Sholay
What is the main plot of Sholay?
How did Sholay perform upon its initial release?
What was revolutionary about Sholay’s depiction of villainy?
Sholay, landmark Indian film, released in 1975. Directed by Ramesh Sippy, written by the renowned duo of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar (Salim-Javed), and starring an ensemble cast including Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, and Hema Malini, Sholay (“Embers”) held the record for highest-grossing Hindi movie for 19 years. It places stylistic flourishes imported from international cinema within the Bollywood framework of exaggerated plot devices and high emotional stakes. By turns atmospheric and absurd and never less than evocative, Sholay is widely regarded as epochal.
Sholay began as a four-line concept by writers Salim-Javed, who pitched the premise of two lovable guns for hire to producer G.P. Sippy and his son Ramesh Sippy. The full screenplay contained plot devices and other elements inspired by Hollywood productions such as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); these were fired in the Bollywood crucible to create a “curry western.” Despite several derivative scenes, Sholay is greater than the sum of its parts. By fusing archetypal Indian themes with an existing cinematic stencil of visual references, Sholay reinvented Hindi filmmaking and is considered an evolutionary milestone in Bollywood.
Characters and plot summary
The main roles in the film include:
- Jai (Amitabh Bachchan): taciturn, brooding, sarcastic, and loyal; petty criminal who finds his conscience while hunting Gabbar Singh
- Veeru (Dharmendra): quick to laugh and love, devoted to Jai; petty criminal who finds love during the quest against Gabbar Singh
- Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan, in his debut): dacoit (a term for armed bandits used on the Indian subcontinent) leader of incredible brutality
- Thakur Baldev Singh (Sanjeev Kumar): former cop and landowner in the village of Ramgarh; lost his arms and most of his family to Gabbar
- Basanti (Hema Malini): talkative horse-and-cart driver; Veeru’s romantic interest
- Radha (Jaya Bachchan [credited as Bhaduri]): Thakur’s daughter-in-law, tormented by survivor’s guilt; Jai’s romantic interest
Other small but significant roles include members of Gabbar’s gang, among them Kaalia and Sambha, the imam of Ramgarh and his son Ahmed (who is murdered by the dacoits), Thakur’s retainer, or domestic worker, Ramlal, Jai and Veeru’s former prison warden, a timber merchant called Soorma Bhopali, and Basanti’s formidable aunt, whose permission Veeru needs to win his beloved’s hand.
Like many Bollywood releases, Sholay is lengthy, with a run time of more than three hours. In essence, it is an action-thriller punctuated with romantic, musical, and comic interludes. Its central plot follows Jai and Veeru, best friends and petty criminals who are hired by former police officer Thakur Baldev Singh to capture the dreaded dacoit Gabbar Singh, who is terrorizing Thakur’s village, Ramgarh. Thakur and Gabbar have a violent history. Thakur had once caught and jailed Gabbar, after which Gabbar broke out of prison and massacred Thakur’s family. The only survivors were those not present at the time of the attack: Thakur’s daughter-in-law, the faithful family retainer, and Thakur himself, whose arms were hacked off by Gabbar, as depicted in one of the film’s most searing scenes.
Along the way, Jai and Veeru fall in love—Jai with Thakur’s widowed daughter-in-law, Radha, and Veeru with Ramgarh’s feisty horse-and-cart driver, Basanti. After various aggressive encounters with Gabbar, Jai and Veeru ultimately prevail. In the climax fight scene, Jai sacrifices himself to save Veeru and Basanti, and Thakur kicks Gabbar almost to death before turning him over to the police.
Genre and themes
Sholay represents a watershed in Bollywood. Previous landmark films included social dramas, such as Pyaasa (1957; “Thirsty”), and tragic romances, such as Mughal-e-Azam (1960; “The Grand Mughal”). The nonconformist Sholay transcends genres: at once a dacoit drama, an action-thriller, a buddy film, a comedy, a romance, a tragedy, and a morality tale, Sholay is all things to all fans.
In the original ending of Sholay, Thakur Baldev Singh kills Gabbar Singh by kicking and trampling on him. India’s censor board objected to the glorification of vigilantism, and the scene was changed such that Thakur turns Gabbar in to the police instead of killing him.
