Rohan Kanawade on Making a Love Story Without Music in ‘Sabar Bonda’: ‘It was a Difficult Decision — Not to Make, but to Explain’

In Sabar Bonda, Rohan Kanawade made a choice that runs counter to almost every instinct of Indian cinema. The film has no songs. It does not even have background music. And he never doubted it. “No. Not at all,” he says, when asked if the decision ever made him second-guess himself. “Because most of the decisions happen even before I write the script. After that, no. This is how I’ve written it,” he adds.

The resistance, however, began early. “We were about fifteen days into the shoot and one of the executive producers said, ‘I think we need a song in the film,’” he recalls. The suggestions only got more specific. “Someone even said we at least need a flute. I said no, nothing,” he says with a laugh.

For Kanawade, the absence of music was not an aesthetic experiment. It was baked into the writing and the way the film was shot. “Thinking that there’s not going to be any background music, you shoot it that way. You have those silences. You create those moments. You incorporate sound design. After that, you cannot have background music in it,” he explains.

Even the end credits were not spared. “People thought maybe at least there will be music there. Nothing happened there either,” he adds. The only concession came through sound design. Anirban Borthakur and Naren Chandavarkar, who worked on the film’s sound, suggested leaning into what was already present. “They came up with the idea of using bird sounds and tree rustling. We already had it in the film. We just started using it slowly and gently,” Kanawade says.

That decision, too, came from an emotional place rather than a technical one. “I wanted to create a feeling of how it sounds when you’re really with your lover, just sitting and talking. Or when you’re talking to your mother on the veranda. How does the world sound then? Maybe they’ve lived a moment like this. With their mother, father, anyone,” he says.

“It was a difficult decision. Not to make, but to explain,” he admits. What made it possible, finally, was trust. “Thankfully, my producers were okay with it.”