Amjad khan

When Amjad Khan was offered the role of Gabbar Singh in the film Sholay, he appeared calm on the surface, but inside he was gripped by fear. He knew this was not an ordinary villain’s role—it was a character that could either make a person immortal forever or destroy them completely. He could not sleep all night, pacing his room, repeatedly asking himself what would happen if he failed, how people would look at him.
The next day, he made a firm decision: he would not merely play Gabbar—he would become him. He read the Bengali novel “Abhishapto,” which explores the psychology of a cruel bandit. Then he began spending hours sitting alone in a deserted graveyard near Mumbai—immersed in silence and darkness, talking to himself, imagining how Gabbar would laugh, how he would look, how he would speak.
Standing in front of the mirror, he practiced making his laughter terrifying, roughening his voice, and filling his eyes with savagery.
On the first day of shooting, when he arrived on set dressed as Gabbar, an eerie silence fell over the unit. There was a strange intensity in his eyes—something not found in ordinary people. When he delivered his very first line, “Kitne aadmi the?” (“How many men were there?”), time itself seemed to freeze for a moment.
Dharmendra later said that it was no longer Amjad Khan standing there—it was truly Gabbar.
That role took him to the heights of fame, but fate demanded its price. During the same film, he suffered a serious accident, had to have his spleen removed, and his body remained weak for the rest of his life. The very character that made him immortal also broke him from within.
On 27 July 1992, at the age of just 51, Amjad Khan left this world—but Gabbar lived on. Even today, whenever someone says “Kitne aadmi the?”, a single face appears in millions of minds: Amjad Khan—a man who departed, yet remains forever alive as fear, as a voice, and as a memory.