Cocktail 2's Mashooqa Sparks a Viral Pritam Plagiarism Row

A single Bollywood song has done what few film promotions manage these days: it has split Indian timelines down the middle. Within hours of the Cocktail 2 track Mashooqa landing online in late May, two crowds formed almost instantly. One was busy turning it into reel fodder, drawn to its sun-soaked Sicilian visuals and a hook that refuses to leave your head. The other had already pulled out the magnifying glass, convinced they had heard the tune somewhere before. The argument that followed pushed composer Pritam, the film, and the very idea of musical originality straight to the top of the trends list.

What makes the moment so distinctly 2026 is how fast it all moved. The song dropped, the accusations dropped faster, and within a day the composer himself had fired back. It is a small story about a film track, but it has become a flashpoint for a much older question in Hindi cinema: where does inspiration end and copying begin, and who gets to decide?

What Mashooqa Actually Is

Mashooqa is one of the lead tracks from Cocktail 2, the upcoming romantic entertainer headlined by Shahid Kapoor, Kriti Sanon and Rashmika Mandanna. Directed by Homi Adajania and backed by Dinesh Vijan's Maddock Films along with Luv Films, the movie is positioned as a stylish, modern take on love, friendship and heartbreak. It is set for a theatrical release on June 19, 2026.

The song itself was conceived as something more ambitious than a standard summer number. Composed by Pritam with lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya, it was shot in Sicily and built around a deliberate fusion of Bollywood melody and Mediterranean flavour. Crucially, the track is a genuine cross-border collaboration: alongside Indian singers Raghav Chaitanya and Ruaa Kayy, it features the Italian artist Mahmood, who lent his vocals and wrote and performed the Italian portions of the song.

That detail matters, because Mahmood is no minor name. He is a two-time winner of Italy's prestigious Sanremo Music Festival and has represented Italy at the Eurovision Song Contest, finishing as runner-up on one of those occasions. The whole pitch of Mashooqa, in other words, was authenticity: a real Italian voice, a real Italian setting, an honest attempt to braid two musical cultures together rather than borrow from a distance.

The Accusation That Lit the Fuse

The irony is hard to miss. A song designed to celebrate an Indian–Italian partnership ended up accused of lifting from an Italian source. Soon after release, social media users began claiming the melody resembled a 1993 Italian track titled Se So Arrubate A Nonna, credited to the duo Bibi and Coco. Screenshots, side-by-side clips and confident verdicts spread quickly, the way they always do when a familiar name is involved.

Others threw in different comparisons, with some listeners insisting parts of it echoed an older Hindi number from the 1990s. None of this was backed by any formal finding; it was the usual mix of sharp ears, half-remembered tunes and the internet's appetite for a takedown. But the volume was enough to drag an unflattering nickname back into circulation, with users reviving the jab Copytam to needle the composer.

It is worth being precise here, because the line between hearing a similarity and proving plagiarism is not a small one. Two songs can share a scale, a chord movement or a rhythmic feel without one being copied from the other. Pop melodies, in particular, draw from a limited and well-worn pool of patterns. An accusation that travels at the speed of a reshare is not the same as a verified claim, and as of now there has been no independent or legal determination that Mashooqa copied anything.

Pritam Pushes Back

Pritam, who rarely engages with this kind of pile-on, chose to respond this time. Roughly a day after the backlash began, he addressed it on Instagram, taking aim at what he framed as a recurring ritual around his releases. He described a class of self-styled music sleuths who, he suggested, manufacture resemblances for sport, coining a tongue-in-cheek label for the supposed genre of imaginary similarities they keep discovering.

His tone was equal parts exasperated and sarcastic. He noted that the same faces show up with the same inspired-by theory every time he puts out new music, going so far as to call them his unpaid PR team before signing off with a pointed not nice. It was less a detailed rebuttal than a weary swat at a pattern he says has followed him for years.

That history is part of why the story resonates. Pritam is one of the most prolific and commercially successful composers in Hindi cinema, with a long list of chart-toppers behind him. He has also faced repeated allegations over the years of drawing too closely on international songs, some of which became their own controversies. For his critics, that track record is reason enough to be suspicious; for his defenders, it has hardened into a reflex where any new release is presumed guilty before anyone checks.

Why This Touches a Bigger Nerve

The Mashooqa row is not really about one song. It sits on top of a debate that Bollywood has never fully resolved. For decades, Hindi film music borrowed liberally from regional, folk and foreign sources, sometimes openly reworking them and sometimes not crediting them at all. As streaming made the world's back catalogue instantly searchable, that old grey zone became impossible to hide. A listener in any city can now pull up an obscure 1990s European track in seconds and run a comparison.

That shift has been good for accountability. Genuine cases of uncredited lifting deserve scrutiny, and artists whose work is reused without acknowledgement deserve recognition and royalties. But the same tools that expose real theft also fuel a noisier culture of instant verdicts, where a passing resemblance is treated as proof and the accused has little room to respond before the label sticks. The cost of being wrong falls almost entirely on the artist, not the accuser.

There is also a craft question buried in here. Fusion music, by design, reaches across borders and traditions. A song like Mashooqa, which actively recruits an Italian collaborator and shoots in Italy, is bound to carry European textures. Whether that counts as homage, collaboration or copying is a genuinely hard call, and it rarely gets a fair hearing in a comment section that has already moved on to the next outrage.

What Comes Next for Cocktail 2

For the film's makers, the timing is a double-edged sword. On one hand, Mashooqa is unmissable right now, and attention is attention in a crowded release calendar. On the other, the conversation has drifted from the song's craft to its supposed sins, which is not the headline any promotional team plans for.

The wider Cocktail 2 rollout has had its own bumps. The makers had previewed Mashooqa and another track, Tujhko, at a Mumbai event in mid-May, and were expected to unveil the film's trailer around the end of the month. That trailer launch was pushed back at short notice, though the team has signalled that the June 19 theatrical date remains unchanged. Cocktail 2 carries a legacy too, arriving as a spiritual follow-up to the 2012 hit Cocktail, which Adajania also directed and which became one of that year's biggest Hindi earners.

Whether the plagiarism chatter fades or hardens into something more formal will likely depend on whether anyone takes it beyond social media. For now, it remains an allegation that is loud but unproven, met with a flat denial from the man at the centre of it. What is certain is that a song built to bridge two musical worlds has, at least for this news cycle, become a mirror for India's unresolved argument about originality itself.

Source: bollywoodhungama.com