Every spy thriller asks the audience to believe that a man can hide his true self for years. Dhurandhar asks something stranger. It asks us to hear the self he hides. Across both installments of Aditya Dhar’s espionage saga, Shashwat Sachdev composed a body of work that refuses to sit beneath the images as polite accompaniment. It speaks. It confesses. It grieves. In a story where Jaskirat Singh Rangi must bury his name, his faith, his family, and his own face under the borrowed identity of Hamza Ali Mazari, the orchestration becomes the only presence in the room that never lies.

This is the claim that organizes everything below, and it is not a modest one. The received wisdom about Hindi-film scoring treats the background as a delivery system for feeling the screenplay has already spelled out: a string swell here to underline grief, a percussive jolt there to punctuate a thrown punch. Sachdev tears up that contract. His work for the duology behaves like a sentient figure with its own memory and its own appetite for contradiction, capable of saying the opposite of what the dialogue insists. When Hamza assures a Lyari crime boss that he feels nothing for the men he is about to betray, a single sustained cello line beneath the conversation tells us he is lying to everyone in the frame, himself included.

To prove that reading, this piece will not march through the soundtrack track by track the way a magazine round-up would. That approach mistakes a catalog for an argument. Instead the analysis is organized by what the music actually does inside the narrative: how it narrates the protagonist’s psychology when he cannot speak; how Sachdev’s recurring melodic figures function as a private grammar that the careful listener learns to read; how the songs operate as load-bearing story beats instead of decorative interludes; why the series gambled on a Western pop artist for its first teaser and what that decision reveals; how the sonic palette mutates between the patient first chapter and the scorched second one; and how the design of pure noise, gunfire, breath, the hum of a Karachi street, does work that the orchestra alone could never accomplish. Only after building that case will the piece turn, as honest criticism must, to the places where the music overreaches, repeats itself, or substitutes volume for meaning.

The stakes of getting this right extend past one franchise. For two decades, the dominant Bollywood approach to the action score has been maximalist: more brass, more choir, more bombast, a wall of audio engineered to make the viewer feel large emotions on cue. Sachdev’s contribution to the spy genre, building on the textural experiments he began with Aditya Dhar on their earlier collaboration, points toward a different model entirely, one where restraint carries more force than spectacle and where a held silence can land harder than a hundred-piece ensemble. Understanding what he accomplished here is, in a real sense, understanding where the Hindi film score might be headed next.

The Score as the Only Honest Voice in the Room

The central problem of Dhurandhar, dramatically speaking, is that its hero cannot tell the truth. Not to the woman he is falling for, not to the criminal patriarch who treats him like a son, not even to the handlers in Delhi who manufactured him, because honesty would shatter the cover that keeps him alive. A protagonist who must perform falsehood in every waking interaction presents a brutal challenge: how does a storyteller give the audience access to his real interior when the character himself is forbidden from revealing it? Aditya Dhar’s answer, worked out shot by shot with his composer, is to outsource that interior to the orchestration. What Hamza cannot say, the underscore says for him.

Watch the early Lyari sequence where Hamza first earns the trust of Rehman Dakait by absorbing a beating without naming the man who ordered it. On screen, Ranveer Singh plays the moment with an almost terrifying blankness, jaw set, eyes flat, a man who has trained himself to feel nothing visible. The visuals give us a wall. But underneath, Sachdev runs a low, trembling figure on a bowed string, barely audible, the kind of sound you register in your chest before your ears. That trembling is the only evidence the audience receives that a human being still lives inside the disguise. The performance hides the man; the scoring finds him. This division of labor, the face concealing and the score confessing, is the project’s signature technique, and once you notice it you cannot stop noticing it.

Consider how differently a conventional Bollywood thriller would have handled that same beat. The standard move is redundancy: the actor emotes pain, the strings emote pain, and the audience is told twice what they already understood once. Sachdev does the opposite. He makes the orchestration carry information the image withholds. The screen shows control; the audio reveals collapse. The gap between the two is precisely where the drama lives. Hamza’s tragedy is legible only in that gap, in the distance between the man the world sees and the man the music mourns. This is not accompaniment. This is counterpoint, in the deepest sense: a second voice arguing with the first.

