Written by Salim-Javed: The Story of Hindi Cinema’s Greatest Screenwriters

by Diptakirti Chaudhuri

Yaadon Ki Baaraat’s Shaakaal is perceptive enough to recognize the faint sound of a passing train during a phone call from an adversary, and dispatch his henchmen to kill the man when he appears to make the next phone call.

  Chacha Bhatija’s Jeevan is the proverbial ‘asteen ka saanp’ who weaves an elaborate web of deceit to control his brother-in-law’s property. While this act is not new to Hindi cinema, the initial scenes have him fooling most of the audience as well.

  Don’s Amitabh Bachchan is a master of escapes, hoodwinking the police in style and identifying traitors in his own gang with ease—sharp, ruthless and a million times more glamorous than the hero. The other villain—kingpin Vardhan, impersonating an Interpol officer—is again a very cool customer who does not get flustered by the fact that Vijay knows his real identity. He plays a cat-and-mouse game with him, leading both the gangsters and the police down the garden path without compromising his cover.

  While it takes most of the other characters a lot of time to figure out that Mr India is visible in red light, Mogambo gets it in a flash. He sees Mr India at the edge of his steaming red cauldron of acid and immediately switches on all the red lights in his hideout.

  Even a minor character like Madho Singh (Shetty) in Trishul seems formidable because he isn’t merely a neighbourhood tough but someone who has managed to keep an industrialist like R.K. Gupta (Sanjeev Kumar) at bay for a very long time.

  Be it their less famous but very impactful villains or biggies like Gabbar Singh and Mogambo, Salim–Javed invested their baddies with a level of charisma and intelligence that was usually the exclusive preserve of heroes.

  The entire process of creating the villain—from finding a name like Gabbar (which was a real bandit’s name), to giving him a new vocabulary while writing the dialogues, to recommending a completely new actor to play the very unconventional part—was anchored by Salim–Javed. The result was such a magnetically evil character that Gabbar Singh (the character and not Amjad Khan the actor) became the face of Britannia Glucose D biscuits, a brand that was a favourite among children and families.

  This journey of creating a charismatic villain was a definite first in the history of Hindi cinema, and also the very first time audiences started rooting for the villain. This was something that took a while for people to get. Naseeruddin Shah—not a fan of Sholay at all—explains this wonderfully in his memoir when he talks about watching Sholay in its second week (in a half-empty theatre): ‘I saw with my own eyes the rejection by an audience of an effective actor in a movie because he was upstaging the ones they identified with. His later applause-inducing non sequiturs were that day being greeted with stony silence or hostile rejection by the majority of the Dharmendra/Bachchan fan club present. It took a week or two for the audiences to cotton on to the fact that, hey, they had been rooting for the wrong guys all along. Gabbar was their man.’

  In fact, this inability of audiences to process a larger-than-life villain had been a problem for the makers as well, because the Sippys had seriously considered dropping Amjad Khan halfway through the shooting. From being a towering figure in the script to the difficulties in filming to the initially muted audience reactions to becoming an icon, the reactions to Gabbar Singh were as complex as the character itself.

  Here was a role which all three male leads—Dharmendra, Sanjeev Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan—coveted when they first heard the script. Here was a character that took the longest to cast. Here was a newcomer who was almost dropped due to his inability to project menace in the initial days of shooting. Here was a character who was called ‘a short fat lout, is a far cry from the much-feared dacoit. The man cannot even run or fight and only keeps ordering or grimacing’, in one of the early reviews (in Star and Style magazine). And here was an icon who became so popular with kids and adults alike that advertising agencies made ads around him. And continue to do so.

  The process of creating Mogambo was as interesting.

  While the character was jointly conceived by Salim–Javed, they had split long before the film went into final stages of script development and Javed Akhtar wrote the final draft. The villain became a legendary character not through his actions but through words, just three of them—‘Mogambo khush hua’. Be it the power of the words or the charm of that gargantuan character, Amrish Puri just sank his teeth into the role. Shekhar Kapur says, ‘Each time he brought a new flavour, a new emotion, a different resonance in his voice. He became threatening and lovable at the same time. Each time bringing something out of the ordinary for those lines that have now gone down in history.’

