‘Ghafoor’ Was Just The Beginning For Shashwat Sachdev
National Award-winning composer Shashwat Sachdev—the guy behind the viral hit Ghafoor—on repurposing old melodies, working with Aryan Khan and his new work
Shashwat Sachdev is on his piano. "Na na na na na na na.” He apologises for his raspy vocals—he just woke up, he says. In a sped-up tempo, he’s humming ‘Tu Pehli Tu Aakhri’, the lovelorn ballad from his chart-topping score for The Ba***ds of Bollywood. The composer is pumped for the Ba***ds album that just dropped an hour ago.
The National Award-winning Sachdev, who was born in Jaipur and started learning music as a three-year-old, is enjoying this bit of his time under the sun. After a collaboration with Hans Zimmer on the theme of the BBC show Virdee earlier this year, his trippy EDM track from Ba***ds, ‘Ghafoor’, has gone viral.
But he is telling me about how ‘Tu Pehli Tu Aakhri’ came quite like an epiphany. “We used to just have this melody,” he says, referring to the aching song intro he just hummed. “And we’d always sing it—me, Aryan [Khan, director of the show] and the supervisor on the show, Manav [Chauhan, also the co-writer]. We would just keep circling back to this melody. One night, we had the lyrics session and Kumaar sir came in and wrote this.”
The lyrics for another song from the show were in place. “So, I was recording Jubin [Nautiyal] for ‘Ruseya Na Kar’ while these people were doing lyrics for this in another room in my studio. And then, Aryan ran to the studio and told me, ‘Sha, we have beautiful lyrics for this song. What do you think?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s very nice’. And, so, in one night, we produced, wrote and finished both songs.”
His other high point as a composer this year came when the first look for Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar dropped in July. The teaser to the upcoming espionage drama sees Ranveer Singh perform some tough stunts to a song called ‘Jogi’, a hip-hop version of a Punjabi akhada hit (‘Na De Dil Pardesi Nu’ by Muhammad Sadiq and Ranjit Kaur). “All of us quite like the song. We did a lot of bibles [music ideas] for the score of the film, and we figured that maybe we should be editing the teaser on ‘Jogi’. Hanumankind came on board and added his own thing. Jasmine [Sandlas] added her own thing.”
But the thing about the song was how it gave new life to the akhada hit. How does Sachdev—who’s worked with the Punjabi folk hit ‘Challa’ and ‘Aj Mera Ji Karda’ from Monsoon Wedding (2001) in songs for Uri and Kill (2024)—approach remaking old songs? “It could be seen as using a crutch,” he says of the contentious subject. “But I think of it as a superpower where I sometimes don’t have to waste time. My approach is always that a character is coming from somewhere and going somewhere—they have a whole arc. So, a folk song helps establish a context.”
The composer has long been a sonic innovator, also working in the independent space (his albums include Euphoria And the Following Realities and Shades of Cashmere) with the UK-based music library Extreme Music. But does he feel that the global pop movement perennially leaves indie music in an offbeat zone? “Even then, it’s the kind of work that actually drives the whole sonic movement, even when we can’t see it,” he says. “There have always been poets who’ve written deep, complex poetry not meant for the common man—yet their work has inspired those who do.” There will always be something that speaks louder to the masses, he admits. “But that doesn’t mean the other doesn’t have its place.”