The technique reaches its fullest expression in the duology’s quietest interactions, not its loudest. Late in the first chapter there is a domestic scene, almost unbearable in its tenderness, where Hamza shares a meal with the family he has infiltrated. The dialogue is warm, ordinary, the small talk of people who believe they are safe with one another. Dhar shoots it in unhurried medium shots, letting the warmth build. And against that warmth, Sachdev lays a melodic line so mournful it feels like an intrusion from another film. The viewer experiences a strange double vision: the eyes see belonging, the ears hear betrayal-in-waiting. We are made to feel what Hamza cannot allow himself to feel, the grief of a man who has come to love the people he is destroying. No line of dialogue could achieve this. Only the music can hold the warmth and the doom in the same breath.

What makes this approach more than a clever trick is its consistency and its discipline. Sachdev does not deploy the confessional underscore everywhere; that would dilute it into mush. He reserves it for the moments when Hamza is most performing, most armored, most successfully fooling everyone around him. The rule, which the series observes with near-mathematical rigor, is inverse: the more convincing the lie on screen, the more naked the truth in the orchestration. When Hamza is alone and can afford to feel, the underscore often falls silent, because in solitude the man and his interior have briefly fused and no second voice is needed. The music speaks loudest exactly when the character is most silent. That inversion is the engine of the entire sonic design.

This is also why the project’s score rewards re-watching in a way few action soundtracks do. On a first viewing, swept along by plot, many viewers register the underscore only subliminally, as atmosphere. On a second pass, knowing where the story goes, the listener hears the music as prophecy. That mournful line during the family meal is not just sad; it knows what is coming. Sachdev has built foreknowledge into the orchestration itself, so that the work seems to grieve events that have not happened yet. The careful sound design of the duology’s identity is, in this respect, inseparable from its visual grammar, a relationship explored in depth in our breakdown of how the films build meaning through image and frame. Picture and sound are not partners here. They are conspirators.

The Grammar of Sachdev’s Leitmotifs

If the orchestration is a voice, then leitmotifs are its vocabulary, and Sachdev built the series a startlingly precise one. A leitmotif, in the simplest terms, is a short recurring melodic or rhythmic idea attached to a person, place, or notion, so that its return cues recognition even when the listener cannot consciously name what they are recognizing. Wagner formalized the device for opera; Hollywood adopted it; John Williams made it a household experience through a galaxy far away. What distinguishes Sachdev’s use of it in Dhurandhar is not the device itself but the psychological specificity with which he assigns and then deforms his figures. He does not write a tune for Hamza the way a lesser composer writes a tune for a hero. He writes several tunes for the several men Hamza is forced to be, and the drama plays out in how those figures fight one another for control of the soundtrack.

The first and most important of these is what we might call the home figure, a slow, descending melodic phrase, modal and faintly devotional in character, that first surfaces in the prologue depicting Jaskirat’s life before the operation, before the grief that made him a weapon. It is the sound of Punjab, of a name not yet abandoned, of a self that still has a future. Sachdev introduces it cleanly, in full, and then, crucially, he almost never lets us hear it whole again. Throughout the Karachi years, the home figure returns only in fragments: three notes glimpsed under a line of dialogue, the opening interval stated and then strangled before it can resolve, the melody played on an instrument so processed it sounds like a memory of itself. The phrase is intact in the prologue and broken everywhere after. That breakage is the character arc, rendered in sound. Hamza cannot go home, and the home figure cannot complete itself. They are the same wound.

Set against this is the cover figure, the music of Hamza Ali Mazari, and Sachdev makes a brilliant decision here: he refuses to give it a melody at all. Where the home figure is lyrical, the cover figure is rhythmic, a tense, clipped percussive pattern with no singable line, all pulse and no song. This is exactly right. Hamza the persona is a function, a performance, a set of behaviors rather than a soul, and so his music is propulsion without melody, motion without interior. As the project proceeds and the disguise calcifies, the rhythmic cover figure begins, ominously, to colonize more of the soundtrack, crowding out the fragments of the home figure. By the back half of the first installment, the pulse is everywhere and the melody is almost gone. The man is being eaten by the mask, and you can hear it happening.

The third major idea is the longing figure, distinct from the home figure though related to it, a yearning ascending line associated specifically with Hamza’s impossible desire to return to who he was. Where the home figure is the past, the longing figure is the wish. Sachdev scores it for solo woodwind in its purest appearances, a single reed instrument carrying the line alone, unsupported, exposed, the way a wish is exposed. The choice of a lone instrument is not incidental. It sounds like one voice calling across a great distance and receiving no answer. This figure carries much of the duology’s emotional architecture of identity and loss, the same thematic territory mapped across the duology in our examination of the recurring ideas and symbols that bind both films together.

