I was going through a list of the best-performing Indian songs on a music streaming platform and was elated to find a song I love — “Jaiyye Sajna” from Dhurandhar — at number one. As someone who’s grown increasingly cynical about contemporary Hindi film music, it’s not often that my personal taste aligns with popular sentiment. It was reassuring to find common ground in a new film song, that too, one that’s uncompromising in its authenticity.
The language in “Jaiyye Sajna” isn’t the sort of bastardised Punjabi you generally hear in Bollywood: ‘Pattalan chon digde hanjoo, akh meri phir vi roi na…’The lyrics aren’t the easiest to follow for a non-speaker, but the song is able to transcend that barrier. It’s the music of the language, the phonetics, at work here. Both the featured artists Jasmine Sandlas and Satinder Sartaaj write their own verses; while Sandlas croons like a Punjaban in heartbreak mode, equal parts power and pining, Sartaaj, more restrained, evokes the pind. Perhaps the most striking thing about “Jaiyye Sajna” is how composer Shashwat Sachdev takes a longing love song rooted in folk and makes it sound sexy. It has a sparse, minimalist arrangement. You feel each sonic component: from the tactile thuds of the opening sub-bass drone, to the slick beats, to the lone piano at the end.
The song’s collaborative nature, the space it leaves for instrumental passages, and the purity of its Punjabi echo the larger ethos of the Dhurandhar soundtrack — which, like the film, unfolds across two parts. There isn’t quite anything like it in Hindi film music. It draws on pre-existing material in a way the industry hasn’t before. Out of its 25 songs, more than half are recreations — but these aren’t straight-up remixes of the kind Bollywood has leaned on in the recent past.
Take “Ishq Jalakar,” for instance. Most of it is original; it borrows only the hook from “Na Toh Karvaan Ki Talash Hai,” a qawwali from the 1960 Hindi film. Sachdev blends the two so seamlessly that anyone unfamiliar with the classic wouldn’t notice the seam. In the Dhurandhar title track, he reworks a ’90s Punjabi folk-pop sound in a Panjabi MC–inspired mould, layering it with Hanumankind’s rap to striking effect.
In Dhurandhar, Sachdev is not a music director in the old-fashioned sense — understood as someone who composes original songs (along with the lyricist). It’s an approach that sees the composer don multiple hats: that of curator and producer as well, someone who dips into the archives to select precise bits of work and shape them into something new.
Set largely in Pakistan and partly in Punjab, Dhurandhar is about an Indian undercover intelligence agent who infiltrates Karachi’s underworld to dismantle Pakistan’s terror network. Sachdev creates a sonic universe rooted in that geography: a cross-section of South Asian pop that includes Bollywood retro, Punjabi folk, songs that draw from the Sufi-qawwali tradition, and mixes it up with hip-hop, rock and electronic music. For all its disparate elements, it still feels like one piece.
Hindi film music has been going through a creatively lean phase for the past decade or so. It hasn’t produced a particularly exciting new composer in a while — the last time someone new made a real impact was perhaps Sneha Khanwalkar with Gangs of Wasseypur (2012). There are multiple reasons: labels and producers driving decisions, the loosening relationship between film and song, and cheap data pushing music toward the lowest common denominator.
One dominant model has been the multi-composer album, where several composers and lyricists work on the same film — a decision driven more by commerce than creative instinct. In such a setup, newer composers rarely get the space to fully immerse themselves. The solo-composer album has largely remained the preserve of the old guard — A. R. Rahman, Pritam, Amit Trivedi.
In that context, Sachdev has proved to be an exception. He chose to go solo in an environment where composers, particularly new composers, were encouraged to participate in multi-composer albums. He chose quality over quantity. “I want to make something that creates a certain dent, and that comes with a certain conviction, and a relationship between a director and a composer,” he had told me in 2019, the year URI: The Surgical Strike, released. And in the film’s director Aditya Dhar, Sachdev had found that collaborator.
That album, which won him a National award, shows his potential, like the prelude to “Jagga Jiteya”, which sounds like a badass war siren, or the gentle “Beh Chala”, which exhibits his feel for melody. More recently, he created the loony, trippy “Ghafoor” from Ba**s of Bollywood (2025). It all feels like a buildup to Dhurandhar, his most ambitious work yet. It’s as much an Aditya Dhar film, the title cards in the promo reminds us, as it is a Shashwat Sachdev musical.
Bollywood is quick to replicate what works. But recreating something like the Dhurandhar soundtrack won’t be easy. It had the advantage of a lavish budget and access to the catalogues of Saregama (for the first part) and T-Series (for the second), which Sachdev exploits with abandon. Not every composer gets that kind of leeway, especially in these times.
But that same freedom — to draw so liberally from the past, to move across traditions and geographies — also brings with it a certain responsibility. The irony of using syncretic musical traditions, which reflect a shared cultural history between India and Pakistan, in the service of a narrative that is sharply anti-Pakistan is hard to miss. That tension perhaps extends to the credits as well. You have to dig into metadata to find Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s name on “Jaan Se Guzarte Hai,” and in “Mann Atkeya,” another Nusrat composition, his name is absent altogether.
It leaves you with a strange aftertaste. For all its ambition and ingenuity, Dhurandhar is built on a shared musical inheritance — one that doesn’t fully recognise all its contributors upfront. And in a soundtrack so invested in memory, that omission feels particularly telling.
