A Visionary of Sound

From url το vnurananar, music composer Shashwat Sachdev doesn't just score films, he conjures entire visual worlds through sound

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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.