Alam Ara Opened at Bombay's Majestic Cinema on 14 March 1931 as India's First Talkie, Made by Ardeshir Irani in Hindustani for About Rs 40,000 with Seven Songs

Alam Ara opened at the Majestic Cinema in Bombay on 14 March 1931, and Britannica names it as India’s first talkie. Ardeshir Irani produced and directed it in Hindustani, the everyday mix of Hindi and Urdu. He told the film historian B. D. Garga that it cost about Rs 40,000, and that the theatre was mobbed on release, with tickets hard to get for weeks.

Eighteen years earlier, Raja Harishchandra had given India its first full-length feature, a silent one. Alam Ara added speech and song.

A secret that began with one American film

In the Garga interviews, held in 1949 and 1964 and published in 1980, Irani said he had seen Universal’s Show Boat at Bombay’s Excelsior theatre about a year before he began Alam Ara. A 40 per cent talkie, he called it. The film gave him the idea of an Indian one, though his team had no experience and nothing to copy.

The work stayed quiet. A silent film took about a month to finish, Irani recalled, while Alam Ara took months because recording sound was so hard. The crew also took care not to let the talkie secret out.

Irani’s studio at Grant Road was the set. The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai’s heritage record says he set up Imperial Films Studio there in 1926, on the site that is now Jyoti Studios, and ran the Imperial Film Company from it. Both the Hindustan Times and The Tribune call him the head of “Imperial Movietone” instead, and the Hindustan Times adds that Sagar Movietone distributed the film. Every account agrees on the man and the place; the name of the banner varies.

Shooting between the last train and the first

No soundproof stages existed. Garga was told that trains passed every few minutes beside the studio, so most shooting happened in the hours when the trains stopped. The municipal heritage record, quoting Outlook, puts the schedule at 1 am, after the last local, to 4 am, before the first train left Churchgate.

A single-system Tanar machine recorded sound on the same film as the picture, with no booms. Microphones had to be hidden in odd places to keep them out of the frame, Irani said, and the Hindustan Times says some were disguised in the actors’ costumes.

Wilford Deming, an American recordist, came to Bombay to assemble the machine and charged Rs 100 a day. That was more than the company could afford, Irani said, so he and Rustom Bharucha, a lawyer who later managed Imperial Studios, picked up the basics from Deming. Irani then took on the recording himself, with Bharucha’s help.

A Parsi stage play, a Hindustani script and a cast chosen for their speech

The source was a popular stage play by the Bombay dramatist Joseph David, who also adapted it for the screen, according to Irani. The Press Institute of India piece gives the playwright’s full name as Joseph David Penkar (1876 to 1948) and says he worked with the Parsi Imperial Theatre Company. As the Hindustan Times summarises it, the story is a romance between a prince and a gypsy girl, with a king, his two wives, a Sufi prophecy and plenty of jealousy.

According to the Press Institute piece, Irani chose Hindustani over Gujarati or Marathi, and Goswami writes that he saw a larger audience in it. The Hindustan Times adds that Hindustani became the standard language of Bombay’s films after Alam Ara.

In the title role was Zubeida (1911 to 1988) with Master Vithal (1906 to 1969), a silent-era star, as Prince Qamar. Prithviraj Kapoor played Adil, the army chief, according to the Hindustan Times and The Tribune. Sulochana (Ruby Myers), Irani’s first choice for the heroine, was dropped because she was not fluent in Hindustani, says the Press Institute. The Hindustan Times and Goswami’s piece for the Assam Tribune both say Irani first considered the young Mehboob Khan for the prince; Mehboob later made Mother India.

Seven songs, and a beggar’s song that became the first hit

A Maharashtra government magazine, Maharashtra Ahead (January 2012), credits the film’s Hindustani dialogue and its seven songs with its box-office success. The Hindustan Times gives the same count, and Outlook describes one lead song and six more hits, mostly sung by Zubeida.

Audiences remembered “De de khuda ke naam par pyare”, sung by Wazir Mohammed Khan, who also played the fakir (a wandering holy man) in the film. Nearly all the songs became hits, Irani told Garga, Khan’s most of all. Outlook says beggars took it up on their rounds.

Who composed the music is less clear. Irani said there was no music director and that he chose the lyrics and tunes himself, with a harmonium and a tabla player kept out of camera range and the singer facing a hidden microphone. No composer appears in the credits, the Hindustan Times notes, though later reports name Ferozshah Mistry and B. Irani.

Opening day at the Majestic

Posters promised a film that was “All Living, Breathing 100 per cent Talking”, the line the municipal heritage record gives for the film’s release. Irani’s own account is short. The theatre was mobbed, tickets were unavailable for weeks, and black-marketeers did well out of it.

Later accounts add detail. Police had to be called to control the crowd, say the Mumbai heritage record, the Hindustan Times, Outlook and Goswami’s piece. Outlook says four-anna tickets were resold for Rs 5, and both Goswami and The Quint put the houseful run at about eight weeks. None of these writers points to a newspaper report from March 1931, so the police detail rests on later retellings, which are consistent with each other and with Irani’s word “mobbed”.

What came after

Britannica says Indian filmmaking diverged from the Hindi talkie into regional branches in languages such as Tamil, Telugu and Bengali. One of the early ones came from Irani himself. Madras Musings says Kalidas, directed by H. M. Reddy, opened at Kinema Central in Madras a few months after Alam Ara. The film was a Telugu and Tamil bilingual. The magazine says it is hard to call it the first Tamil talkie without reservations, and notes that much of the Tamil was in songs rather than speech. The Mumbai heritage record adds that Irani made Kalidas on the Alam Ara sets to save money.

Irani’s later work included colour. Britannica credits him with producing India’s first indigenously made colour film, Kisan Kanya, in 1937. The municipal heritage record says the film was shot at the same Grant Road studio with the Cinecolour process.

That spread of languages is visible in the 2026 National Film Awards, where best-film prizes went to films in 14 languages.

What survives

No print of Alam Ara is known to survive. So say the Hindustan Times, the Press Institute and The Tribune, and The Tribune lists what remains: posters, a promotional booklet and a printing machine. P. K. Nair, a former director of the National Film Archive of India, told The Hans India in July 2013 that the film’s makers had not looked after the print. About 70 per cent of Indian films made before 1950 were not available for the archive to collect, he estimated.

In May 2022 the Film Heritage Foundation in Mumbai announced that it had recovered a Bell & Howell contact printing machine used to make Alam Ara prints. PTI reported that Irani had originally bought it, that it later sat idle in a saree shop, and that Nalin Sampat, grandson of the Kohinoor Film Company’s Dwarkadas Sampat, deposited it with the foundation. The foundation’s director, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, said it was the only surviving object of the film.