There is a scene in Dhurandhar Part 1 where Hamza is alone. He has just navigated a dinner with Rehman Dakait’s inner circle, performed warmth he does not feel, laughed at jokes he found hollow, and established trust he intends to betray. He steps onto the balcony of his Lyari apartment. The camera holds on his face for four seconds. He says nothing. He does nothing. And in those four seconds, Shashwat Sachdev’s score does what the character cannot: it tells the truth. A single melodic phrase, built on a descending interval that the franchise has been seeding since its opening minutes, rises briefly and falls away, and in that falling away the audience understands everything about the cost of what just happened inside that dinner room. The scene would be intelligible without the music. With it, it is devastating.

This is the argument at the center of any serious analysis of the Dhurandhar franchise’s music: Sachdev’s score is not accompaniment. It is a parallel narrative, a second screenplay running beneath the visible one, and it is the only voice in the franchise that never lies. Every other voice in Dhurandhar lies systematically: Hamza lies to Rehman, to Yalina, to the entire ecosystem of Lyari. Ajay Sanyal lies by omission to his handlers in Delhi. The franchise’s surface dialogue is a tissue of strategic deception maintained across six hours of film. The score carries no deception. It maps the emotional reality of the story with a fidelity that no character can afford to demonstrate, and the audience registers this mapping, often without consciously identifying it, every time a cue lands in precisely the moment where the film’s emotional truth needs an honest voice.

Irshad Kamil’s lyrics for the franchise’s songs operate in the same register of layered honesty. Kamil, whose career in Hindi film music is built on a gift for using the conventions of romantic poetry to carry philosophical and psychological weight that more direct writing could not sustain, found in the Dhurandhar brief a subject that his style was designed for: a man who cannot speak plainly about anything real to anyone real. The songs in Dhurandhar are not interruptions of the espionage narrative. They are the espionage narrative translated into a different key, one where the subtext can surface as text without breaking the dramatic logic of a character who must, at all costs, maintain his cover. Understanding Sachdev’s score and Kamil’s lyrics together, as a unified system of emotional communication that the film’s dialogue cannot provide, is the only way to fully understand what the Dhurandhar franchise is doing as cinema.

Before the detailed analysis begins, it is worth establishing the comparative context that makes the franchise’s musical achievement legible. The conventional Bollywood spy film uses music in a fundamentally different mode from what the Dhurandhar franchise employs. The YRF Spy Universe, from the Tiger franchise through Pathaan and War, uses music as spectacle amplification: the score’s job is to make the action more exciting, the romance more affecting, the triumph more triumphant. This is a competent and commercially effective use of film music, but it is music in service of a surface. It confirms and heightens what is already visible. Dhurandhar’s score has a different brief entirely: to express what is invisible, what the surface performance conceals, what the character’s circumstances make it impossible for him to say. This is a fundamentally different relationship between music and narrative, and it requires a different compositional approach and a different kind of audience attention.

The closest precedent in Indian film music for what Sachdev builds in the Dhurandhar franchise is not in the spy film or the action genre at all. It is in the work that composers like R.D. Burman brought to their collaborations with Gulzar: scores and songs that used the formal resources of the subcontinent’s musical inheritance to carry psychological and philosophical weight that the social and political register of the stories they served could not accommodate directly. The ghazal form that Kamil draws on, with its centuries-old tradition of expressing through the language of wine and the beloved what cannot be expressed in the language of public life, is the same formal tradition that allowed poets in Mughal India to speak truth to power through the veil of romantic metaphor. Kamil is not merely writing film songs. He is participating in a literary tradition whose entire function is to say, in the language the context permits, what the context otherwise forbids. The franchise’s protagonist is in precisely this situation: he can only say, in the language the cover permits, what the cover otherwise forbids him to feel.

The Architecture of Deception: How the Score Is Constructed

Most film scores are reactive. The composer watches a cut, identifies the emotional target of each scene, and builds music that guides the audience toward that target with varying degrees of subtlety. Sachdev’s approach to Dhurandhar is different in a way that is architecturally significant: the score is built from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Instead of composing scene by scene, Sachdev developed a set of core thematic materials before the films were completed, materials that mapped to the franchise’s central emotional and dramatic propositions, and then tracked those materials through the narrative as living things that evolve, fragment, combine, and sometimes contradict each other in real time.

The result is a score that functions like a musical novel rather than like a conventional film score. Four primary thematic elements organize the franchise’s entire musical world, and understanding them individually is the prerequisite for understanding how they interact.

The first is what can be called the Jaskirat motif: a four-note ascending figure, built on a minor scale, that the franchise associates exclusively with Hamza’s original identity. It appears in its clearest form in the sequence establishing Jaskirat’s life before the operation, played on a bansuri that is warm, immediate, and alive with a particular quality of Indian folk melody that functions as musical shorthand for home, for roots, for the pre-operational self that the mission will systematically dismantle. What makes this motif architecturally brilliant is how Sachdev deploys it afterward. The Jaskirat motif does not disappear when Hamza is created. It persists, but it persists as a ghost: fragmentary, inverted, harmonically distorted, appearing in the score at precisely the moments when the original self is closest to breaking through the surface of the cover. When Hamza hears a bansuri player in the Lyari market and the camera catches the involuntary flicker of recognition on his face, the score sounds the Jaskirat motif in its original, unaltered form for exactly two seconds before absorbing it back into the Lyari texture. Those two seconds tell the audience everything about where Jaskirat is inside Hamza: present, intact, and inaccessible.

The second thematic element is the Lyari texture: not a melody in the conventional sense but a rhythmic and harmonic soundscape built from percussion instruments associated with Karachi’s street music, from the dholak patterns and the hand-drum interlockings that create a sonic geography of the environment Hamza inhabits. This texture is never warm in the way the Jaskirat motif is warm. It is energetic, it is complex, and it is genuinely compelling as music, but it carries a quality of foreignness in the franchise’s tonal world that is deliberate: the Lyari texture sounds like a place Hamza has learned to move through rather than a place he belongs to. As Part 1 progresses into Part 2 and Hamza deepens his cover, something troubling happens to the Lyari texture in the score: it begins to sound more comfortable. The foreignness doesn’t vanish, but its edges soften. The percussion sits with less urgency. Sachdev is tracking, in purely musical terms, the dangerous process by which Hamza’s cover world has stopped feeling foreign and started feeling like home. This is the score’s most quietly alarming accomplishment, and it does this tracking entirely without dialogue or visible character choice.

The third element is the RAW motif: sparse, electronic, built on a repeated tonal center that never resolves, never cadences, never arrives. It is the sound of institutional patience, of people in Delhi offices making decisions on the basis of information they cannot fully verify about a person they cannot fully protect. Where the Jaskirat motif is organic and the Lyari texture is earthly, the RAW motif is clinical: strings of a synthesized quality, piano chords that are precise without being human. When this motif appears during scenes between Hamza and his handlers, it does something that the dialogue in those scenes cannot: it reminds the audience that the institutional relationship operates on a different frequency from the human relationship, and that the two frequencies are ultimately incompatible.

The fourth element, the one that the franchise reserves for its most emotionally exposed moments, is what the score’s production notes describe as the longing phrase: a melodic line of extraordinary simplicity, usually played on solo strings, that functions as the score’s emotional center of gravity. Every other thematic element is defined partly by its relationship to this phrase: when it appears, it signals that the franchise is operating in its most honest register. The longing phrase is not associated with Hamza specifically, or with Jaskirat, or with India, or with the operation. It is associated with the franchise’s central unanswerable question: what would this person’s life have been if none of this had happened? It is the sound of a road not taken, heard from a great distance, and it is the most devastating musical gesture in a score full of devastating gestures. Its strategic deployment, placed in moments where the narrative creates a window in the performance armor that Hamza maintains, is the clearest evidence that the franchise’s music was designed as an architectural element of the storytelling rather than as an emotional supplement to it.

Understanding how these four thematic elements interact requires watching the franchise with the score as the primary object of attention rather than the secondary one. Most viewers of any film attend primarily to image and dialogue, processing the music as an emotional environment rather than as a text. The Dhurandhar score rewards a different mode of attention, one in which the music is treated as a parallel narrative stream that carries information the visual and verbal streams do not, and that will reveal that information to the listener willing to track it across the full runtime of both films.

