Alvida, Veeru

 IT’S HARD TO realise that Dharmendra has gone. For almost seven decades he has been a keystone in the Hindi film industry, with more hits than any other artiste, a major hero from the black-and-white Bandini (1963), directed by Bimal Roy, in the days when Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand and Dilip Kumar were the leading men, then alongside Amitabh Bachchan and others, right up to the present, and beyond with his last film, due to release when he would have been 90. His heroines were Nutan, Meena Kumari, Saira Banu and Hema Malini, his last great romantic role was in Karan Johar’s Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani (2023).

Although Dharmendra was always a loved and respected figure—Paaji, a romantic hero, Garam Dharam— his long career on screen had two major phases. First as a middle-class, morally upright hero and/or a romantic lead then later as an action hero in B-movies. The watershed between these two phases was one of the greatest Hindi movies of all time, now 50 years old, Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay (1975).

There has been so much said about Sholay, a film we have all watched multiple times, that it is hard to say something new. Perhaps it is better to say that the film was a landmark, not just in terms of its massive success but for blending the ma­sala to give a new flavour to Hindi movies. The movies which followed brought in a new kind of hero, ‘the Angry Young Man’, played most successfully by Amitabh, while the roman­tic hero, typified by Rishi Kapoor, was young and urban upper-middle class, whose goal was love rather than social justice.

Sholay didn’t quite fit the genres of Hindi cinema. It was a dacoit film but different in not being set in the Chambal area. Instead, it was a desolate, lunar-like landscape dwarfed by massive rocks (shot near Bengaluru, but seemingly remote). The dacoit had no desire to reform and hadn’t taken to crime because he was outlawed or wronged but simply because he was evil. There were clear elements drawn from the ‘spa­ghetti western’, notably that of Sergio Leone, but it referenced other major Hollywood films such as The Magnificent Seven (dir. John Sturges, 1960).

The film was a multi-starrer, having multiple heroes (Dharmendra and Amitabh), heroines (Hema Malini and Jaya Bachchan), who were already established as star couples. The heroes were not heroic but petty criminals willing to un­dertake any work for money, although they become heroic by the end. Yet Sholay was not really about these stars but about the fight between good and evil, embodied by the Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar) and Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan). Gabbar is the villain to end all villains and the film is about him and Thakur, a clash of family and the state versus evil, a parallel society.

The film has very little romance. The romance between Jai (Amitabh) and the widowed Radha (Jaya) is in only a couple of scenes and is carried out through looks and background mu­sic, the most memorable scene being when she extinguishes the lamps as he plays the harmonica. Yet Jai is articulate when he wants to be and has many quotable lines, notably in the classic comedy scene when he takes Veeru’s (Dharmendra) marriage proposal to Basanti’s (Hema) aunt.

By contrast, Basanti over-articulates everything, being a real chatterbox. Veeru is also verbally expressive, with many one-liners as well as a long speech in the tanki scene where he threatens to kill himself if he can’t marry Basanti: “Yeh mat pu­chho chaacha, tumhaare aasoo nikalaayenge. Yeh badi dukh bhari kahani hai. Is story men emotion hai, drama hai, tragedy hai. Yeh Basanti hainaa is se mera lagan hone waala tha, chaacha. Lekin iski buddhi mausi ne beech me bhaanji maar di. Ab main is duniya me nahin rah sakta. Gaonwaalo tum ko mera aakhari salaam, good bye. (Don’t ask uncle—it will bring tears to your eyes. It’s a sad story. It has emotion, drama, and tragedy. This Basanti, you know… I was about to get engaged to her. But her aunt ruined every­thing. Now I can’t live in this world anymore. People of the village, my final salute to you… goodbye.)”

This is one of the most un­usual features of Sholay, namely the primacy of words in the film. Gabbar’s speeches are endlessly quoted even today, his “Kitne admi the? (How many men were there?) ” and others being the most memorable.

The songs in the film are some of RD Burman’s finest. There is one item song with Helen dancing in the villains’ lair: ‘Mehbooba’, a dance song taken from Demis Roussos’ ‘Say You Love Me’, which is turn was taken from the Cypriot Greek song by Michalis Violaris, ‘To Rialia’ (The money).

Nearly all the other songs concern Veeru and Basanti, and can be seen as love songs, though they have particular referenc­es. ‘Holi Ke Din’ is about festivities and happiness; and Veeru tries to soothe an angry Basant with ‘Koi Haseena’. Basanti has one song on her own, ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan’, when Gabbar says he won’t kill Veeru as long as she dances.

However, Sholay’s most famous song is ‘Yeh Dosti’, a song of friendship between Jai and Veeru. Its two versions—a hap­py one at the beginning of the film and a sad one at the end— frame the story as the friendship of the two heroes rather than the fight between good and evil. The two denim-clad urbane petty crooks on the make begin riding the now iconic motorbike with sidecar, singing that they are friends for life. (I still find it striking that Kishore Kumar sings play­back for Veeru while Manna Dey sings for Jai though the latter voices don’t match.)

Although the songs have remained very popular, when the movie released, the dialogues—by Salim-Javed—seemed to have more impact on the audiences, and possibly still do. It seems in Sholay that the dialogues do the work that songs usually do in a Hindi film. They are compressed moments condensing character and emotion in the way that is more usually done by songs. The only other films that does this is Yash Chopra’s Deewaar, released the same year with dialogues also by Salim-Javed, which found songs redundant, their work done by the dialogue, and finally had only one and a half songs.

Sholay was one of the Salim-Javed films that established Amitabh, and he’s often seen now as the biggest star in the movie. He had a smaller role, shown by his lack of songs, but he was the new stylish cool—the master of restraint and silence.

At the time it was Dharmendra, billed first in the movie credits, who had a more conventional romantic lead role, not dissimilar from his earlier films. Although he was very much in shape (just as well, as he was acting in very revealing costumes in Manmohan Desai’s Dharam Veer, 1977), he had been a leading star for over a decade and was now in his 40s. But it was more important that people often felt that Veeru was Dharmendra, rather than the other way round, that is that the character was entertaining and popular but not new.

Dharmendra wasn’t taken se­riously, even in his earlier days. His charm meant he was seen to be playing himself, rather than acting and having considerable talent. He was seen as too hand­some, being the most classically good looking man in the history of Hindi cinema. It’s often as­sumed that beautiful people don’t have brains, and this was amplified by the stereotypical views of a Punjabi accent and of the Jat heritage of which he was proud. Like most preju­dices, they are wrong. Dharmendra was one of the best ac­tors of his generation, his talent clearly evident in his work with Bimal Roy and then Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Although Dharmendra was not one of the Western Punjab Khatris, like them he was formal and polite, at least at the right time of day. I only met him twice and was inevitably charmed. I have also met his sons who are impeccably mannered, humble and well-spoken and a credit to their families.

Dharmendra has left an indelible mark on Hindi cinema over his long career. I’m not alone when I say he will be much missed.