As Thakur is about to kill Gabbar, the police arrive, and the senior officer convinces Thakur to let go, explaining that he was also a police officer, whose example is legendary. Convinced, Thakur lets go, and the police arrest Gabbar for his crimes.
After Jai's funeral, Veeru decides to leave Ramgarh, with Thakur empathising with him. After boarding the train, he finds Basanti waiting for him on the train, and they both embrace each other.
Director's cut
The original director's cut has a different ending. The police do not arrive to stop Thakur. Instead, he kicks Gabbar onto a nail on one of the two poles that Gabbar had used to chain Thakur when he had cut off his arms, thus stabbing him in the back and killing him. This version also has deleted scenes that include Thakur's shoe soles getting laced with spikes, the scene in which Thakur's family is massacred, and the scene in which the imam's son is killed. The Censor Board was concerned about the violence, and that viewers may be influenced to violate the law by punishing people severely. Although Sippy fought to keep the scenes, he ultimately had to reshoot the ending, and as directed by the Censor Board, have the police arrive just before Thakur can kill Gabbar.The fully restored director's cut was released in 2025 as Sholay: The Final Cut. It was remastered in 4K and Dolby 5.1, and theatrically reissued on 12 December 2025 globally. This release is classified at 206 minutes.
Prior to this release, the censored, theatrical cut was the only one seen by audiences for fifteen years. Versions of the director's cut initially surfaced in 1990 via a British VHS release. Eros International then released two versions on DVD: a director's cut that preserved the original full frame and is 204 minutes in length, and the censored widescreen version which ran at 198 minutes long.
Cast
Production
Development
The screenwriter pair Salim–Javed, consisting of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, began narrating the idea for Sholay as a four-line snippet to filmmakers in 1973. The idea was rejected by two producer/director teams, including directors Manmohan Desai and Prakash Mehra. About six months after the release of Zanjeer, Salim-Javed contacted G. P. Sippy and his son Ramesh Sippy, and narrated the four-line snippet to them. Ramesh Sippy liked the concept of Sholay and hired them to develop it. The original idea of the film involved an army officer who decided to hire two ex-soldiers to avenge the murder of his family. The army officer was later changed to a policeman because Sippy felt that it would be difficult to get permission to shoot scenes depicting army activities. Salim-Javed completed the script in one month, incorporating names and personality traits of their friends and acquaintances. The film's script and dialogues are in Hindustani; Salim-Javed wrote the dialogues in Urdu script, which was then transcribed by an assistant into Devanagari script so that Hindi readers could read the Urdu dialogues.The film's plot was loosely styled after Akira Kurosawa's 1954 samurai cinema film, Seven Samurai. Sholay is a defining example of the Dacoit Western film, combining the conventions of Indian dacoit films, especially Mehboob Khan's Mother India and the Dilip Kumar and Nitin Bose film Gunga Jumna, with that of Westerns, especially Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns such as Once Upon a Time in the West as well as The Magnificent Seven. It also has some plot elements borrowed from the Indian films Mera Gaon Mera Desh and Khote Sikkay. A scene depicting an attempted train robbery was inspired by a similar scene in Gunga Jumna, and has also been compared to a similar scene in North West Frontier. A scene showing the massacre of Thakur's family has been compared with the massacre of the McBain family in Once Upon a Time in the West. Sholay may have also been influenced by Sam Peckinpah's Westerns, such as The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The character Gabbar Singh was modelled on a real-life dacoit Gabbar Singh Gujjar who had menaced the villages around Gwalior in the 1950s. Any policeman captured by Gujjar had his ears and nose cut off, and was released as a warning to other policemen. The fictional Gabbar was also influenced by larger-than-life characters in Pakistani author Ibn-e-Safi's Urdu novels, Dilip Kumar's dacoit character Gunga from the film Gunga Jumna who speaks with a similar mixed Khariboli and Awadhi dialect, and villains from Sergio Leone's films. Sippy wanted to do away with the clichéd idea of a man becoming a dacoit due to societal issues, as was the case in other films, and focused on Gabbar being an emblem of pure evil. To emphasise the point of Gabbar being a new type of villain, Sippy avoided the typical tropes of dacoits wearing dhotis and pagris and sporting a tika and worshipping "Ma Bhavani"; Gabbar would be wearing army fatigues. The character of the jailer, played by Asrani was influenced by Adolf Hitler. Javed Akhtar brought a book on World War II which had several pictures of Hitler posing to set the typical posture of the character in the film. Asrani spiced up his character with some ideas about Hitler's speech delivery he had heard from a teacher in FTII. The trademark 'Ha Ha' at the end of his monologues was inspired by a similar performance by Jack Lemmon in The Great Race. Soorma Bhopali, a minor comic relief character, was based on an acquaintance of actor Jagdeep, a forest officer from Bhopal named Soorma. The real-life Soorma eventually threatened to press charges when people who had viewed the film began referring to him as a woodcutter. The main characters' names, Jai and Veeru, mean "victory" and "heroism" in Hindi.