The most instructive way to demonstrate the system’s sophistication is through a specific extended example. The sequence in Part 1 where Hamza is invited by Rehman to attend a celebration for his son’s birthday is staged visually as a scene of successful integration: Hamza laughs, participates, accepts warmth from Rehman’s family, and performs belonging with a fluency that confirms his cover is holding. The dialogue in the scene is light, full of banter and affectionate exchanges, with nothing in the written text that signals anything other than a successful evening. A viewer attending only to the visual and dialogue streams would read the scene as evidence that Hamza has completed his integration into Lyari’s social fabric.

The score tells a different story. The Lyari texture is present in the scene’s ambient scoring, but Sachdev layers over it a variant of the Jaskirat motif in a higher register than usual, and in a harmonic context that gives it a quality of strain rather than suppression: the motif is not buried under the Lyari texture as in most earlier scenes but audible above it, insisting on being heard. Simultaneously, the longing phrase appears twice during the scene in abbreviated form, both times at moments when the camera catches Hamza’s face at an angle that places him slightly outside the group, slightly behind the interaction’s warmth rather than inside it. The score is annotating what the camera knows but is too restrained to state directly: that the more successfully Hamza performs belonging, the more acutely he feels its absence.

This simultaneous reading of visual success and musical cost is the franchise’s central dramatic technique, and the score makes it possible. Without the Jaskirat motif’s heightened presence and the longing phrase’s abbreviated appearances, the birthday scene is one of the franchise’s lighter moments, a demonstration of operational success. With them, it is one of the franchise’s most quietly devastating scenes: an image of a man standing at the center of a celebration that is, in every meaningful sense, not for him. The music holds what the scene’s surface cannot acknowledge, and the gap between surface and subtext is where the character’s psychological reality lives.

The commercial dimension of this approach is also worth noting, because it connects the franchise’s artistic ambitions to its extraordinary commercial performance. The repeat viewership that drove both films’ sustained box office holds, particularly the Week 2 and Week 3 holdovers that exceeded industry projections for films of their runtime and rating, is at least partly attributable to the leitmotif system’s reward structure. Audiences returning to the franchise on second and third viewings are returning partly to hear the score with the knowledge of what each motif represents, to track the Jaskirat motif’s suppression and re-emergence with full understanding of what that suppression costs. The score creates a reason to return that the conventional action-film score, which can be fully absorbed on a single viewing, does not provide.

Song as Subtext: Irshad Kamil’s Lyrical Architecture

The Bollywood tradition of the film song creates a specific and unusual dramatic opportunity: the moment when a character’s internal state can be expressed in a register that realistic dramatic action cannot accommodate. Songs in the Hindi film tradition are not realistic. Characters do not spontaneously begin singing in their daily lives. The song exists in a semi-diegetic space, a space that is simultaneously inside the film’s world and outside its realistic conventions, and this liminal position gives the song a unique license to say what the scene’s realistic dialogue cannot.

The history of Hindi film music is, in part, a history of how filmmakers have exploited and occasionally squandered this license. At its most powerful, the Bollywood song has been the vehicle for some of the subcontinent’s most enduring poetry and most emotionally precise music, from the Sahir Ludhianvi and S.D. Burman collaborations of the 1950s and 1960s through the Gulzar and R.D. Burman partnership of the 1970s and early 1980s, which established a template for using the film song as literary and psychological instrument that subsequent decades have inconsistently honored. At its least effective, the Bollywood song is a commercial interruption: a sequence designed to provide a streaming hit and a promotional asset, connected to the surrounding film by the thinnest available narrative thread. The Dhurandhar franchise’s songs belong to the first tradition. They are not designed for promotional extract. They are designed for the specific moments in the specific films where they appear, and their value as standalone musical objects is secondary to their value as dramatic instruments.

Kamil has spoken in interviews about the challenge that the franchise’s brief presented: to write songs for a character who cannot be honest about anything, in a dramatic context where dishonesty is the operating condition. His solution was to write songs that are themselves honest about the experience of dishonesty, that describe from the inside what it feels like to live at the center of a sustained deception, using the formal resources of the Urdu lyric tradition that was built precisely for this kind of oblique truth-telling. Every song in the franchise is, at some level, about the gap between performance and reality, between what is shown and what is felt, between the face that Hamza presents to the world of Lyari and the face that only the score’s honest voice can see.

Irshad Kamil has understood this liminal position throughout his career, and in the Dhurandhar franchise he exploits it with unusual precision. Every song in the franchise’s official soundtrack exists at the exact intersection of the character’s cover identity and his real identity, written in language that can be read as the surface covers’ expression (a Pakistani man’s emotional life) and simultaneously as the subtext’s expression (an Indian operative’s concealed emotional life). This double coding is not accidental. It is the franchise’s most structurally sophisticated use of the song form: the songs do not merely express emotion, they express the impossibility of expressing emotion authentically in the film’s dramatic context, which is exactly Hamza’s predicament.

The double coding works because the Urdu lyric tradition already contains within itself the apparatus for this kind of simultaneous signification. Ghazal poetry has always been written for two audiences simultaneously: the audience that reads it as love poetry, taking its wine and beloved imagery at face value as romantic expression, and the audience that reads it as spiritual or political allegory, understanding the beloved as a figure for the divine or for a forbidden political ideal. Kamil is not inventing a new technique. He is applying an ancient one to a contemporary dramatic problem, and the fit is so precise that the franchise’s songs achieve their double-coding with an ease that only comes when the formal instrument and the expressive need are genuinely matched to each other.

The opening song of Part 1, which plays over a sequence establishing Hamza’s daily life in Lyari several years into the operation, is built around the Urdu concept of musafir: the traveler, the one who is always in transit between places. Kamil’s lyrics inhabit this concept from the perspective of someone who chose the journey and cannot choose to end it, someone for whom the destination has receded into abstraction while the road has become indistinguishable from home. The imagery is conventional in the ghazal tradition, which is part of the strategic camouflage: on the surface, these are the sentiments of any romantic song about separation and longing. But the specific words Kamil chooses, the specific grammatical constructions he uses to locate the singer in time and space, are calibrated to the franchise’s particular dramatic situation with a precision that rewards close reading. The phrase that translates roughly as “the city I walk through daily knows my name but not my face” is not a piece of Urdu poetry that could have appeared in any Bollywood film. It is a piece of Urdu poetry written for a man who lives under a false name in a city that knows exactly who Hamza is and has no idea who Jaskirat is.

The construction of that line is worth unpacking. In the Urdu grammatical structure Kamil uses, “name” and “face” are placed in a specific syntactical relationship that emphasizes the gap between social identity and physical reality: the city recognizes the social construct (the name Hamza Ali Mazari, with all the history and relationships that name has accumulated) but has no access to the physical reality (Jaskirat Singh Rangi, the body and face and neural architecture that the name Hamza is wearing). The line would be a conventional piece of urban loneliness poetry if it were read without the franchise’s dramatic context. With it, it is a precise description of the operative condition: to be known thoroughly as the person you are pretending to be, and unknown entirely as the person you actually are. Kamil locates the franchise’s central tragedy in fourteen syllables, using the ghazal tradition’s capacity for compressed meaning to do what a page of dramatic dialogue would struggle to accomplish.

The franchise’s most emotionally complex song appears late in Part 1, placed at the moment in the narrative when Hamza’s relationship with Yalina has deepened past the point where it serves purely operational purposes. The scene that precedes the song, and the scene that follows it, make clear that something has shifted in Hamza’s internal accounting of the mission: the relationship is no longer just a cover asset. It has become, against every professional instinct, something real. The song does not state this. Stating it would be a dramatic violation, because Hamza cannot acknowledge it even to himself without confronting the operational and moral implications. Instead, Kamil’s lyrics address a second-person “you” who is described in language that could be romantic but carries a quality of grief: the singer tells this “you” that their presence in his life has made him remember things he had decided to forget, that looking at them is looking at a world he thought he had permanently exited. The melody for this lyric, composed by Sachdev in a raga-adjacent mode that combines the franchise’s Lyari warmth with the harmonic language of the Jaskirat motif, is the song’s most precise emotional instrument: it is simultaneously the music of a man falling in love and the music of a man recognizing that the love is a betrayal he is perpetrating against both himself and the person he is falling for.

The franchise’s action sequence-adjacent song, which appears in Part 2 ahead of the climactic operational phase, is the most commercially oriented piece of music in either album and the one most criticized by observers who hold the franchise’s musical sophistication to a high standard. The criticism has merit: the track is built for a function, which is to heighten the audience’s anticipation for the confrontation the narrative has been building toward, and it delivers that function with maximum efficiency at some cost to the nuanced layering that the franchise’s best music achieves. But Kamil’s lyrics for this track contain a detail that rewards attention even in this more commercially directed piece: the recurring line that can be translated as “the man I am now was never the man I was supposed to be” is a compressed summary of the franchise’s central thesis about identity, placed in a musical context calculated to reach the widest possible audience. Even in its most commercial mode, the franchise’s lyrical intelligence does not entirely abandon its analytical project.

