गब्बर से कह देना कि रामगढ़वालों ने पागल कुत्तों के सामने रोटी डालना बंद कर दिया है...

Gabbar se keh dena ki Ramgadh-vaalon ne paagal kutton ke saamne roti daalna band kar diya hai...


Tell Gabbar that the people of Ramgadh have stopped throwing scraps to mad dogs...


These were the loaded words of Thakur Baldev Singh in the cult classic Sholay ("Flames"; 1975).  He is a former cop and landowner [thakur/zamindar] of the village of Ramgadh, which is currently being raided and terrorized by the psychopathic bandit [daku] Gabbar Singh.  The same bandit who had years ago gunned down the Thakur's entire family and also hacked off his arms.  This irreconcilable enmity between the noble landlord and the evil bandit, and the triumph of the former over the latter is one of the core relationships in this film. The relationship between landlords and bandits in general is also a cornerstone of many classic films and these characters have also led storied lives throughout the history of Indian cinema. 
The film Sholay, made in the style of a Spaghetti  Western, is of course the gold standard when it comes to movies about landlords and bandits and has given us some of the most memorable characters and much-quoted lines from Bollywood.  But it's interesting to note that it's one of the only movies I can think of where the bandit is unabashedly and irredeemably evil.  Gabbar Singh is a maniacal, capricious villain who has no back-story of childhood oppression to justify his current state of affairs.   In this famous scene from the film, for instance, Gabbar plays a game of Russian Roulette with three of his minions who have failed to carry his orders through. He's a mad meanie, and that's about it. It's also one of the few movies that has a good landlord. Indian movie-goers prefer their zamindars and thakurs nasty and hard-boiled.
 One of the oldest movies to feature a bandit as a lead character is Hunterwali ("The Lady with the Whip"; 1935) where Australian-born Mary Evans (better known as Fearless Nadia) plays a dethroned Princess Madhuri who moonlights as a hot-pants-wearing, whip-wielding masked bandit. Alas, it's really hard to find these really old prints, but the DVD stores in Old Delhi are a good place to look.  Mother India (1957) is another movie with a bandit that comes to mind. This Oscar-nominated film  features Birju (played by Sunil Dutt) as a young man, embittered by the exploitation meted out to his community of landless farmers by the wily village moneylender.  He eventually takes to banditry, which leads to the classic climax of this much-lauded film. Take this poignant scene, for instance, where Birju confronts the exploitative moneylender, refusing to pay the exorbitant interest of 3/4 of their harvest.  The moneylender hands Birju the village accounts as proof of his supposed debt, but neither Birju nor anyone else in the village is literate. They can make little sense of these accounts, let alone establishing their solvency.  Mother India is also one of those films where both bandit and landed gentry are vile, with innocent rural folk caught in the fray.
Many bandit movies were made in the late 1970s and through the 1980s.  While some were set in the scrubby badlands of central India, many of these bandits and landlords were transplanted to urban settings with the advent of gangster movies. Here o mafia dons, good cops and bad cops, wielding automatic weapons and cigars replaced the horse-riding highwaymen and imperious landlords. Deewar ("The Wall"; 1975) and Nastik ("Athiest", 1983) are two older gangster films that come to mind. After almost a decade of feel-good movies in the 1990s, Satya ("The Truth"; 1998) brought the gangster flick back with a stark and blood-curdling bang. Company (2002) is another masterful film of this genre, as is Maqbool (2003), which is based on McBeth.  One movie that stands out in its portrayal of a bandit is Bandit Queen (1994), which recounts in chilling detail the true story of the village woman turned Daku, Phoolan Devi. 

Bollywood cinema is full of the other classic character: the evil landlord.  These curly-mustachioed, rifle-wielding men show up in betel juice-stained muslin tunics or in riding breeches with knee-high leather boots.  They are cruel men, hungry for power and money, who economically exploit the farmers who labour on their lands and sexually exploit village women with impunity. Madhumati (1958) has a meanie (played by the Bollywood super-villain, Pran) who fits this description to a T, and Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam ("Master, Mistress and Servant"; 1962) features a drunk thakur often found at high-end brothels.  The 1974 film Ankur ("The Seedling") and the 1985 film Mirch Masala ("Chili and Spice") give us a land-owner and a tax-collector, and focus on the sexual "perks" these landed folk took for granted. The more recent, Oscar-nominated Lagaan ("Land-Tax"; 2001) pits the capricious and cruel Captain Russel, a cog in the wheels of British Empire, against the resilient and ingenious village-folk under his jurisdiction.  Both movies are brilliant, though quite different in their production and scale. 
All in all, Bollywood owes a deep debt to banditry and the landed gentry. And while Bollywood doesn't come out with as many of these movies as they used to, the genre thrives in Bhojpuri Cinema. 


Tadka Dal
Exploitation of rural folk turns them into bandits; landlords are nasty or noble just because.  But beware the recreational bandit...he ain't got no moral core to appeal to. 


Source
Much of the lore surrounding bandits and landlords has its roots in the era of the British Raj in India.  Many groups of rural folk were dubbed "criminal castes" and "criminal tribes", and were thought by the British to be endemically criminal, prone to violence and thuggery.  This era also saw highwaymen gaining an edge thanks to English-made rifles and easy access booty in the form of goods and passenger trains.  These folks gave many common words to the English language. 'Thug', 'loot', and 'dacoit' are just a few of these. 
The British also instituted the supremely exploitative zamindari system in India. Under this land-tenure system British-appointed landlords collected debilitating rents from their farmers on behalf of the British, but bore none of the traditional responsibilities that used to previously go with their status (like rent forgiveness and food-aid during droughts).  Added to this was the British policy of replacing food crops, which could sustain farmers, with cash-crops like indigo and cotton that left farmers with nothing if the crop failed. 


Thanks to Laura Wagner for suggesting this topic.