  Javed Akhtar was right about Mogambo’s impact. Shekhar Kapur recalls watching a cricket match in Sharjah several years later when a six was hit and a huge banner proclaimed, ‘Mogambo khusha hua!’

  Gabbar Singh: A Villain, They Wrote

  ‘Gabbar Singh yeh keh kar gaya, jo dar gaya woh mar gaya . . .’

  Line from a song in the film 100 Days (1991)

  During a Twitter Q&A, film director Anurag Kashyap was asked who his favourite movie villain was, and he replied, ‘Gabbar Singh.’ When asked why, he said, ‘Because when I saw him the first time, I was only six years old.’ For him and many people who started watching movies in the 1970s, Gabbar Singh is their first abiding movie memory. He was indeed the scary figure who was invoked to get children to sleep.

  But is Gabbar Singh the most memorable character of Hindi cinema?

  Well, he is certainly the only villain—if not the only character—whose lines are repeated in daily conversations as well as popular culture even forty years after the film’s release. A survey done by the Economic Times in 2005 (just after the film’s thirtieth anniversary) suggested that there were fifty ads in circulation that were inspired by Sholay for top brands like Maggi, Britannia, Clinic Plus, Alpenliebe and Tetley. A large number of these ads depended on Gabbar Singh and his iconic ‘Kitnay aadmi thay?’liii

  Javed Akhtar says he and Salim were influenced, to a large extent, by Sergio Leone and his brand of Western movies. ‘There is some Mexican blood in Gabbar. He’s a bandit, not a daku (dacoit),’ he says. They gave a lot of thought to Gabbar’s persona.

  Because Amjad Khan was an absolute newcomer in films when he played Gabbar, he spent a lot of time on the sets observing the other actors, helping out as an assistant and talking to the writers about the script. Since Amjad was Salim–Javed’s recommendation, both parties felt a certain sense of responsibility towards each other and that led to more thought around the character and better preparation. The blackened teeth, unwashed look, stooping gait and even the unusual language formed a character that was quite unlike any Hindi film audiences had ever seen. No longer did the daku wear a turban and tilak, and pray to Maa Kali before embarking on his adventures. The honour code of the dacoits was thrown out of the window as well; Gabbar was completely okay with attacking his enemies’ families. In fact, that seemed like his strategy. He almost relished killing a small child, something that was out of bounds for even the most hard-core villains till then.

  This incarnation of evil was written as the antithesis of the moral Thakur—the two characters who formed the axis of the film.

  The character of Gabbar was conceived as inherently unpredictable. Just before shooting Kaalia, he feigns concern: ‘Ab tera kya hoga, Kaalia?’liv Immediately after the three dacoits think they have escaped death in his version of Russian Roulette, he explodes into a manic burst of laughter and then shoots them. He doesn’t merely tell us the bounty on his head but arrogantly asks a minion to do so.

  Even his language—his vocabulary—wasn’t regular Hindi. Javed Akhtar says, ‘He became alive . . . There are so many words in Gabbar’s vocabulary that I wasn’t even conscious of. I didn’t even know for sure if I could use those words . . . Gabbar had his own language.’

  For example, Gabbar—when describing his arrest—says, ‘Aur kacheri mein aisa taap mujhko, aisa taap mujhko.’lv Literally, ‘taap’ means fever and the way it is said, it is not eve
n a properly formed sentence but it communicated Gabbar’s unconventional anger remarkably well. Gabbar threatens to skin Basanti alive—‘khurach khurach ke’—a word that perfectly brings out Gabbar’s sadism.34

  The language gave an additional dimension to the scary, evil characterization of Gabbar. And if his lingo was unpredictable, his actions were even more so. Right from the manic laughter in his first scene (nearly a third of the way into the film) to his brutal murder of innocents, Gabbar is that rare villain who repulses you with his cruelty and yet holds your attention with his magnetism.

  Apart from the language, Gabbar’s backstory—never mentioned in the film—found some interesting expressions.