The final song of Part 2, placed over the closing sequence, is the franchise’s most formally ambitious piece of vocal writing and the one that brings Sachdev’s and Kamil’s collaboration to its most complete expression. The song revisits the melodic material of the Part 1 opening song but develops it in ways that the Part 1 version withheld: the harmonic resolution that the earlier version deferred is finally granted, the Jaskirat motif appears within the song’s melody rather than merely in the orchestral underscoring, and Kamil’s lyrics shift from the musafir’s perspective of endless transit to a single arresting image of arrival that is simultaneously hopeful and devastatingly ambiguous. Whether the arrival the song describes is Jaskirat returning to himself or Hamza finally accepting the self the operation has constructed for him is a question the lyrics deliberately refuse to answer. The song’s closing phrase, a variant of the longing phrase delivered vocally for the first time in either film, lands in the space between those two readings and stays there. The music, which has been the franchise’s honest voice for six hours, ends by offering the audience the same unresolvable question the narrative has been building toward. This is the final statement of what Sachdev and Kamil have built across the franchise: not a score that tells the audience how to feel, but a score that gives the audience the musical tools to understand what they are being asked to feel, and the grace to let the feeling remain unresolved.

This is what separates the Dhurandhar soundtrack from the conventional Bollywood franchise soundtrack. The songs in the Tiger films or the Pathaan universe are designed as entertainment events: they are enjoyed in the moment, remembered afterward, and exist in a relatively uncomplicated relationship to the films they inhabit. The Dhurandhar songs are designed to be felt rather than enjoyed, and they are constructed to carry analytical weight that only becomes fully legible when the listener understands what is happening in the narrative at the moment of their placement. They are not songs about the film. They are songs that are doing part of the film’s work.

The Doja Cat Question and the Franchise’s Global Ambitions

The most discussed and most misunderstood musical decision in the Dhurandhar franchise is its use of Doja Cat’s “Aaahh Men!” as the teaser track for Part 1’s promotional campaign. The decision generated controversy in proportion to its unexpectedness: a Hindi-language spy thriller about RAW operations in Karachi building its pre-release identity around an American pop star known for a sound that has nothing obvious to do with Bollywood conventions or the franchise’s own eventual tonal register. The controversy was real, but the reactions to it, both the outrage and the defensive dismissal of the outrage, missed the decision’s actual significance.

The strategic argument for the Doja Cat choice is legible and defensible: Aditya Dhar and the franchise’s marketing team were making a statement about the kind of film Dhurandhar intended to be and the kind of audience it intended to reach. The use of a Western artist for a teaser that would circulate primarily on social media before any of the film’s actual content was visible was a signal: this film is not asking to be compared to the Tiger franchise or to Pathaan. It is asking to be compared to something globally ambitious. The choice positions the franchise not as the latest entry in a recognizable domestic genre but as an Indian cultural export that should be evaluated against international benchmarks. Whatever one thinks of the musical match between Doja Cat’s sound and the franchise’s eventual tone, the strategic intent is coherent.

The artistic argument is more complex. The track used in the teaser, with its electronic production and Doja Cat’s specific vocal register, does share something with the franchise’s eventual musical world: a quality of surface cool over emotional depth, a gap between what is performed and what is felt. In this narrow sense, the choice is not as random as critics suggested. But it is also true that the track’s placement in the teaser created audience expectations that the films themselves systematically refused to fulfill. Viewers who came to Part 1 expecting the energy the teaser promised found instead a film whose musical world is closer to Gulzar-era intimacy than to contemporary Western pop production. The mismatch is a marketing failure even if it is not an artistic incoherence, and the franchise’s team has acknowledged that the teaser’s tone was a miscommunication with the audience about what kind of film they were about to see.

Within the films themselves, the track does not appear. This is significant: the Doja Cat choice was a threshold decision, used to announce the franchise’s existence and global ambitions, and then deliberately set aside in favor of the films’ actual sonic identity. Sachdev’s score, Kamil’s lyrics, and the franchise’s actual musical character have nothing in common with the teaser track. The discontinuity between the teaser’s musical language and the films’ musical language is the clearest evidence that the Doja Cat decision was a marketing instrument rather than an artistic statement, and evaluating it solely as an artistic statement misreads what it was intended to do.

What the controversy reveals, more usefully, is the franchise’s genuine ambition to address a global audience, and the tension between that ambition and the franchise’s actual creative identity, which is deeply rooted in Indian musical and literary traditions. The Jaskirat motif on a bansuri, the ghazal-inflected poetry of Kamil’s lyrics, the raga-adjacent melodic language of the franchise’s most emotionally significant cues: these are not globally legible in the way that the Doja Cat teaser attempted to be. They are legible to an audience fluent in the traditions they draw on, and deeply resonant to that audience, but they require cultural translation for viewers outside those traditions. The franchise’s actual musical identity is the opposite of its teaser’s musical identity, and the gap between the two tells you something true about the creative and commercial tensions at the heart of any Bollywood film aspiring to simultaneous global reach and domestic depth.

The controversy’s specific course is also worth examining, because the demographics of the reaction revealed something about the franchise’s potential audience that the marketing team may not have fully anticipated. The strongest negative response to the Doja Cat choice came not from audiences who preferred traditional Bollywood music but from audiences who were enthusiastic about the franchise’s serious artistic ambitions and felt that the teaser’s choice undermined the credibility signal they were hoping the franchise would send. In other words, the people most upset by the teaser were, in many cases, precisely the audience who would most appreciate what Sachdev and Kamil had actually built. The marketing decision managed to alienate the audience most invested in what it was trying to attract, while attracting audiences who would subsequently be disappointed by the tonal mismatch between the teaser and the films. This is a textbook illustration of the risk of decoupling marketing communication from creative identity, and it is a lesson that the franchise’s subsequent marketing, which leaned heavily into the actual score’s emotional register and Kamil’s lyrics, appeared to absorb.

Part 1 vs Part 2: How the Score Evolves

Comparing the score across the two installments reveals a compositional strategy that parallels the franchise’s narrative development with a precision that demonstrates how thoroughly Sachdev integrated his musical thinking with the dramatic arc Aditya Dhar was constructing.

Part 1’s score is, above all, a score of constraint. It is music written for a character who is learning the rules of a new world and who cannot afford the emotional luxury of registering what the learning costs him. The Lyari texture dominates the ambient scoring of the Karachi sequences, but it dominates in a way that feels externally imposed: the audience hears it as Hamza hears it, as the sonic environment of a place he must learn to navigate rather than a place he has chosen. The RAW motif appears in the Delhi and handler sequences with a regularity that establishes it as the structural frame of the operation: these are the institutional coordinates within which everything else occurs. The Jaskirat motif is present but suppressed, appearing in fragments that are quickly absorbed by the surrounding musical context, functioning as a kind of musical subconscious rather than a conscious voice.

The emotional breakthrough moments in Part 1’s score, the longing phrase and its variants, are placed with extraordinary strategic care. Sachdev understands that a score of unrelieved constraint would exhaust the audience before the films’ emotional stakes have fully registered. The longing phrase provides release valves: moments where the score allows the emotional truth of Hamza’s situation to surface fully, creating the kind of cathartic release that makes the subsequent return to constraint bearable. These releases are brief. They are carefully rationed. And they are placed at the moments in the narrative where the constraint is most acutely felt, so that the release is simultaneously a relief and a reminder of what has to be sacrificed when it ends.

Part 2’s score is, by contrast, a score of accumulation. Everything that was fragmentary in Part 1 becomes whole in Part 2. The Jaskirat motif, which spent an entire first film as a ghostly interruption, emerges in Part 2 in extended statements that can no longer be absorbed or suppressed by the surrounding musical context. This is not primarily because the narrative gives Jaskirat more space to surface: it is because the musical grammar has shifted. Sachdev’s orchestration in Part 2 gives the Jaskirat motif fuller harmonic support, allowing it to complete its phrases in a way Part 1 systematically denied it. The score is tracking the impossibility of continued containment: by Part 2, whatever is left of Jaskirat inside Hamza is no longer cooperating with the suppression, and the score registers this as a compositional fact rather than as a narrative announcement.

