Raj Kapoor Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
48 free Raj Kapoor trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Raj Kapoor was the Charlie Chaplin of Indian cinema, the founder of R. K. Films at 23, and a star so big in the Soviet Union that a Vysotsky song listed him alongside Shiva and yoga. This quiz covers the films: Aag and Barsaat, the Awaara that sold 100 million tickets in Russia and another 100 million in China, Shree 420 and its shoes-are-Japanese anthem, Sangam shot in Europe, the six-year gamble of Mera Naam Joker, and the Bobby that paid its debts. It also covers the man and the dynasty: his birth in Peshawar, his father Prithviraj and Prithvi Theatres, the brothers Shammi and Shashi, the sons Randhir, Rishi and Rajiv, the granddaughters Karisma and Kareena, the marriage at 21 to a 15-year-old cousin, the long affair with Nargis, the composers and writers he made famous, the awards, the asthma that killed him and the memorial farm at Rajbaugh. It suits Hindi film fans, quiz nights and anyone who has hummed 'Mera Joota Hai Japani'. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Raj Kapoor, his major films and his family, and each question shows its supporting sentence after you answer.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Raj Kapoor is often called the Indian version of which Hollywood star?
Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp gave Kapoor his best-known persona: a shabby, cheerful vagabond whose honesty in a crooked world won him audiences far beyond India.
Q 02In which city was Raj Kapoor born in 1924?
Peshawar
Peshawar, now in Pakistan, was only his first home: his father's stage career kept the family on the move, and Raj went to school in three different cities.
Q 03Which fellow superstar grew up in the same neighbourhood as Raj Kapoor and remained his lifelong friend?
Dilip Kumar
Dilip Kumar was born two years earlier in the same old quarter; the boyhood friends became the great rival stars of 1950s Hindi cinema and shared the screen only once, in Andaz.
Q 04Which two younger brothers of Raj Kapoor also became major film actors?
Shammi and Shashi
Shammi and Shashi followed him by different roads: Shashi began as a child, playing the boyhood version of Raj's own characters in two of his early films, while Shammi broke through as a dancing star.
Q 05Raj Kapoor's first leading role, in 1947's Neel Kamal, paired him with which future superstar actress?
Madhubala
Madhubala was just 14 and it was her first adult lead too; the film did little business, yet within a few years both were among the biggest stars in India.
Q 06What was the name of the production banner Raj Kapoor founded in 1948?
R. K. Films
R. K. Films took its famous emblem from a scene in its first hit: Kapoor with a violin in one hand and his leading lady swooning on his other arm.
Q 07Which 1948 film marked Raj Kapoor's debut as a director?
Aag
Aag won praise but little money for its 24-year-old director; its lasting gift was the first pairing of Kapoor and Nargis, the screen couple who would define the next decade of Hindi film.
Q 08Which 1949 film, the second Raj Kapoor directed, gave his new studio its first hit?
Barsaat
Barsaat, a rain-soaked double love story, made his studio's name, and its songs did the same for a young playback singer called Lata Mangeshkar, who sang for both heroines.
Q 09Which composer duo did Raj Kapoor launch in 1949 and keep for most of his films over the next two decades?
Shankar-Jaikishan
Shankar-Jaikishan were unknowns when he handed them the music for the second film he directed; the gamble paid off, and they scored his productions for more than twenty years.
Q 10Which writer of Awaara, Shree 420 and Bobby also launched Amitabh Bachchan's screen career?
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas wrote Awaara for another director and took the script to Kapoor after they fell out over casting; as a director himself he cast the unknown Bachchan in Saat Hindustani.
Q 11Who played Judge Raghunath, who disowns Raj, in Awaara?
Prithviraj Kapoor
Prithviraj Kapoor was Raj's real father: the man who disowns him on screen had starred in the films that gave Raj his first parts as a boy, and here took direction from his own son.
Q 12Outside India, in which country did Awaara make Raj Kapoor a household name in the 1950s?
Soviet Union
Soviet Union: released there in 1954, the film drew tens of millions of viewers in its first run, and its vagabond hero kept Kapoor's films popular with Soviet audiences for decades.
Q 13Which Raj Kapoor production won its child actress a special mention at Cannes in 1955?
Boot Polish
Q 21Mera Naam Joker ran for more than four hours; how did Indian cinemas show it?
With two intervals
With two intervals: the film tells three stories end to end, each almost a feature in itself, so audiences were given two breaks instead of the usual one.