Retribution eventually overtakes Gabbar, but Sholay is not merely a tale of the triumph of virtue over evil—instead, it boils over with subversive subtext. The deceptively simple theme of crime and punishment is complicated by the antiestablishment nature of the film’s extrajudicial mission and the figures who undertake it: Jai and Veeru are rebels who find a cause and a conscience, and the upright Thakur is an unconventional representation of dissent and disaffection. Romantic love, an important narrative strand, is presented in two conflicting ideals: a happy ending for the boisterous Veeru and bubbly Basanti and Jai’s doomed, mostly silent relationship with Radha.
A variety of subplots interface with the primary thread. Basanti revels in her unconventional profession (horse-pulled carts, a form of rural transportation, were mainly driven by men) and is presented as a feminist figure. Thakur persuades Radha’s father to approve of the socially progressive remarriage of his widowed daughter. Religious harmony is promoted through the interactions between the imam, his son, and the Hindu villagers.
Sholay’s depiction of villainy was nothing less than revolutionary when the film was released. The rustic Gabbar, a departure from the sophisticated reprobates in previous Hindi films, is brutal in the extreme, killing his own gang members with as much ruthlessness as he does Thakur’s grandson. Yet Sholay is not a gory film—its violence is stylized and in many instances implied rather than shown outright, such as the murder of the imam’s son, symbolized by Gabbar’s swatting a bug. The suggestion of ferocity transforms the dacoit into such a menacing a character that, as he boasts in the film, parents use the specter of Gabbar Singh to discipline errant children.
Release and reception
Sholay was released on a Friday, as most Indian films are; but this was no ordinary Friday—it was August 15, celebrated annually as the anniversary of India’s 1947 independence from British rule. Disappointingly, Sholay began not with a bang but a whimper. Business was so slow that an emergency meeting was convened over the first weekend to discuss if a reshoot was needed to have Bachchan’s character, Jai, survive. However, as Bachchan related in Angry Young Men (a docuseries on Salim-Javed; 2024), director Ramesh Sippy decided to wait till Monday:
So we waited and we didn’t go to reshoot that scene. And thank god, because after Monday it became history.
The first intimations of immortality arrived when the film’s sales team reported hearing Sholay’s dialogue on the streets of Mumbai. In the several years after its initial release, Sholay collected 30 crore rupees (more than $350 million in 2025 dollars), dethroning Mughal-e-Azam as Bollywood’s highest-earning film until it was in turn displaced by Salman Khan’s Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994; “Who Am I to You?”).
Legacy
Sholay won just a single Filmfare Award (for best editing); it was eclipsed by Deewaar, also written by Salim-Javed, who won for best story, screenplay, and dialogue.
Of Sholay’s many iconic characters, none is more ingrained in the collective Indian consciousness than Gabbar Singh. In Angry Young Men Javed Akhtar ascribed this to the viewer’s subconscious admiration for the dacoit’s “total freedom from morality.” Many of Gabbar’s lines are now embedded in the lexicon of Indian popular culture, including:
“Yeh haath humko de de, Thakur.” (“Give me these arms, Thakur.”)
“Kitney aadmi they?” (“How many men were there?”)
“Ab tera kya hoga, Kaalia?” (“What will happen to you now, Kaalia?”)
“Jo darr gaya, samjho mar gaya.” (“If you are scared, consider yourself dead.”)
“Holi kab hai? Kab hai Holi? Kab?” (“When is Holi? When?”)
Several scenes of comic relief also resonate, among them a scene in which an inebriated Veeru climbs the local water reservoir and threatens to jump if he is prevented from marrying Basanti. Sholay’s songs, in addition to effectively advancing the film’s narrative, became chartbusters—“Yeh Dosti” (“This Friendship”), which underscores Jai and Veeru riding a motorbike, celebrates their bond; a song set against the festival of Holi ends with Gabbar’s gang storming Ramgarh; in “Jab Tak Hain Jaan” (“As Long as I Live”), Basanti dances at Gabbar’s behest for the sake of a captive Veeru.
In the intervening decades since Sholay’s release, Bollywood filmmaking has progressed in both storytelling finesse and technical proficiency. Yet no other film has been able to similarly capture public imagination.
