Bollywood Songs And Scenes

What we verified before publishing

Fact-check status: passed

The following claims were verified through Perplexity Sonar before the questions were finalised. The host can reference any of them during play:

• The conventions of Bollywood are rooted in the Natyashastra, a Sanskrit text from the second century BCE.
• There is no such thing as a Bollywood musical because songs are integral to almost all Indian films.
• The 1932 film Indrasabha featured an incredible 71 songs, one of the highest counts in Bollywood history.
• The first Bollywood film in colour was 'Sairandhri' (1933), which was actually produced in Germany.
• The song 'Pyar Kiya to Darna Kya' from 'Mughal-e-Azam' cost Rs 10 million to create, while the rest of the film cost less than Rs 1 million.
• The song 'Ae Malik Tere Bande Hum' from 'Do Aankhen Barah Haath' (1957) was adopted as a school anthem by a Pakistani school.
• The longest Hindi film song is 'Ab Tumhare Hawale Watan Saathiyon', which is 20 minutes long and appears in three parts.
• Playback singing did not become commonplace in Bollywood until the 1950s; before that, actors sang live on set.
• The first song ever heard on an Indian film screen was 'De de khuda ke naam par' from 'Alam Ara' (1931), performed by actor Wazir Mohammed Khan.
• Bollywood was not known by that name until the late 20th century; the term was invented after Bombay cinema caught the West's imagination.
• In the 1913 film 'Raja Harischandra', the bathtub scene featured male actors dressed as women to portray the king's attendants.
• Amitabh Bachchan suffered a near-fatal injury on set in 1982 while filming the movie 'Coolie'.