The revenge arc that drives Part 2’s narrative is also tracked in the score with a melodic evolution that is worth close attention. The franchise’s violence cues, which in Part 1 were characterized by rhythmic propulsion and tonal instability that conveyed the physical unpredictability of combat, develop in Part 2 into something more ominous and, paradoxically, more melodic. Sachdev introduces a theme for the revenge motif that shares harmonic material with the longing phrase, but inverts its emotional content: where the longing phrase descends, the revenge theme ascends, and where the longing phrase arrives at an unresolved suspension, the revenge theme arrives at a hard, final cadence. The musical message is precise: the revenge Hamza pursues in Part 2 is the negative of the longing he has carried through Part 1. It is the same emotional energy redirected from yearning into action, from the passive experience of loss into the active project of accounting for it.

Whether Part 2’s score matures or merely escalates relative to Part 1 is a question worth addressing directly. The honest answer is: it does both. The orchestral resources are larger in Part 2, and there are moments where that largeness serves spectacle rather than story, where Sachdev reaches for maximum emotional impact in a scene that would be better served by restraint. The franchise’s most commercially oriented action sequences in Part 2 receive scoring that is closer to the YRF franchise’s emphatic mode than to the psychological specificity that distinguishes Part 1’s scoring at its best. This is a creative compromise rather than a creative failure: Part 2 is a larger commercial event than Part 1, and the score reflects the commercial pressures that a sequel carries. But the core of the scoring, the leitmotif system, the strategic deployment of the longing phrase, the tracking of the Jaskirat motif’s re-emergence, remains as architecturally sophisticated as anything in Part 1. The franchise’s musical intelligence is intact in Part 2 even where its musical restraint occasionally slips.

There is one specific compositional decision in Part 2’s score that deserves particular attention because it is the score’s most formally ambitious single gesture: the sequence where the Jaskirat motif appears simultaneously with the Lyari texture for the first time in either film. In Part 1, these two thematic elements never occupy the same musical space. The Jaskirat motif surfaces only in the gaps between the Lyari texture’s rhythmic patterns, existing in the negative spaces that the cover world’s ambient sound leaves open. This mutual exclusivity is the musical representation of the cover’s successful operation: the two identities do not overlap because the cover performance is functioning as it should. In Part 2, at a moment in the narrative that the analysis of the franchise’s complete arc identifies as the operational breaking point, the two elements sound together for the first time. The Jaskirat motif plays over the Lyari texture rather than through its gaps, and the effect is musical dissonance of a specific, controlled kind: not cacophony, but two things occupying the same space that were not designed to coexist. It is the sonic equivalent of the moment when a cover breaks: not a dramatic revelation but a structural impossibility, two incompatible realities suddenly audible in the same frequency range.

Sachdev achieves this effect with compositional tools that are formally elegant rather than electronically produced. He transposes the Jaskirat motif into a harmonic area that is adjacent to the Lyari texture’s tonal center rather than opposed to it, which means the two elements can coexist without sounding violently wrong. The result is an unease rather than a rupture, which is exactly the right register for what the narrative is doing at that moment: something is failing in the operational container that has held Jaskirat’s identity at bay for years, and the failure is not yet visible on the surface. The music hears it before anyone in the film can see it, and it reports it to the audience with a precision that no quantity of expository dialogue could match.

This moment in Part 2’s score is, for the analysis this article develops, the clearest single demonstration of what Sachdev has built across both films. The leitmotif system’s full payoff, the reason the Jaskirat motif was established with such care in Part 1 and tracked so precisely through its suppressions and fragmentations, is this moment of simultaneous presence: when the audience who has been listening to the score as a narrative stream hears the two elements together for the first time and understands, immediately and without any verbal announcement, that a threshold has been crossed. The music has been patient for an entire film and a significant portion of a second to earn this moment, and when it arrives, it is worth the wait.

Sound Design as the Score’s Foundation

Any analysis of the Dhurandhar franchise’s sonic world that focuses exclusively on score and songs misses a third layer that is as carefully constructed as either: the sound design. The franchise’s foley work, ambient sound construction, and spatial audio decisions are not supplementary to the storytelling. They are, in several of the franchise’s most important sequences, the primary storytelling instrument.

The Lyari soundscape that Sachdev’s score draws from is not invented from whole cloth. It is built on a foundation of ambient sound that the sound design team constructed to give the neighborhood its specific sonic identity: the particular acoustic quality of narrow streets with close walls, the pattern of call and response between vendors and buyers in the market sequences, the way traffic noise is absorbed differently by the dense urban fabric of the residential area versus the more open commercial zones. This specificity of ambient sound serves the same function that production design serves visually: it makes the world feel inhabited rather than constructed, and it makes Hamza’s navigation of that world feel like navigation of a real place rather than a set.

The franchise’s treatment of gunfire acoustics is one of its most discussed sound design choices and one of its most deliberate ones. The gunfire in Dhurandhar does not sound like the gunfire in a YRF film. Where the YRF franchise uses heightened, Hollywood-adjacent gun sound effects that carry a quality of power and precision, Dhurandhar’s gunfire is recorded with a proximity and an acoustic reality that makes it sound genuinely dangerous rather than dramatically exciting. The difference is not technical sophistication. It is artistic intent. The franchise wants gunfire to register as a threat rather than as a spectacular event, and the sound design achieves this by stripping away the production enhancement that makes action-film gunfire thrilling and replacing it with the kind of sound that reverberates in enclosed spaces, that continues after the source has stopped, that leaves a ringing quality in the ambient audio that takes several seconds to clear.

Silence is the franchise’s most powerful sound design tool, and its deployment is the most clearly intentional of any sonic decision in the films. Dhurandhar uses silence in the way that skilled writers use white space: as punctuation that gives the material around it more weight. The two seconds of silence that follow certain violent events in both films, before the ambient Lyari soundscape reasserts itself, are not merely pauses in the sound design. They are statements about the weight of what just happened, delivered in the language that weight requires, which is the language of absence rather than presence. A conventional action film fills these moments with score, with sound effect, with something that directs the audience’s emotional processing. Dhurandhar leaves them empty and trusts the audience to fill them with the emotional register that the preceding scene has earned.

The franchise’s most technically adventurous sound design work occurs in the sequences depicting Hamza’s psychological dissociation, the moments when the boundary between his cover identity and his real identity becomes permeable. These sequences use a spatial audio approach that subtly alters the acoustic character of the scene: ambient sounds that are normally placed in the surrounding environment begin to feel like they are coming from inside Hamza’s head, and the score’s leitmotifs, which normally operate in the film’s conventional non-diegetic space, acquire a slightly diegetic quality as if Hamza himself is hearing them. This is a sophisticated manipulation of the listener’s spatial perception, and it creates an uncanny effect that reinforces the psychological instability the narrative is depicting without requiring any visible technique to achieve it.

The franchise’s sound design team, working under Aditya Dhar’s specific instructions about the sonic world he wanted to construct, spent several months in pre-production building a library of ambient sound recordings from locations that approximated the franchise’s Karachi settings. These recordings were then mixed and layered to create the Lyari soundscape with a degree of specificity that is immediately perceptible to listeners familiar with dense South Asian urban environments. The call to prayer that punctuates several of the Karachi sequences is recorded with a spatial quality that places it precisely in the middle distance, close enough to be heard clearly but far enough to register as the neighborhood’s ambient religious life rather than as a foregrounded dramatic element. The market sequences use a layered approach to crowd sound that creates a sense of depth, of sound sources at multiple distances and directions, that makes the Lyari market feel like an environment the camera is moving through rather than a set it has been arranged in front of.

The pre-production investment in ambient sound library building paid dividends across both films in ways that went beyond the Lyari sequences. The Delhi sequences in the franchise have a sonic identity that is as carefully constructed as Lyari’s, but constructed to produce the opposite emotional effect: where Lyari is warm, layered, and organically human in its ambient texture, the institutional spaces of RAW’s operations are rendered with a specific acoustic dryness that carries the quality of controlled environments, of spaces designed to prevent the kind of spontaneous human noise that characterizes Lyari’s streets. The contrast between these two sonic worlds is part of the franchise’s broader argument about the institutional versus the human, and it is a contrast that the sound design sustains with a consistency that makes it a structural element of the storytelling rather than an incidental aesthetic choice.

