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By:

Rajeev Puri

24 October 2024 at 5:11:37 am

Before Sholay, there was Mera Gaon Mera Desh

When the comedian and television host Kapil Sharma recently welcomed the veteran screenwriter Salim Khan onto his show, he made a striking claim. India, he joked, has a national bird and a national animal; it ought also to have a national film. That film, he suggested, would surely be Sholay. Few would quarrel with the sentiment. Released in 1975 and directed by Ramesh Sippy,  Sholay  has long been treated as the Everest of Hindi popular cinema -quoted endlessly, revisited by generations and...

Before Sholay, there was Mera Gaon Mera Desh

When the comedian and television host Kapil Sharma recently welcomed the veteran screenwriter Salim Khan onto his show, he made a striking claim. India, he joked, has a national bird and a national animal; it ought also to have a national film. That film, he suggested, would surely be Sholay. Few would quarrel with the sentiment. Released in 1975 and directed by Ramesh Sippy,  Sholay  has long been treated as the Everest of Hindi popular cinema -quoted endlessly, revisited by generations and dissected by critics. In 2025, the film marked its 50th anniversary, and the release of a digitally restored, uncut version introduced the classic to a new generation of viewers who discovered that its mixture of revenge drama, western pastiche and buddy comedy remains curiously durable. The film’s influences have been debated almost as much as its dialogues – from scenes taken by the Spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, particularly ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968) or to the narrative architecture of ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954) by Akira Kurosawa. Others note echoes of earlier Hindi films about bandits and frontier justice, such as ‘Khotey Sikke’ (1973) starring Feroz Khan. Yet, rewatching ‘Mera Gaon Mera Desh,’ directed by Raj Khosla, one cannot help noticing how many of the narrative bones of  Sholay  appear to have been assembled there first. Released in 1971,  Mera Gaon Mera Desh  was a major hit at the box office, notable for holding its own in a year dominated by the near-hysterical popularity of Rajesh Khanna. The thematic framework of the two films is strikingly similar. In  Sholay , the retired policeman Thakur Baldev Singh recruits two petty criminals - Jai and Veeru - to help him avenge the terror inflicted upon his village by the bandit Gabbar Singh. In  Mera Gaon Mera Desh , the set-up is not very different. A retired soldier, Jaswant Singh, seeks to protect his village from a ruthless dacoit and enlists the help of a small-time crook named Ajit. Even the villain’s name seems to echo across the two films. In Khosla’s drama, the marauding bandit played by Vinod Khanna is scene-stealing performance is called Jabbar Singh. In  Sholay , the outlaw who would become one of Indian cinema’s most memorable antagonists was Gabbar Singh. There is an additional irony in the casting. In  Mera Gaon Mera Desh , the retired soldier Jaswant Singh is played by Jayant - the real-life father of Amjad Khan, who would later immortalise Gabbar Singh in  Sholay . The connective tissue between the two films becomes even clearer in the presence of Dharmendra. In Khosla’s film he plays Ajit, a charming rogue who gradually redeems himself while defending the village. Four years later, Dharmendra returned in  Sholay  as Veeru, a similarly exuberant petty criminal whose courage and irrepressible humour make him one half of Hindi cinema’s most beloved buddy duo alongside Amitabh Bachchan as Jai. Certain visual motifs also appear to have travelled intact. In Khosla’s film, Ajit finds himself bound in ropes in the bandit’s den during a dramatic musical sequence. A similar image appears in  Sholay , where Veeru is tied up before Gabbar Singh while Basanti performs the now famous song ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan.’ Other echoes are subtler but just as suggestive. Ajit’s pursuit of the village belle Anju, played by Asha Parekh, anticipates Veeru’s boisterous attempts to woo Basanti, portrayed by Hema Malini. Scenes in which Ajit teaches Anju to shoot recall the flirtatious gun-training sequence between Veeru and Basanti that became one of  Sholay ’s most cherished moments. Even the famous coin motif has a precedent. Ajit frequently tosses a coin to make decisions - a flourish that would later appear in  Sholay , where Jai’s coin toss becomes a running gag. Perhaps most intriguingly, the endings of the two films converge in their original form. In  Mera Gaon Mera Desh , the villain is ultimately killed by the hero. The uncut version of  Sholay  reportedly ended in a similar fashion, with Gabbar Singh meeting his death at the hands of Thakur Baldev Singh. However, censors altered the climax before the film’s 1975 release, requiring that Gabbar be handed over to the police instead. All this does not diminish  Sholay . Rather, it highlights the alchemy through which cinema evolves. The scriptwriting duo Salim–Javed took familiar ingredients and expanded them into a grander narrative populated by unforgettable characters and stylised action. On the 55 th  anniversary of  Mera Gaon Mera Desh , Raj Khosla’s rugged western deserves a renewed glance as the sturdy foundation on which a legend called  Sholay  was built. (The author is a political commentator and a global affairs observer. Views personal.)