  To coincide with the release of Sholay in 3D (in January 2014), a graphic novel called Sholay: Gabbar was published, which traces the origins of Gabbar Singh. Author Saurav Mohapatra says, ‘Gabbar is a groundbreaking character in Hindi movies as he was the first “no explanations given, he’s just evil” character in our movies. When I was asked to write about his origin, it was tricky. I decided to stack the narrative evenly so that the reader has to make a choice towards whether or not to believe in the truth of his story. Everyone is a hero in their own eyes and why should Gabbar be different, I thought. I treated him similar to the Joker in the Dark Knight.’ Mohapatra’s story has a young Gabbar becoming bitter after his father dies from police atrocities and joining the army, which he deserts to become a dacoit. His gang of friends—Sambha et al—come together during childhood and they stick through many upheavals though there is no doubt about who the leader of the gang is.

  Director Soumik Sen independently wrote another origin story for Gabbar where the dacoit is born Gulab Singh and has frequent run-ins with the oppressive Thakur families before being disowned by his father and joining the Indian army.

  It is interesting that with the sketchy details provided in the film (e.g. Gabbar’s father’s name, the army fatigues he wore, the anger he has against the Thakurs), two independent writers came up with stories that were similar in many respects. The multiple viewings of Sholay ensured that these details were absorbed and their presence pointed towards a character that was bigger than the sum of its parts.

  The impact Gabbar Singh has had is immense and his charisma has not petered out over time. Much has been spoken about the famous Britannia Glucose D biscuit ad35 endorsed by Gabbar Singh (and not Amjad Khan) that came immediately after the film was released and continued to run for nearly a decade after.

  Early in 2015, Akshay Kumar starred in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s production of a Hindi remake of a Tamil film. The film is about a vigilante forming an anti-corruption force to weed out dishonesty in society. While the original was called Ramanna, Bhansali chose to name the Hindi film Gabbar in—increasing the curiosity value.

  Beyond the Hindi-speaking belt, Gabbar Singh has fans even in south India. Telugu superstar Pawan Kalyan acted in a remake of Dabangg, where he played the Robin Hood cop’s role who went by the name Gabbar Singh. The reason for the name was that the film’s hero—as a child—was impressed by the Sholay character. If you know the plot of Dabangg, you’ll realize there is no reason to take up this name except to pay homage.

  Gabbar Singh’s character was charismatic enough that a talented performer like Amjad Khan became one of the country’s top villains after just that one role and was hailed as an excellent actor. There are two strange epilogues to the Gabbar casting story.

  Satyajit Ray—a fan of Sholay—liked Amjad Khan so much that he offered him the role of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah in his first Hindi film, Shatranj Ke Khiladi. The film-maker said, ‘I took Amjad on the strength of his performance in Sholay. I hope you know that his characterization of Gabbar Singh did not go down well with the public for the first few weeks. It caught on later. But I thought if an actor could be so good and so rangy, why not cast him against the grain and see how it works.’ Gabbar went from playing a macho villain to an effeminate king who sang and danced. The role did not go down well with the cow-belt audience and there were reports of people storming out or ransacking theatres because their ‘Gabbar Singh’ was playing something so radically different. The critical acclaim the film received did not translate into commercial acceptance.

  Denied the opportunity of being Gabbar in Sholay, Amitabh Bachchan finally fulfilled his dream of playing the iconic villain later in his career when he was able to break free from the shackles of his heroic image. He brought a different kind of menace to Babban, who ran an underworld empire in 2000s Mumbai, but the film—Ram Gopal Verma Ki Aag—turned out to be one of the biggest disasters of Indian cinema, faring terribly with both critics and audiences.

  Like the film he appeared in, there is only one Gabbar Singh. Intimidating and inimitable.

  Violence of the Mind

  ‘The leading exponents of the current screen cult of bloody reprisals are scriptwriters Salim and Javed, whose none-too-original scenarios only succeed in stating the obvious: that the defence against violence must always be more violence . . . Sholay manages to raise screen violence to almost unimaginable heights’—From K.M. Amladi’s review of Sholay in Hindustan Times, titled ‘Uncensored Violence’

  ‘The film could have gone easy on the depiction of the violence. There is a pronounced sadistic touch to the last-reel encounter between Sanjeev Kumar and Amjad Khan’s villain, the episode having the sort of violence that borders on the sickening’—From Bikram Singh’s review of Sholay in Filmfare

  Sholay had violence well above what the average Hindi cinema audiences were used to in the 1970s. Starting from the train robbery right in the beginning to the gritty shoot-out in the climax, the film is full of violent scenes. But there is hardly any blood. Despite bullets flying thick and fast, bandits and bystanders being cut down every now and then, there is no sign of the diluted version of tomato ketchup that we have now got used to. The first signs of blood are introduced in the very last scenes when Thakur uses his nail-studded shoes to squash Gabbar’s hands to a pulp. A major reason for this was to keep the censor board at bay but, as it turned out, the impact was more devastating this way. Because the violence was psychological.