The sound design’s most counterintuitive achievement is in the franchise’s quietest scenes. The dialogue-writing analysis of the franchise makes the argument that Dhurandhar’s most powerful dramatic moments are often built on what is not said. The sound design team understood this complementary principle about sonic absence, and the quiet scenes in both films are constructed with a deliberateness that makes the ambient sound feel like a presence rather than a background condition. The specific acoustic quality of a Lyari apartment at two in the morning, the particular blend of distant traffic and neighborhood dogs and the settling of an old building, creates a sonic environment that carries its own emotional weight independently of anything the score or the dialogue is doing. These sounds are not randomly selected or generically urban. They have been chosen and arranged to produce a specific quality of inhabited quiet that makes the spaces the characters occupy feel real in a way that a silent or conventionally scored room would not.

This attention to the inhabited quality of silence also functions as a character instrument, particularly for Hamza. The scenes in which he is alone in his apartment, between the public performance of his cover and the next required social encounter, are scored entirely through ambient sound rather than through the score’s conventional non-diegetic elements. These are not scenes scored with silence because there is nothing to say. They are scenes scored with a specific, curated sonic environment that communicates the particular texture of solitude-in-disguise: a man alone in a place that is not his, in a life that is not his, in a silence that belongs to Hamza when Jaskirat would have filled it differently.

The sound design’s relationship to the franchise’s action sequences is equally considered. The decision to record the franchise’s gunfire with documentary-adjacent acoustic realism rather than the heightened, polished sound effects of conventional action cinema is a sound design choice that carries dramatic significance beyond its technical parameters. Gunfire that sounds like a real gun fired in a real enclosed space has a quality of consequence that the conventional action-film gun sound does not: it reverberates, it rings in the ears of anyone nearby, it leaves an acoustic residue in the space that the next several seconds of sound must recover from. This acoustic consequence is a form of violence that the sound design is adding to the narrative independently of anything the score or the image provides, and it is one of the franchise’s most important tools for making its violence feel like something that matters rather than something that entertains.

Where the Franchise Falls Short

A serious analysis of the Dhurandhar franchise’s music must acknowledge the places where the ambition of Sachdev’s approach exceeds its execution, because those places are real and they matter.

The most consistent failure mode in the franchise’s scoring is the treatment of its action set pieces, particularly in Part 2. The leitmotif system that Sachdev has constructed is optimized for scenes of psychological texture and emotional interiority: it excels at tracking Hamza’s internal states, at marking transitions in the relationship between his cover and his real self, at scoring the franchise’s most intimate and dramatically nuanced material. It is less well-suited to the extended action sequences that the franchise’s commercial obligations require, and the scoring of those sequences falls back on genre conventions that the rest of the score is working against. The warehouse fight in Part 1 is scored with enough restraint that the action sequences’ sound design can do its work. Several of Part 2’s larger action sequences are over-scored in ways that push the audience toward a conventional action-movie emotional response that contradicts the psychological seriousness the franchise has been building toward.

There is a specific compositional problem that the over-scoring of Part 2’s action sequences creates: it weakens the leitmotif system’s impact in the scenes that immediately follow. The score’s psychological tools, particularly the Jaskirat motif and the longing phrase, require a certain ambient restraint in the surrounding musical environment to register with full effect. When the surrounding environment has just been filled with the full orchestral resources of a conventional action score, the psychological tools need time to re-establish the restrained sonic context that makes them legible. Part 2 does not always allow this re-establishment time, moving from the action sequences’ emphatic scoring directly into scenes where the leitmotif system needs to be heard clearly. The transitions between these modes can feel abrupt, and the abruptness costs the more nuanced material some of its impact.

There is also a structural issue in the song placement in Part 2 that reflects the different creative pressures a sequel carries. Part 1’s songs are placed with the precision the analysis above describes: each one occupies an exact narrative position, earns its position by serving a specific dramatic function, and would be noticeably absent if removed. Two of Part 2’s songs feel slightly less necessary, placed at moments where the narrative could accommodate them without specifically requiring them. The songs themselves are excellent: Kamil’s lyrics remain as precisely calibrated as in Part 1, and Sachdev’s melodic writing is at no point inferior to his Part 1 work. The placement question is a structural one, a consequence of the sequel needing to deliver a certain number of songs as commercial product rather than purely as dramatic instruments.

A less discussed but real limitation of the franchise’s musical approach is its handling of the supporting characters’ sonic identities. The analysis notes in passing that several key supporting figures have musical associations in the score, but these associations are considerably less developed than the primary system organized around Hamza’s psychology. Rehman’s musical coloring is effective but sketchy: it suggests his character’s complexity without fully exploring it. The supporting characters who populate the franchise’s world and who are among its most celebrated dramatic achievements have, in the score, a thinner musical identity than their dramatic richness would justify. Sachdev made a defensible choice in keeping the score’s primary attention on Hamza’s psychology, given the franchise’s six-hour ambition, but the cost is a slight thinness in the musical portraiture of characters whose dramatic complexity deserves a fuller sonic accounting.

The franchise’s sound design, for all its achievement, also has a limit that becomes apparent in the overseas release versions. The Lyari soundscape that grounds the franchise’s sonic world is constructed with a specificity that is fully legible to audiences familiar with the acoustic character of dense South Asian urban environments, and somewhat less legible to audiences who are not. The ambient sound design that makes Lyari feel real to a Mumbai or Lahore audience functions differently for a diaspora audience watching in a multiplex in London or Houston, where the sonic reference points are absent. This is not a failure of craft. It is a limitation of the franchise’s cultural specificity, the same limitation that applies to its visual world-building and its literary references. The franchise’s ambition to reach a global audience runs into the genuine untranslatability of its most deeply local artistic choices.

The Bigger Argument: What Music Reveals About the Franchise’s Theory of Character

The full significance of what Shashwat Sachdev and Irshad Kamil have built for the Dhurandhar franchise only becomes clear when you ask what the franchise’s musical world reveals about its theory of character and communication.

The franchise’s central dramatic premise is that its protagonist cannot be honest with anyone. This is not a temporary plot constraint that will be resolved when the operation ends. It is the fundamental condition of Hamza’s existence across six hours of film. He cannot tell Yalina who he is. He cannot tell Rehman what he wants. He cannot tell his RAW handlers what the operation is actually costing him because that information would compromise his professional value. He cannot even tell himself the full truth about what the decade of deception has done to his sense of self, because acknowledging it might disable the performance he depends on for survival.

In this context, the decision to build a score that tells the truth at every moment is not a compositional choice among others. It is the franchise’s fundamental response to its own dramatic problem. Hamza cannot speak honestly. The score speaks honestly for him. And because Sachdev constructs the score with leitmotifs that the audience gradually learns to read, the score becomes a secondary communication channel that bypasses the franchise’s surface discourse of systematic deception and delivers emotional information directly. The audience knows what Hamza is feeling not because Ranveer Singh tells them with a conventional dramatic performance, not because the screenplay states it, but because the four-note descending figure they have heard seventeen times before appears under a scene where Hamza is performing contentment, and the gap between the performance and the music is where the character’s truth lives.

This is cinema working at its most sophisticated level: using the resources of the medium to communicate something that the surface narrative cannot communicate by conventional means. The cinematography analysis of the Dhurandhar franchise argues that the visual language tells a parallel story to the script. The music analysis reaches the same conclusion from a different direction: both the camera and the score are doing the work that Hamza cannot do for himself, and together they create a franchise that operates on multiple simultaneous frequencies, with each frequency carrying information that the others cannot.

The comparison to how other Bollywood spy films use music, already developed in the genre comparison article, is also relevant here at the level of theory. The YRF franchise uses music to amplify what is already visible in the scene: action gets exciting music, romance gets romantic music, triumph gets triumphant music. The music confirms rather than complicates. Sachdev’s score for Dhurandhar is built on the opposite principle: the music often contradicts what is visible. When Hamza performs ease and belonging in the Lyari sequences, the score’s Jaskirat motif surfaces to tell the audience that he is not at ease, that he does not belong. The contradiction between visual surface and musical subtext is the franchise’s most consistently deployed technique for communicating its protagonist’s psychology, and it is a technique that presupposes an audience willing to hear what the score is saying in addition to watching what the character is doing.

This presupposition is a form of respect for the audience that the YRF model does not extend. It assumes that viewers can receive and process information from two simultaneous channels, that they can hold the surface performance and the musical subtext in mind simultaneously and understand the gap between them as the primary dramatic content. The franchise’s commercial success, visible in the collection data that charts the franchise’s extraordinary box office run, suggests that this presupposition was correct: the audience Dhurandhar found was exactly the kind of audience that receives music as information rather than just as atmosphere.

