Amar Singh Chamkila, the biographical drama film based on the life of the iconic Punjabi musician Amar Singh Chamkila, has been met with rave reviews since its release on Netflix. The Imtiaz Ali directorial stars Diljit Dosanjh as Chamkila and Parineeti Chopra as Chamkila’s wife and celebrated singer Amarjot Kaur.

Ever since the movie’s release, everyone has been curious about Amar Singh Chamkila, who was lovingly deemed as the ‘Elvis of Punjab’. Many enriching anecdotes of his short yet memorable life have surfaced on the Internet, including the one when the singer rejected a Bollywood movie offer by a legendary actress…

Meet the famous actress who Amar Singh Chamkila rejected to star opposite her in a Bollywood film:

It was Sridevi, who was a fan of Amar Singh Chamkila and wanted to work with the controversial yet popular artist in a Bollywood movie. In an earlier interview with Indian Express before his death in 2023, Chamkila’s close friend and lyricist Swaran Singh Sivia revealed this tidbit of how Sridevi had wanted to collaborate with Chamkila in a Hindi film. However, Chamkila refused for a logistical reason.

“Sridevi was a fan of Amar Singh Chamkila. She asked him to be her hero in a film. But he told her, ‘I can’t speak Hindi’. She offered to get him training in the language within a month, but he refused, saying, ‘I will lose Rs 10 lakh in that one month’. Sridevi agreed to do a Punjabi film with him, but it couldn’t happen,” Sivia revealed.

For Swaran Singh Sivia, Chamkila looked as handsome to him as Amitabh Bachchan and was “a gem of a person”. According to India Today, Swaran recalled Chamkila’s generosity: “Amar Singh Chamkila was loved immensely by people in Punjab. People only know Amar Singh Chamkila as a singer. Only a few know that he was a gem of a person. When he once came home in 1986, he saw my mother was sick. He gave me Rs 10,000, and it was a huge amount then.”

In the film Amar Singh Chamkila, Swaran Singh Sivia was played by Apinderdeep Singh.