Nearly half a century after its release, Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 blockbuster Sholay’s imagery still ignites bidders’ imaginations. At the recently held aABC Auction by deRivaz & Ives, an original poster and song-synopsis booklet of Sholay soared to ₹1.61 lakh garnering the maximum 24 bids for any sold Lot, while a rare six-sheet poster followed at ₹74,750 – both posters designed by C Mohan.
Proof that Gabbar, Jai, and Veeru live on not just in memory, but on the collectors’ walls. Together, these sales confirmed what cinephiles always knew: Sholay is not just a film, it is India’s eternal pop-cultural heartbeat.
“The growth of the Cinema Publicity and Memorabilia market in India depends on the increasing engagement of the film fraternity with its history and artistic significance,” SMM Ausaja, Senior Vice-President, Cinema Publicity Material & Memorabilia Dept., deRivaz & Ives, told LnC. “This is still taking time despite Osian’s kick-starting and building the process way back from 2002-3. It is an attitude of material respect; Hollywood has it for its history, we do not so far, but it will happen.”
It was a night where brushstrokes met film reels, where fine art stood shoulder to shoulder with popular culture’s most iconic images. The aABC Auction by deRivaz & Ives closed with an impressive ₹3.31 crore ($384,855 / £285,325) in sales, with 67% of the 148 lots on offer finding buyers. Nostalgia, heritage, and the rare thrill of holding history in one’s hands propelled the enthusiastic response.
The evening’s crown jewel was Ganesh Pyne’s haunting “Portrait of Rabindranath Tagore”. Hammering down at ₹55.2 lakh, it was more than a sale. It was the poet’s visage carried into new custodianship through Pyne’s meditative strokes. Pyne was joined on the leaderboard by M.F. Husain at ₹29.9 lakh and F.N. Souza’s Untitled Landscape at ₹25.3 lakh, both underscoring how India’s modern masters continue to command reverence.
Fine Arts and Rare Books dominated the financial values but the collectible interest and excitement for the new growing middle classes lay in the infant sections of popular culture and cinema publicity material.
The rare antiquarian and controversial autobiographical book on Robert Clive of Plassey sold for ₹4.37 lakh, alongside fine art books on Rabindranath Tagore, F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain, and Nicholas Roerich, which also performed very strongly. These results revealed that knowledge remains the foundational root, still respected and sought after as India’s cultural industry grows.
Clockwise: Meena Kumari, Nirupa Roy, Shyama and Suraiya
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