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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.)

Kohima, WWII’s Overlooked Turning Point

Updated: Oct 21, 2024

The year 1944 marked a pivotal chapter in the Second World War. June 6 saw the Normandy landings, the audacious Allied invasion of mainland Europe. A day earlier, Rome had fallen to the Allies, becoming the first European capital to be liberated. By September, the Allies launched ‘Operation Market Garden’ - an ambitious and risky attempt to outflank German defenses by seizing key bridges in the Netherlands which ultimately became a heroic failure.

Today, as these events are commemorated on their 80th anniversaries, another titanic clash of the war, largely forgotten by history, took place in a remote corner of colonial India. The Battle of Kohima, fought between March and July 1944 between British Commonwealth forces and the Imperial Japanese Army, was just as brutal and consequential, yet it remains overshadowed by the European theatre.

Stalingrad may capture the popular imagination, but Kohima, fought on the Indo-Burma border, was no less significant. By halting the Japanese advance, it changed the trajectory of the war in Southeast Asia and set the stage for the British and Commonwealth forces to retake Burma. The Japanese dream of an imperial empire collapsed along the ‘Road of Bones.’ Until recently, the Battle of Kohima remained on the fringes of history, mostly preserved in the memoirs of servicemen like Arthur Swinson's ‘Kohima’ and John Henslow's ‘A Sapper in the Forgotten Army’. However, Field Marshal William Slim's ‘Defeat into Victory’ emerged as the definitive account. Recent works, notably Fergal Keane's ‘Road of Bones’, have helped bring this overlooked theatre into the spotlight.

But why does Kohima matter? In early 1944, Japan was on the back foot. In the Pacific, the Americans’ island-hopping campaign was drawing ever closer to Japan’s home islands, threatening strategic bombing raids on its cities. The Japanese high command, desperate to relieve this pressure, gambled on an offensive into India. A successful push into the Assam plains, they believed, might trigger the collapse of British colonial rule and open the door to a negotiated settlement with the Allies. Thus, the Japanese launched Operation U-Go, aiming to seize Imphal, Kohima, and Dimapur, critical logistical hubs on the route to Assam and Bengal.

Facing them was Slim, commander of the British 14th Army, who had been quietly rebuilding a demoralised force battered by defeat in Malaya and the humiliating fall of Singapore in 1942. The British and Indian armies had endured the longest retreat in Commonwealth history, following the Japanese invasion of Burma.

Kohima came under siege on April 4, 1944. For over two weeks, 15,000 crack Japanese troops surrounded the garrison, which was outnumbered and short on supplies. But Slim’s men, bolstered by one battalion of the 161 Indian Brigade and the 1st Assam Regiment, held firm. Vital supplies were airdropped, and the garrison endured, testing and proving the theory that troops could stand and fight while being resupplied from the air.

The battle’s significance cannot be overstated. The Japanese offensive was decisively crushed, securing Imphal, safeguarding Dimapur, and delivering a fatal blow to Japan’s war effort in Southeast Asia. For the Indian Army, Kohima was transformative. The battles at Kohima and Imphal helped forge a modern, mechanised force capable of waging an all-arms war. Many of the formations that fought there would later serve in post-independence India, notably the 161 Indian Brigade, which was rushed to defend Srinagar during the 1947-48 Kashmir conflict. Kohima deserves far greater recognition.

(The writer is a advocate at the Punjab and Haryana HC and a military history enthusiast)

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