A Paradox of Peace: When Writers Demand Arms, Not Appeasement

Updated: Oct 30, 2024

Soviet
Anne

In her acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, historian and journalist Anne Applebaum—a figure long revered for her critical and haunting works on Soviet atrocities—did something unexpected. While honoured for her dedication to truth and peace, she called for weapons, not words, in defence of Ukraine. This apparent contradiction is not new for Applebaum, who, throughout her work, has unearthed the horrors of authoritarian regimes and the ways in which societies allow themselves to be subjugated, inch by inch, word by word, until resistance seems impossible.


Applebaum’s career is a testament to the cost of capitulation. ‘Gulag’, her harrowing account of the Soviet Union’s network of labour camps, stands as one of the most definitive modern works on the topic, as chilling as it is necessary. Through exhaustively documented testimonies, the book recounts the fate of millions whose lives were consumed by a system built on repression. In her ‘Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956,’ Applebaum traces how Eastern European states became pawns in Stalin’s machinations, each effort to resist crushed under a seemingly relentless ideological machine. Perhaps her most sobering work is ‘Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, which chronicles the engineered famine that starved millions in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933—a human-made catastrophe designed to break Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule. Through these narratives, Applebaum continually reminds readers of the danger posed by unchecked authoritarianism - and, crucially, by the silence of those who might oppose it.


Viewed in this light, her speech should come as no surprise. Her words echo those of writers and thinkers in previous moments of historical peril—those who, in the face of burgeoning oppression, have warned that moral neutrality, if not outright cowardice, can be as complicit as collaboration. Perhaps one of the most famous cases comes from Winston Churchill, a writer himself before he became a wartime leader. In the 1930s, his unheeded calls for Britain to prepare for conflict with Hitler were dismissed as warmongering, an overreaction from a man bitter over his political isolation. Yet Churchill, as he later argued in ‘The Gathering Storm, recognized the peril in appeasement and the disastrous cost of a delayed response. Had Britain heeded his calls, perhaps the Second World War might have taken a different shape.


Other writers have faced similar censure for their seeming bellicosity, such as George Orwell. His essays on totalitarianism in Spain and ‘Homage to Catalonia’ illuminate how the West’s unwillingness to confront fascism and communism head-on led to tragic outcomes for countless innocents. Orwell knew well the consequences of naïve idealism and the tendency to whitewash evil in the name of political expediency. His firsthand experiences with Spanish anarchists, betrayed by Stalin’s operatives, taught him that unwillingness to oppose aggressive powers leaves the path wide open for atrocities. Orwell’s legacy of confronting unpleasant truths, however divisive, mirrors Applebaum’s dedication to unearthing the darkness embedded within totalitarian histories.


Then, there is the instance of Federico Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda - poets who wrote passionately about the injustices of fascism, with Lorca losing his life (being murdered) in the Spanish Civil War and Neruda narrowly escaping death during Chile’s dictatorship. Through their poetry, they portrayed the horror and urgency of resisting authoritarianism, appealing to the power of words and art to incite change before a society becomes irredeemably oppressed.


Who can forget Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote most illuminatingly about Soviet repression in his monumental works, especially the classic The Gulag Archipelago. Having endured the camps himself, Solzhenitsyn warned against the normalization of oppression and was expelled from the USSR. His writings were intended as a stark reminder of the personal and societal cost of allowing tyranny to flourish, even tacitly. Solzhenitsyn’s stance was clear: those who desire peace must first confront the structures that make oppression possible.


During the Nazi occupation of France, Camus used his role as the editor of the underground newspaper Combat to argue against collaborating with the regime. Later, in The Plague, he explored the futility of accepting oppression, using the fictional town’s struggle against a spreading epidemic as an allegory for resistance against totalitarianism. Camus insisted that ignoring oppression, even out of a desire for peace, allows evil to grow.


Applebaum’s recent call for arms rather than appeasement is both timely and deeply rooted in her life’s work. She is among a tradition of writers who, having studied the cost of silence, warn against a pacifism that veils complicity. In her view, the issue is not merely Ukraine’s sovereignty; it is the question of whether democratic nations will stand by as a predatory power seeks to erase another nation. Her works - particularly those on Eastern Europe’s traumas - are cautionary tales of what happens when the world averts its gaze.


For peace is rarely kept by appeasing a hungry power; it is, often, a fight wrested from the jaws of tyranny.

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