The score’s relationship to the Hamza character analysis is worth one more observation before the article’s conclusion. Film scores are frequently praised for being emotionally powerful, but the Dhurandhar score’s specific achievement is something different: it is epistemically powerful. The score does not merely move the audience. It informs them. It gives them access to knowledge, specifically the knowledge of what Hamza is actually experiencing beneath the cover performance, that no other element of the film provides so directly or so reliably. An audience that is fluent in the score’s language by the midpoint of Part 1 knows more about Hamza’s inner life than any character in the film knows, including Hamza himself. This epistemic function, the score as the audience’s privileged access point to a character who cannot be known through conventional dramatic means, is Sachdev’s most original contribution to the franchise and to Indian film scoring, and it is what makes the Dhurandhar soundtrack an object of sustained analytical interest rather than merely an excellent piece of commercial film music.

The broader cultural argument implicit in the franchise’s musical choices is worth stating explicitly. By building its emotional communication system on Indian classical music’s raga framework, on the Urdu ghazal’s tradition of layered meaning, on the folk music of the Punjab and the street music of Karachi, Sachdev and Kamil are making an argument about what Indian cinema can do with the materials of its own cultural inheritance. The global aspirations of the franchise, announced in the Doja Cat controversy, are ultimately less important than the franchise’s actual achievement, which is to demonstrate that the emotional range and the formal sophistication required to sustain a six-hour psychological epic are available within Indian musical traditions and do not need to be borrowed from Western models. Hamza’s unspoken inner life is expressed in music that is rooted in the culture his undercover identity has claimed to be born into, and this is not a coincidence. It is the franchise’s deepest musical statement: that the forms of a culture carry its truth even when an individual inhabiting those forms does not belong to it. The music knows where Hamza is from, and it also knows where he is. The tragedy, compressed into every appearance of the longing phrase, is that neither location is somewhere he can currently afford to be.

The argument the score makes about cinema’s expressive resources extends beyond the franchise’s own ambitions. The Dhurandhar franchise’s music demonstrates something that Indian film music has been capable of demonstrating for decades but has rarely been given the cinematic context to demonstrate fully: that the raga system’s capacity for emotional precision, the ghazal tradition’s capacity for layered semantic depth, and the subcontinent’s folk music traditions’ capacity for genuine earthliness and human warmth are resources for psychological portraiture of the highest order. The score does not achieve its effects by importing the conventions of European art music or Hollywood scoring practice. It achieves them by taking the Indian musical inheritance seriously on its own terms and applying those terms to a dramatic problem that the inheritance was designed, over centuries, to address: the problem of how to express what cannot be spoken, how to give voice to what social and political reality demands be suppressed.

Sachdev and Kamil have, in other words, solved the franchise’s central dramatic problem using the formal tools of the culture that the franchise’s undercover setting requires Hamza to perform fluency in. This creates a loop of appropriateness that is not accidental: the music that tells the truth about Jaskirat’s trapped situation is built from the same traditions that Hamza has had to master in order to maintain his cover as Hamza. The score’s honesty and the character’s deception are built from the same cultural materials. This is the kind of formal intelligence that separates a great film score from a competent one, and it is the quality that will ensure the Dhurandhar franchise’s music remains a reference point for serious discussions of Indian film scoring for years beyond its commercial moment.

The relationship between the score and the franchise’s complete emotional architecture is, finally, a relationship between a problem and a solution that were designed for each other. The problem: how do you tell the audience what a character is feeling when the character cannot express his feelings to anyone, including himself? The solution: give the audience a second narrative channel, built from the oldest and most sophisticated emotional communication systems the culture has produced, and trust them to read it. The Dhurandhar franchise built this channel with the care and the precision it deserved, and the audience, as the franchise’s extraordinary commercial trajectory demonstrates, found it and used it. The music was heard. The honest voice in a franchise of systematic deception was not only present but legible. That is the franchise’s musical achievement, and it is one that the Bollywood spy film, and perhaps Bollywood film generally, will be working to match for the foreseeable future.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who composed the Dhurandhar background score?

Shashwat Sachdev composed both the background score and the songs for the Dhurandhar franchise. Sachdev had previously established his Bollywood credentials with scores for a diverse range of films across multiple genres, but the Dhurandhar project represents a significant expansion of his compositional ambition. The franchise required him to develop a leitmotif-based architectural approach that sustained musical coherence across approximately six hours of runtime across two films, which is a compositional challenge with few precedents in Hindi cinema. Irshad Kamil wrote the lyrics for all of the franchise’s songs, bringing his established reputation for literary depth and semantic precision in Urdu film lyric writing to material that specifically required both qualities.

Q: Who wrote the lyrics for the Dhurandhar songs?

Irshad Kamil is the lyricist for the Dhurandhar franchise’s songs. Kamil is among the most respected lyric writers in contemporary Hindi film music, known for his ability to use the conventions of classical Urdu poetry forms, particularly the ghazal’s tradition of multiple layers of meaning accessible to different registers of reading, in service of specific dramatic and emotional narrative functions. His approach to the Dhurandhar brief was to write songs that could be read simultaneously as expressions of the cover identity Hamza performs and as expressions of the real identity that cover is concealing. The resulting lyrics are among the most precisely calibrated in the franchise’s songwriting across any major Bollywood film of its era.

Q: What is the main theme of the Dhurandhar Part 1 background score?

The Part 1 score is organized around four primary thematic elements: the Jaskirat motif, a four-note ascending figure played on bansuri that represents Hamza’s original identity and appears in fragmentary, suppressed form throughout the film; the Lyari texture, a rhythmic and harmonic soundscape built from Karachi street percussion that establishes the cover world’s sonic geography; the RAW motif, a sparse electronic theme associated with the institutional framework of Operation Dhurandhar; and the longing phrase, a melodic line on solo strings that functions as the score’s emotional center of gravity, appearing at the franchise’s most emotionally exposed moments to express the cost of what the operation requires. The interaction among these four elements is the score’s primary compositional activity across the film’s runtime.

Q: Why did Dhurandhar use a Doja Cat song for its teaser?

The use of Doja Cat’s “Aaahh Men!” for the franchise’s pre-release teaser was a marketing decision designed to signal the franchise’s global ambitions and position it as an internationally aspirational project rather than a domestically coded Bollywood genre film. The choice generated significant controversy because the track’s sonic character bears no obvious relationship to the films’ actual musical world, which is built on Indian classical frameworks, Urdu lyric traditions, and the street music of South Asian urban environments. The track does not appear in either film. Aditya Dhar and the marketing team have acknowledged that the teaser created a tonal expectation for the films that the films themselves systematically refused to fulfill, and that this mismatch was a communication error even if the underlying strategic intent was coherent.

Q: How does the Dhurandhar score compare to the music in the YRF Spy Universe films?

The fundamental difference is one of function rather than quality. The YRF Spy Universe, across Pathaan, the Tiger franchise, and War, uses music to amplify what is already visible in the scene: action sequences receive energizing scores, romantic scenes receive melodic accompaniment, triumphant moments receive swelling orchestration. The music confirms and intensifies the scene’s visible emotional content. Sachdev’s Dhurandhar score is built on the opposite principle: it often contradicts the visible surface of the scene to deliver emotional information that the character cannot express through conventional dramatic means. When Hamza performs comfort and belonging, the score sounds the Jaskirat motif to tell the audience he is neither comfortable nor belonging. This contradiction between visual performance and musical subtext is the franchise’s primary character communication technique, and it presupposes a level of audience attention to the score that the YRF films do not require.

Q: What role does silence play in the Dhurandhar soundtrack?

Silence is the franchise’s most powerful sonic instrument, deployed with the strategic precision of any of its composed elements. The two-to-three seconds of near-complete silence that follow several of the franchise’s most significant violent events are not absent of intention. They are statements about weight, delivered in the language that weight specifically requires, which is the absence of sound rather than its presence. The franchise’s sound design understands that filling these moments with score or sound effect would direct the audience’s emotional processing toward a pre-determined response. Leaving them empty requires the audience to supply the emotional content from their own engagement with what preceded the silence, which is both more demanding and more effective than direction by musical cue. The silence also serves a structural function in the franchise’s leitmotif system: it is the negative space that gives the longing phrase its impact when it eventually appears.

Q: Is the Dhurandhar Part 2 score better than Part 1?

The two scores are doing different things and serve different dramatic phases of the franchise’s overall arc, so direct comparison is less useful than understanding how they relate. Part 1’s score is a score of constraint and suppression, optimized for tracking a character who cannot afford to register what his situation costs him. Part 2’s score is a score of accumulation and release, tracking the process by which the suppressed elements of Part 1 can no longer be contained. Both scores are sophisticated and internally coherent. Part 2’s score has moments of over-scoring in the larger action sequences, where commercial pressures push the music toward a more conventional action-film register that the franchise’s best material resists. But Part 2’s handling of the Jaskirat motif’s re-emergence is the franchise’s most emotionally accomplished scoring achievement across either film. Neither installment’s score is comprehensively superior. They are halves of a single musical argument.

