Next Big Thing | 'The Ba***ds of Bollywood' and 'Dhurandhar' Composer Shashwat Sachdev Talks About His Musical Vision

Shashwat Sachdev’s music does not so much accompany visuals as insist upon them. Whether threading a raga through a romantic cue or reworking a village folk tune into something like cinematic hip-hop, his scores arrive fully formed with a sense of place: a dusky street in Jaipur, the packed stands of a stadium, the cramped intimacy of a studio in Mumbai’s Versova. That insistence that a piece of music must conjure a visual world has become the organising impulse behind work that now spans independent albums, global music libraries and two of Bollywood’s most talked-about projects: The Ba***ds of Bollywood, fronted by Aryan Khan and Shah Rukh Khan, and Dhurandhar, directed by Aditya Dhar and starring Ranveer Singh.

Classical Foundations

The catalogue of influences reads like a shorthand for Sachdev’s method. His parents (a doctor and a professor of philosophy) filled the house with Hindustani and instrumental recordings; his mother, who had studied music herself, was the household’s chief curator. Learning began early. At three-and-a-half, the first formal lessons arrived: six months of tabla, then vocals, under the tutelage of Ustad Ramzan Khan, a sarangi stalwart of the Sikar gharana. The teacher recognised a seriousness in the child that the family had not yet grasped and, after a single year, proposed formal discipleship. Riyaz became a lifeline for young Sachdev. When family pressure threatened to prioritise exams over practice, Sachdev’s choice was unequivocal: take away the music and school would go too.

Those early, uncompromising years of endless repetitions and maternal oversight of practice sessions once the guru had left, became the origin of the composer’s rigour. Yet they are also the source of the aesthetic that distinguishes his film work which is a devotion to detail. “Classical music was and is pretty important,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter India. “It’s the starting point.” That foundation made it possible to move fluidly between idioms; a Hindustani sensibility supplies a melodic logic, Western classical training supplies a readable way to notate and communicate ideas, and an appetite for popular forms stretches the sound into new shapes.

The decision to study law at Symbiosis Law School in Pune came not out of vocational interest but as a route to the city’s musical infrastructure, “I went to study law as a means to an end. The end was always access to music,” he says. Pune, Sachdev recognised, offered a culture in which Hindustani and Western classical teachers could be found and where piano instruction could be pursued seriously. While his peers imagined a conventional professional track, Sachdev imagined a practical path toward musical formation: “If I have to compose,” he says, “it has to be through Western music” — not as snub to tradition, but as a pragmatic system for scoring and collaboration. “We don’t write Hindustani classical, it’s more intuitive. But to communicate your ideas you need to have a music language and Western classical provided that language,” he says.

Bridging Worlds

A further layer of worldly polish arrived during a stint in Los Angeles, where a small studio in Silver Lake brought exposure to international production practices and to the catalogue world. Work with Extreme Music, a Sony subsidiary, led to a co-writing opportunity with Hans Zimmer, brokered when BBC’s crime thriller series Virdee, that had licensed Sachdev’s library music, sought original material. The collaboration was a logical extension of Sachdev’s ambition: take the techniques learned from his guru and the conservatoire and apply them to the sound of global media.

That dual training — Hindustani and Western — shines bright in the two films that now mark his ascent. Dhurandhar, developed in close creative partnership with Aditya Dhar following their National Film Award winning work on Uri: The Surgical Strike, is an example of the composer’s capacity to read a script and answer it with sound. A folk melody, written into the screenplay as “Na De Dil Pardesi Nu (Jogi)”, was licensed and reimagined by Sachdev as a hybrid track for the film’s title sequence — a cinematic hip-hop rendition that kept the original’s textual anchor while broadening its emotional field. “We used it on the teaser also, but Aditya has written that music into the film for a very important scene. From there I’ve added my interpretation to it. That’s what makes the music cinematic when it works organically,” he says.

Cinema as Muse

The Ba***ds of Bollywood required a different tact. Arriving on the project later in the process, after the first episode had been edited, Sachdev faced the task of articulating a sonic universe retroactively. That condition demands another form of skill: the ability to write “bibles” and musical landscapes that persuade directors and editors to see their film differently. For a show positioned at the intersection of star spectacle and serial storytelling, the sound must be enormous without becoming undisciplined; it must offer leitmotifs that register across episodes yet remain adaptive to shifting moods. The result, by most accounts, is music that amplifies emotion without flattening nuance. “Aryan [Khan] narrated the next few episodes and then I worked on the music. It’s very refreshing because it is in the rom-com or romantic drama genre, but the scale is epic,” says Sachdev.

A recurring theme in conversations with Sachdev is his love for cinema. “For the last decade or more I’ve tried to watch one film a day,” he says. “My music comes from that sense of spectacle. The songs that I make need to evoke those same stunning visuals,” he adds. Sachdev speaks of music as an invitation to visualisation. Songs and cues are often created with a specific image in mind; at times, the same image presents itself to listeners in the room, validating his intuition. “I love it when everyone sees the same visuals while listening to my sound. But I also like it when there’s a different interpretation. I want to keep my music expansive and exact at the same time,” says Sachdev. If a composer’s job is to translate the ineffable into the audible, Sachdev’s project is to make that translation feel like a whole new language.

The next few years will reveal how fully that language takes hold; for now, the work suggests that whatever the scale, the image and the sound will not be strangers to one another.

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