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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.)

Once Upon a Time in Mumbai

William Henry Sleeman (1788-1856) was the greatest crime buster in Indian history who ended the “Thugh” menace by 1848. He did not do this through modern police ‘encounters.’ As I show in my book ‘Keeping India Safe’ (2017,) Sleeman achieved his goals through legal means, by a pan-India crime investigation and court trials.


Between 1826 and 1848 Sleeman prosecuted 4,500 thugs of whom 504 were given death sentences. More than 3000 were given life term. Most of them were sent to the penal colonies in Malaya. Only 250 were acquitted.


The Guinness Book of Records once claimed thugs were responsible for 2 million deaths between 1550 and 1840; the historian Mike Dash, in his 2004 book Thug, suggests a figure closer to 50,000–100,000. Either way, Sleeman’s campaign ranks among the greatest policing feats in history.


The pity is that Sleeman’s works, and his method of investigation are not taught in Indian police schools. Yet his methods are little studied in Indian police academies, perhaps because he never wrote a systematic manual, his insights scattered across memoirs like the two-volume ‘Rambles and Reflections of an Indian Official’ (1844).


Likewise, I am not aware whether any Maharashtra police official had written authoritative accounts about those dark days, when Mumbai was reeling under underworld terror by way of kidnapping, extortion, killings and gang warfare.


That gap is now filled by ‘The Brahmastra Unleashed,’ a new book by senior police officer D. Sivanandhan, one of the architects of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), unveiled in 1999.


Like Sleeman, the then Mumbai police Commissioner R.H. Mendonca and his chief strategist Sivanandhan, who was then Joint Commissioner (Crime) conceived the idea of creating a ‘Brahmastra’ in form of a new law called ‘Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act’ (MCOCA) for their offensive against the Mumbai underworld rather than resorting to the highly controversial ‘encounters.’


In this process they were helped by Chief Minister Manohar Joshi, Deputy CM Gopinath Munde, Additional Chief Secretary Karun Shrivastava, Law Secretary Ms. Pratima Umarji and the late S.S. Puri, Additional Director General of Police. The author says: “The basic essence of the law was that it would be very difficult for the police to book a person under MCOCA, but once booked, it would be extremely difficult for the person to come out of it.”


The backdrop was grim. In October 1998 a spree of killings claimed 12 businessmen in 15 days. This trend started when Bharat Shah, owner of ‘Roopam’ in Crawford Market sited near the office of the Police Commissioner was shot dead in broad daylight. This was followed by the killings of two brothers running a café in Bhandup on 13 October and another three businessmen on October 18.


This triggered panic among Mumbai’s traders, who, in a meeting which included Joshi, Munde, Mumbai Police Commissioner R.H. Mendonca and the author threatened to abandon the city unless order was restored. Sivanandhan recalls the moment vividly: “Little did anyone know that this peculiar gathering…would permanently alter the history of Mumbai city… I realised that the special task the government had chosen me for was to end the menace of the Mumbai underworld and free the city and its people from the clutches of crime and terror.”


What follows in the book is a vivid account of how organised crime was then committed in the city by cartels and how it resembled a ‘corporate-like’ structure under a project manager who juxtaposed advance intelligence on special projects (killings) with methodical plans on recruitment, training, funding and procurement of weaponry. Allied matters like getaways, medical treatment of the injured and legal aid to those arrested were also planned.


The author’s account of the various gangs that operated in Mumbai reads like the best-sellers on Chicago gangsters, Al Capone and John Dillinger. He gives statistical details of the police work during this period which will be of great use to researchers. There is also a separate chapter on the provisions of the new law while another one analyses how MCOCA was successfully applied in specific cases.


By the early 2000s, shootouts had become negligible. To quote the author: “The fact that there were negligible shootouts from 2003 till date reveals a clear picture of how the Mumbai Police’s MCOCA-its Brahmastra -wiped out the entire underworld in one clean sweep.”

(The reviewer is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat. His latest book is ‘India and China at odds in the Asian Century.’)

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