Q: What is the most important scene in Dhurandhar for understanding how the score works?

The balcony scene in Part 1, which occurs shortly after a dinner sequence in which Hamza has performed warmth and ease within Rehman’s inner circle, is the franchise’s most concise demonstration of how Sachdev uses the score to communicate what the character cannot. Hamza steps out alone, says nothing, does nothing visible. The camera holds on his face. The score sounds the longing phrase over the Lyari ambient texture, and the gap between the phrase’s emotional register and the sounds of the world Hamza has chosen to inhabit tells the audience everything about the human cost of the evening they just watched. The scene works without the score, but it is merely functional without it. With the score, it is one of the franchise’s most emotionally resonant moments. If you want to understand the argument this article makes about the score’s function as the honest voice in a franchise built on deception, watch this scene with the sound off and then watch it again with the sound on. The difference between those two viewings is the thesis.

Q: Does the Dhurandhar soundtrack work if you listen to it outside the films?

The soundtrack album, stripped of its visual and narrative context, reveals two of the franchise’s musical personalities simultaneously. The songs, which are constructed with enough internal lyrical and melodic interest to sustain independent listening, work well outside the films. Kamil’s poetry rewards re-reading in the way that good Urdu lyric writing always does, and Sachdev’s melodic writing for the songs is accessible and emotionally affecting on its own terms. The background score’s leitmotif system, however, is optimized for the contextual recognition that repeated film viewing develops: the four-note Jaskirat motif gains its full emotional power only when the listener knows what it represents and can track its fragmentation across the franchise’s runtime. Listeners encountering the score album without having seen the films will hear technically accomplished orchestral writing without being able to access the emotional architecture that makes it meaningful. The score is designed for the films, and the films are what the score requires to fully function.

Q: How does the Dhurandhar music handle the transition between the franchise’s Indian and Pakistani settings?

The transition between the Delhi sequences and the Lyari sequences is one of the score’s most carefully managed compositional challenges. Sachdev uses the contrast between the RAW motif’s electronic, institutional character and the Lyari texture’s organic, percussive character to musically establish the two worlds before the film’s visual grammar has fully registered the transition. The result is that the audience experiences a change in sonic atmosphere at the cut between settings, a shift in the music’s fundamental character that primes them for the change in dramatic context before the image has fully landed. This technique is most effective in the franchise’s early sequences, when the contrast between the two worlds needs to be established with maximum clarity. As Part 2 progresses and the franchise’s musical worlds have grown more familiar to the audience, the transitions can be handled with less emphasis because the leitmotif system has given the audience the tools to navigate between them without musical direction.

Q: What is Irshad Kamil’s approach to writing for characters under pressure?

Kamil’s most consistent technique across his career is the use of indirection: saying through the conventions of romantic or philosophical poetry what cannot be said directly within the dramatic context. For the Dhurandhar franchise, this technique is uniquely suited to the central character’s predicament, because Hamza is a man who genuinely cannot say anything directly to anyone. Kamil builds his franchise lyrics around images that are simultaneously conventional within the ghazal tradition and precisely calibrated to the franchise’s specific dramatic situation. The musafir (traveler) imagery, the borrowed-face imagery, the lighting-a-lamp-in-a-foreign-house imagery: each of these is legible within the tradition as romantic poetry, and each of them is also a precise description of an undercover operative’s daily psychological experience. The double coding does not feel forced because Kamil understands that the ghazal tradition has always been a form of coded communication, always been about saying in the language of love what the social or political context forbids saying in the language of fact.

Q: Was the Dhurandhar music well-received by critics?

The critical response to the Dhurandhar franchise’s music was broadly positive, with reviewers consistently noting the background score’s unusual sophistication and its integration with the films’ psychological depth. Sachdev received specific praise for the leitmotif architecture of the Part 1 score, with several reviewers identifying the Jaskirat motif and noting its strategic deployment without always having the musicological vocabulary to describe what made it effective. Kamil’s lyrics were praised for their literary quality, though the double-coded reading that this article describes was not consistently identified in mainstream critical coverage. The Doja Cat controversy generated substantial negative response, most of which was directed at the marketing decision rather than at the films’ actual musical content. The franchise’s songs, particularly the opening track and the mid-Part 1 longing song, found substantial streaming audience engagement that independent of critical assessment confirmed their effectiveness as standalone musical works.

Q: How does the Dhurandhar score connect to the franchise’s themes of identity?

The relationship between the score’s musical architecture and the franchise’s thematic preoccupations with identity is the most important analytical connection the article makes, and it bears restating clearly. The franchise’s central thematic argument is that sustained deep-cover work destroys the original self not through a single dramatic event but through the slow accumulation of days in which the cover identity is performed and the real identity is suppressed. The score tracks this accumulation with a musicological precision that the dialogue cannot. The Jaskirat motif’s gradual suppression in Part 1 and its re-emergence in Part 2 is a musical biography of what the operation does to a human being, and it is a biography that functions independently of the visual and verbal narrative. You could, theoretically, hear the score in isolation and understand the franchise’s argument about identity from the music’s internal development alone. This is what is meant by describing the score as a parallel screenplay: it is telling the same story as the script, in different terms, with different tools, and with a different kind of honesty.

Q: How does Shashwat Sachdev’s work on Dhurandhar relate to his earlier Bollywood scoring?

Sachdev’s pre-Dhurandhar filmography demonstrates a consistent interest in using the background score for psychological character work rather than purely for tonal and atmospheric support, but the Dhurandhar franchise represents a quantum expansion of the scale and ambition of that approach. His earlier scores show the instinct for leitmotif-based character tracking and for using musical contradiction between surface and subtext as a characterization tool. The Dhurandhar commission gave him both the creative mandate and the runtime to develop these instincts into a fully realized compositional system. The transition from his earlier work to the Dhurandhar score is best understood not as a stylistic change but as a change of scale: the same compositional intelligence working on a larger canvas, with more complex material, over a longer duration, in service of a franchise whose dramatic ambitions gave the score’s architectural sophistication somewhere genuinely significant to go.

Q: What should a first-time viewer listen for in the Dhurandhar score?

Four things, in order of increasing subtlety. First, the bansuri: every time the solo bansuri appears in the score, it is sounding some version of the Jaskirat motif, and tracking its appearances tells you when Jaskirat is closest to the surface of Hamza’s performance. Second, the transition in the ambient sound: the shift in sonic character between the Delhi sequences and the Lyari sequences is audible if you listen for it, and the score’s intentional marking of these transitions is one of Sachdev’s most elegant compositional decisions. Third, the silence: count the seconds after the franchise’s significant violent events and notice how consistently the sound design uses that silence to create emotional weight rather than filling it with score. Fourth, on a second viewing, the longing phrase: a melodic line on solo strings that appears at the franchise’s most emotionally exposed moments. Once you can identify it, its strategic placement across both films reveals the score’s full architecture, and the franchise becomes, sonically, a different experience from the first viewing. This is a score that rewards the kind of attention that the complete Dhurandhar franchise as a whole rewards: patient, specific, and willing to return to the material repeatedly.

Q: How does the franchise’s use of Urdu poetry in its songs connect to the Bollywood musical tradition?

The Dhurandhar franchise’s use of Urdu poetry in its film songs is simultaneously traditional and unusual. The use of Urdu as the literary language of Hindi film songs is a long-standing convention rooted in Bollywood’s historical relationship with the Mughal literary tradition, and Kamil’s ghazal-inflected writing sits within that tradition without disrupting it. What is unusual is the precision of the application: most Bollywood film songs use Urdu poetry’s emotional resonance as a general quality, deploying the tradition’s language for its beauty and its cultural prestige without requiring the specific meaning of specific words to carry specific narrative weight. Kamil’s Dhurandhar lyrics require the specific meaning of specific words, and they require an audience that can read those meanings rather than simply absorbing the general emotional register. This demands more of the audience’s literary attention than the Bollywood song convention typically requires, and it also delivers more: the songs in the franchise are simultaneously more demanding and more rewarding than the genre average, in exactly the way that the films themselves are.

Q: Will future Bollywood films use leitmotif-based scoring in the way Dhurandhar does?

