Dissanayeke and Sahai note that , although the film borrowed heavily from the Hollywood Western genre , particularly in its visuals , it was successfully " Indianised " . As an example , William van der Heide have compared a massacre scene in Sholay with a similar scene in Once Upon a Time in the West . Although both films was similar in technical style , Sholay emphasised Indian family values and melodramatic tradition , while the Western was more materialistic and restrained in its approach . Maithili Rao , in Encyclopedia of Hindi Cinema , note that Sholay infuse the style of the Western genre into a " feudalistic ethos " . Ted Shen of the Chicago Reader note Sholay 's " hysterical visual style " and intermittent " populist message " . Cultural critic and Islamist scholar Ziauddin Sardar lampoon the film in his book The Secret Politics of Our Desires : Innocence , Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema , both for its caricature and stereotyping of Muslim and women characters , and for what he call mockery of innocent villagers . Sardar note that the two most prominent Muslim characters in the film are Soorma Bhopali ( a buffoonish criminal ) , and an impotent victim of the bandits ( the imam ) . Meanwhile , the sole function of one female character ( Radha ) is to suffer her fate in silence , while the other female lead ( Basanti ) is just a garrulous village belle .