How many extras appeared in the funeral scene of Gandhi?

How to get close to this number

Think about what the shot had to look like. A funeral scene recreating one of the largest public gatherings in history needs a crowd that reads as a crowd from the air, filling streets to the horizon. Digital crowd replication did not exist, so the number had to be real — and that pushes it into the hundreds of thousands rather than the thousands.

The detail that makes it possible is in the explanation: most of the crowd was not paid. Around a third were hired extras and the rest simply came, because the production announced the shoot on the anniversary of the actual funeral in the place it happened. The record was set by an event people wanted to attend, not by a budget.

That also makes it a record no film will break. Digital crowds made large extras counts obsolete almost immediately afterwards, so this figure marks the end of a technique rather than a peak within it. Records that stand forever usually do so because the category stopped being contested, not because the achievement was unmatchable.