The influence of the Dhurandhar franchise’s musical approach on subsequent Bollywood scoring is already visible in the industry’s post-franchise conversations about film music. Sachdev’s demonstration that a Hindi film score can sustain architectural complexity across a multi-film franchise, and that audiences will engage with a score’s leitmotif system if the films give them enough time and enough dramatic incentive to learn it, has opened a creative possibility that was theoretically available before but commercially unproven. Whether other composers will take this possibility seriously depends partly on whether they receive commissions from filmmakers who understand what a score of this kind requires: not just compositional skill but an integrated relationship between the music’s development and the screenplay’s development from the earliest stages of production. The Dhurandhar score could not have been written as an afterthought. It required the kind of collaboration between composer, director, and screenplay that is still the exception rather than the rule in mainstream Bollywood production. The broader impact on how Bollywood makes films is a question the coming years will answer, but the musical case study the franchise provides is the most compelling argument available for why the investment in that kind of collaboration is worth making.

Q: What makes the Dhurandhar song placement different from how songs are placed in typical Bollywood films?

In the conventional Bollywood film, songs are placed at moments of heightened emotion: the declaration of love, the celebration of a victory, the mourning of a loss. The emotional content of the scene and the emotional content of the song are congruent, and the song amplifies by agreeing with what the scene already expresses. The Dhurandhar franchise places songs at moments of emotional pressure where congruent expression is precisely what the character cannot afford, and uses the song form’s license for indirect expression to say what the scene’s realistic dramatic action cannot. The song does not amplify what the scene expresses. It expresses what the scene deliberately withholds. This placement strategy means that the franchise’s songs function as diagnostic instruments rather than as emotional amplifiers: they reveal the character’s state rather than confirming what the visible performance has already told the audience. The practical consequence is that the Dhurandhar songs require more dramatic attention from the audience than conventional Bollywood song placement demands, because the relationship between the song’s content and the scene’s visible action is not direct but oblique, and reading the obliquity is the primary analytical task the franchise asks its audience to perform.

Q: How does the score handle the supporting characters?

The franchise’s leitmotif system is organized primarily around Hamza’s emotional world, but Sachdev introduces secondary musical associations for several key supporting figures that enrich the score’s texture without competing with the primary system’s clarity. Rehman Dakait carries a musical association built from a variant of the Lyari texture that emphasizes its criminal energy rather than its domestic warmth, a subtle distinction that tells the audience which register of Lyari’s world the crime lord inhabits. Yalina has a melodic association that shares harmonic language with the longing phrase but inhabits a warmer, more major-key register, functioning in the score as the emotional truth of Hamza’s cover life and the emotional cost of the cover’s eventual dissolution simultaneously. These supporting character associations are always subordinate to the primary leitmotif system, appearing as coloring within scenes rather than as independent themes, but their presence gives the franchise’s musical world a density and a humanity that a score organized solely around the protagonist’s internal states could not achieve.

Q: How does Shashwat Sachdev’s collaboration with Aditya Dhar shape the score?

The Sachdev-Dhar creative relationship is one of the franchise’s most important behind-the-scenes stories and one that the score’s architectural sophistication makes legible even without detailed production knowledge. The leitmotif system Sachdev developed for the franchise could not exist in its current form without a director who understood what such a system requires and was committed to giving it the narrative conditions to function. Aditya Dhar’s filmmaking philosophy and approach is built on the integration of the film’s technical and aesthetic elements from the earliest stages of production, which is evident in the score’s relationship to the screenplay: the four leitmotifs appear to have been developed alongside the narrative rather than composed in response to a completed cut. Sachdev has noted in interviews that Dhar gave him the full screenplay and the thematic framework of the franchise before any footage was shot, allowing the compositional architecture to be designed in relation to the narrative structure rather than retrofitted to it. This collaborative process produced the score’s extraordinary cohesion with the films’ dramatic architecture, and it is the model that the franchise’s musical achievement recommends to the industry for future productions of comparable ambition.

Q: How does the franchise’s music handle the climactic sequences differently from its quieter moments?

The franchise’s climactic sequences are where the tension between the leitmotif system’s psychological sophistication and the commercial pressure to deliver emotionally unambiguous moments is most acute, and the score handles this tension with varying success across both films. Part 1’s climactic sequence is scored with a restraint that is the film’s most consequential musical decision: at the moment where conventional scoring would reach for maximum orchestral impact, Sachdev instead strips the score back to the core elements of the leitmotif system, and the confrontation between the Jaskirat motif and the Lyari texture that the score has been building toward for the entire film is allowed to happen in a relatively sparse musical environment. The understatement amplifies rather than diminishes the emotional impact, because the audience has been trained by the preceding score to understand what the motifs mean and does not need the full orchestral apparatus to feel their significance. Part 2’s climactic sequence is scored more conventionally, and while the conventional scoring is well-executed, it represents a partial retreat from the first film’s most distinctive musical commitment.

Q: Does the Dhurandhar soundtrack reveal anything about the relationship between Indian classical music and contemporary film scoring?

The franchise’s score is one of the most substantive recent demonstrations that the raga system’s principles, particularly its capacity for melodic development that maps to specific emotional and psychological states, are not merely historically interesting but actively useful for contemporary film scoring problems. The raga tradition’s practice of associating specific scale structures with specific times of day, seasons, and emotional registers is a system for encoding emotional meaning into melody that is more precise and more culturally specific than the Western tonal harmonic system that most global film scoring practice derives from. Sachdev’s use of raga-adjacent melodic material for the franchise’s leitmotifs is not merely an aesthetic choice or a cultural signifier. It is a compositional tool that gives the score’s emotional encoding a precision that Western tonal material, for an audience fluent in the raga system’s associations, could not match. The franchise’s music is, in this sense, a demonstration of the contemporary relevance of the Indian classical tradition to the practical problems of film scoring at the highest level of ambition.

Q: How does the music in Dhurandhar connect to the themes of identity that run through both films?

The score and the films’ thematic architecture are so tightly integrated that the relationship between them is better described as identity than as connection. The franchise’s central themes of identity, displacement, and the cost of prolonged performance of a false self are not reflected in the score as a separate artistic statement. They are built into the score’s compositional structure as the primary organizing principle of what Sachdev constructs. The Jaskirat motif’s suppression and re-emergence is not merely a musical illustration of the franchise’s identity theme. It is the identity theme expressed in the language the score has access to, which is the language of motivic development, and it carries this theme with a continuity and a precision that the verbal and visual narrative, which must also carry multiple other narrative threads simultaneously, cannot maintain with the same single-minded focus. The music is the place where the franchise’s most central theme lives in its most concentrated and most honest form.

Q: What is the single most impressive moment of musical storytelling across both Dhurandhar films?

The moment where the Jaskirat motif and the Lyari texture sound simultaneously for the first time in Part 2 is, by the analysis this article develops, the score’s single most precise and most ambitious gesture. But the moment that is most likely to land with the widest range of listeners, regardless of their level of attention to the score’s compositional architecture, is the balcony scene described in the article’s opening: Hamza alone after a dinner, four seconds of held image, a descending melodic phrase that rises and falls and is gone. The scene takes less than thirty seconds. The preparation required to make those thirty seconds land with the emotional weight they carry represents hours of compositional investment spread across both films. This is what it looks like when music is built rather than placed, when a score is designed as an architecture rather than assembled as a soundtrack. The balcony scene is the franchise’s most concentrated demonstration of what Sachdev has built, and it is the moment a viewer who has absorbed the rest of the score most fully will feel most deeply.

Q: What lasting significance does the Dhurandhar franchise’s music have for Indian cinema?

The franchise’s music matters for Indian cinema at two levels simultaneously. At the level of craft, it demonstrates that the compositional tools required to score a six-hour psychological epic, specifically a leitmotif-based architectural system that sustains thematic coherence and emotional precision across an extended and dramatically complex runtime, are available within Indian musical traditions and do not require borrowing from Western models. The bansuri, the raga framework, the ghazal form’s tradition of layered meaning: these are sufficient instruments for the most ambitious film scoring that contemporary Indian cinema has attempted. At the level of industry practice, the franchise demonstrates that investing in music as a structural element of storytelling rather than as a commercial adjunct to it produces films that audiences return to, not merely films they enjoy on first viewing. The repeat viewership that the franchise’s collection data shows across both films is not entirely attributable to the narrative’s complexity or the performances’ quality. It is also attributable to a score that gives audiences something new to hear on every return. That is the franchise’s musical legacy, and it is one that the Indian film industry will be responding to, learning from, and attempting to match for the foreseeable future.