Q 22Each of Mera Naam Joker's three chapters is built around what?
A lost love
A lost love: his schoolteacher, a visiting trapeze artist and an ambitious actress each move on, and years later all three are invited to watch his farewell performance.
Q 23Which of Raj Kapoor's sons made his screen debut playing the young Raju in Mera Naam Joker?
Rishi
Rishi won a National Film Award for the part while still in his teens, and three years later the same director, his father, turned him into a teenage heart-throb.
Boot Polish follows a brother and sister who choose to shine shoes rather than beg; Kapoor produced it, and the Cannes jury singled out its child actress, Naaz, for her performance.
Q 14Who sang 'Awaara Hoon', the song that made Raj Kapoor a star from Turkey to China?
Mukesh
Mukesh was Kapoor's singing voice in film after film, a bond so close that when the singer died in 1976 Kapoor is said to have felt he had lost a part of himself.
Q 15In Shree 420, Raj's country boy travels from Allahabad to which city, on foot?
Bombay
Bombay first tempts him: he loves a poor, honest schoolteacher but is seduced by the easy money of a crooked businessman, and the film turns on which of the two he will choose.
Q 16Which 2016 Hollywood film plays the Shree 420 song 'Mera Joota Hai Japani' near its beginning?
Deadpool
Deadpool borrows a song that India has treasured since 1955: its chorus, about wearing foreign clothes over an Indian heart, became a patriotic anthem of the newly independent country.
Q 17The '420' in the title Shree 420 comes from the section of India's penal code that deals with which offence?
Cheating
Cheating: Section 420 covers fraud, so the title means roughly 'Mr Fraudster', and '420' has passed into everyday Indian speech as a word for a con man.
Q 18For which 1959 comedy did Raj Kapoor win his first Filmfare Award for Best Actor?
Anari
Anari was neither produced nor directed by him: Filmfare first named him Best Actor for playing another director's honest simpleton, not one of the heroes of his own celebrated films.
Q 19Raj Kapoor's 1960 film Chhalia was based on a story by which Russian novelist?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky's tale of a lonely dreamer, 'White Nights', was moved from St Petersburg to India after Partition, where the hero shelters a wife cut off from her family in the upheaval.
Q 20Which 1964 hit was Raj Kapoor's first film in colour, with honeymoon scenes shot across Europe?
Sangam
Sangam, a love triangle between two friends and the woman they both love, was a huge hit and his last success as a leading man; the starring roles that followed it later in the decade flopped.
Q 24Which actress made her debut opposite Raj Kapoor's son in Bobby (1973)?
Dimple Kapadia
Dimple Kapadia became a star overnight, but she had married the superstar Rajesh Khanna shortly before the release and given up acting; she stayed away from the screen for more than a decade.
Q 25Raj Kapoor's Bobby was inspired by which American comics?
Archie
Archie comics shaped the film's look as well as its mood: its young heroine recalled Kapoor restyling her hairline and ordering all her clothes from abroad to match.
Q 26By its young leading man's own account, why did Raj Kapoor really make Bobby?
To clear Mera Naam Joker's debts
To clear Mera Naam Joker's debts: the film's young star said his father wanted a teenage love story but could not afford a superstar like Rajesh Khanna, so he got the lead 'by default'.
Q 27In Raj Kapoor's Bobby, the teenage heroine is the daughter of what?
A Goan Christian fisherman
A Goan Christian fisherman, proud and quick-tempered: when the rich boy's father accuses him of using his daughter to trap the boy for money and offers a bribe, the two families fall out.
Q 28Raj Kapoor's 1978 film Satyam Shivam Sundaram, starring Zeenat Aman, drew accusations of what?
Promoting obscenity
Promoting obscenity was the charge, yet the fable preaches the opposite of skin-deep love: its hero adores a veiled woman by night and shuns his scarred wife by day, not knowing they are one.
Q 29Which 1985 film, starring newcomer Mandakini and his son Rajiv, was Raj Kapoor's last as director?
Ram Teri Ganga Maili
Ram Teri Ganga Maili names its heroine Ganga and sends her, like the river, from its pure mountain birthplace at Gangotri down to Calcutta, preyed on by men at every stage of the journey.
Q 30Which unfinished Raj Kapoor love story was completed by his sons and released in 1991?
Henna
Henna, a romance across the India-Pakistan border, was still in the making when he died: his eldest son directed it, his second son starred, and a Pakistani actress played the title role.