  Cutting off a proud man’s arms is such a distressing act of violence that one doesn’t have to show the severance in all its bloody, gory glory. The horror of a whole family being wiped out is again not linked to the extent of bloodshed. Especially when a child’s head is blown off from point-blank range. Even Ahmed’s death—a shocking end to a young man with potential—is not shown but symbolized through the killing of an ant.

  Each one of these scenes is unimaginably violent without focusing on the actual act of violence.

  In many ways, Sholay marked the pinnacle of the series of violent films that Salim–Javed were accused of writing. Sholay’s violence was a ‘choreographed ballet’ that was created with the help of mega-budgets and foreign technicians and equipment. However, Salim–Javed’s forte was not the elaborately mounted ‘fight scene’. In fact, the real speciality of this dynamic duo was conjuring the kind of violence that played on your mind rather than the sort that played out only in front of your eyes.

  Salim–Javed focused on creating a context that affected the audience’s psyche and made the actual fights seem far more impactful. The physical violence was accentuated by psychological violence, and this was often achieved long before any punches were actually thrown.

  Action was no longer a resolution mechanism, a punishment meted out to the villain at the climax. The fight now came right in the initial scenes and was often used to set up the hero’s character. And the hero did not fight with his fists alone; he brought his anger and his psychological scars into battle.

  In Deewaar, when Vijay Verma fights Peter’s goons in the famous scene at the dockyard warehouse, we can sense that his manic anger is not just against these goons (with whom he has no history). He is channelling his anger against the father who abandoned him, a society that thought nothing of punishing a little boy for his
father’s sins, and a system that is failing him and his brother. At the end of it, when his mother asks why he didn’t avoid the fight, Vijay’s angry retort is exactly what the audience has been thinking all this while. ‘Tum chaahti ho main bhi mooh chhupake bhaag jaata?’lvii Deewaar had just this one fight scene but the film always comes across as exceedingly violent because in the viewers’ minds, Vijay starts getting beaten up the day the disgruntled workers tattoo ‘Mera baap chor hai’ on his arm. It is only now that he is able to give it back and begin the process of finding some sort of closure.

  This was a common pattern in Salim–Javed’s scripts: the action scene would be announced much in advance and the tension kept simmering till it exploded into the actual fight.

  In Zanjeer, during Inspector Vijay Khanna and Sher Khan’s confrontation in the police station, the police officer—in an unprecedented move for a Hindi film hero—kicks the chair the crime boss is about to sit on. Their tussle begins right then with Sher Khan taunting Vijay that it is only because of the safety of the station and the security his uniform affords him that he can dare to do such a thing. Vijay picks up the gauntlet, walks into Sher Khan’s ‘ilaaka’ sans uniform and challenges him to a bout. The high-voltage fight scene actually takes up only a couple of minutes of screen time but it was written as a well-paced, crackling-dialogue-laced event that seems to last longer on-screen and even longer in our memories. It ends with Sher Khan acknowledging the new hero—‘Aaj zindagi mein pehli baar Sher Khan ki sher se takkar hui hai . . .’—and bringing the episode to a satisfying close.

  In Trishul, Amitabh Bachchan’s devil-may-care character acts in a similar fashion when trying to evict Madho Singh (Shetty) from the land that he has bought. The standard Hindi film action sequence—where the hero beats up and throws out the villain—is preceded by a sequence that builds the tension, with Vijay walking up to Madho Singh and asking him to leave. Then, of course, he returns with an ambulance to pack the beaten villains into. Again, the violence is made memorable by introducing dialogues and other elements that accentuate both the action and the character. In a way, the violence in Trishul is set up by the way Vijay is introduced in the first scene where he lights a dynamite fuse with his beedi and calmly walks away from the danger zone. You get an inkling of the impending violence from the manner in which he explains his fearlessness: ‘Jisne pachees baras apni maa ko har roz thoda thoda marte dekha ho, use maut se kya dar lagega?’lviii