by: Roshmila Bhattacharya

August 15, 1975. It was red-letter day for Hindi Cinema because it was on this day 25 years ago that Ramesh Sippy's curry western, Sholay, exploded on screen. And made Gabbar Singh a household name.

Gabbar's menacing "Kitne aadmi the, Sambha?" followed by his manic laughter, made audio history with record-breaking record and cassette sales. The gun-toting Bihari babu became a role model for youngsters all over the country who only two years ago were getting all moony-eyed as they tried to imagine themselves in a bandh kamra with their own Bobby. Gabbar with his potent combination of menace and mischief brought violence back on the Hindi film screen and surprised even his creator, Ramesh Sippy, by becoming the kind of phenomenon Sippy had never visualized even in his wildest dreams.

Interestingly, Amjad Khan was not the first choice for the role that today has become synonymous with his name. According to Javed Akhtar who penned the script along with his co-writer Salim Khan, Amitabh Bachchan who eventually played Jai, had been pretty keen to play Gabbar. Even Sanjeev Kumar who made a memorable Thakur, had tried to convince Sippy that he would be convincing as the bad man.

But Sippy had his own ideas about what he wanted from these two star actors and opted for Danny Denzongpa to bring Gabbar to life. However, by the time Sholay went to Ramgarh or Ramanagaram, a small village on the outskirts of Bangalore, Danny had got busy with Feroz Khan's Dharmatma. It was Salim-Javed who recommended Amjad Khan whom they'd seen on stage at the Youth Festival in Delhi. As soon as his script-writers told him about this talented son of the veteran actor Jayant, Sippy recalled seeing him in an English play himself. It was a play about South African blacks and Amjad had played a coloured man to perfection. Amjad was called to the office the next day. As soon as Amjad walked into the room Sippy knew he had found his Gabbar Singh. And when the Pathan returned about five days later, dressed in khaki army fatigues and military boots, sporting a rough stubble, a bullet strip dangling from his shoulders and his teeth blackened so they looked stained with tobacco, Sippy knew that his first, instinctive reaction had been right. "Amjad looked so rugged and so different from any of the villains we'd encountered on screen before," he remembers.

However, after the first schedule when the unit returned to Mumbai, Amjad was almost dropped. Many unit members were disappointed with his performance. His voice, they cribbed, wasn't quite right. "Drop him if you don't like him," Salim and Javed told Sippy. Fortunately for Amjad Sippy decided to continue with him. And the rest, as they say, is history... boxoffice

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