Beyond the figures attached to the protagonist, Sachdev built environmental and adversarial motifs that give the world its sonic logic. The Lyari texture is less a melody than a sound signature: a particular combination of hand percussion, a drone tuned slightly off true so it sits uneasily in the ear, and a recurring metallic scrape that evokes the neighborhood’s industrial decay. Whenever the narrative enters Rehman Dakait’s domain, this texture establishes the place before a single establishing shot is needed. The crime boss himself gets a figure built on a low, repeating bass interval, patient and predatory, music that seems to wait. And the espionage apparatus in Delhi, the world of Ajay Sanyal and his handlers, is rendered in cool, clean, almost clinical synthesizer tones, the antiseptic sound of an operation that treats human beings as assets. Each of these idioms is consistent enough that an attentive listener can navigate the geography of the story with eyes closed.

What elevates this from competent film scoring to genuine authorship is what Sachdev does when these figures collide. The most devastating cues in the series are not statements of single motifs but collisions between them. There is a pivotal confrontation late in the saga where Hamza must choose, in real time, between the loyalty his cover demands and the mission that created him. Sachdev scores the moment by layering the rhythmic cover figure and a fragment of the home figure on top of each other, deliberately out of phase, so that they grind against one another in a way that is physically uncomfortable to hear. The dissonance is the decision. Two selves, two musics, fighting for the same body, and neither winning cleanly. By the time the figures resolve, or fail to, the audience has experienced the protagonist’s internal war as a literal acoustic event. This is leitmotif used not as a labeling system but as a dramatic instrument, and it is the surest evidence that the duology’s scoring was composed by someone thinking like a dramatist rather than a tunesmith. The directorial sensibility that demands this kind of integration is examined further in our study of how Aditya Dhar constructs his films as total sensory systems.

The Songs as Story, Not Interlude

Bollywood’s relationship to the film song is its oldest and most misunderstood tradition. To outside observers the song sequence often reads as an interruption, a pause where narrative stops so that spectacle can happen. The finest Hindi filmmakers have always known better, using the song as a compression device, a way to advance plot, deepen character, and pass time in ways prose dialogue cannot. Dhurandhar belongs to this finer tradition, and Sachdev, working with lyricist Irshad Kamil, treats every vocal number as a structural beam rather than a decorative flourish. The duology contains relatively few songs by Bollywood standards, and that scarcity is the point. Each one is placed where the story needs it and nowhere else.

The first major number, a brooding mid-tempo piece that arrives roughly a third of the way into the opening chapter, functions as Hamza’s induction into Lyari. On the surface it is a montage track, covering the passage of weeks as the agent embeds himself in the underworld. But listen to what Kamil’s lyric is actually doing. The words, sung in a Karachi-inflected register, are ostensibly about belonging, about a man finding his place among brothers. The melody, however, is in a minor mode that undercuts every reassuring word, so that the song promises belonging while the music mourns its impossibility. This is the duology’s confessional technique migrated into a vocal number: the text says one thing, the setting says another, and the truth lives in the contradiction. A montage that would have been mere bridging in another film becomes, here, the first full statement of the protagonist’s doom.

The romantic track tied to Hamza’s relationship with Yalina Jamali is the duology’s most conventionally beautiful song and also its most quietly cruel. Kamil writes the lyric as a love song with no irony in its surface, tender, direct, the kind of words a man sings when he means them. And that is exactly the trap. Because the audience knows what Yalina does not, that the man singing this is a fabrication, the song’s sincerity becomes its tragedy. Every loving phrase is true and false at once: true because Hamza, the man, does feel it; false because Hamza, the man, does not exist. Sachdev scores the arrangement to deepen this ache, beginning with intimate solo guitar and swelling, over the song’s length, into a fuller orchestration that paradoxically makes the listener feel lonelier as it grows, as if the bigger the love becomes, the more impossible its survival. The placement of this number, immediately before the operation’s first irreversible escalation, ensures that the audience carries its tenderness into the carnage that follows. The film weaponizes its own most beautiful song.

A third song, devotional in flavor and structured around a qawwali-influenced call-and-response, occupies a startling position in the narrative: it scores a sequence of violence. This is a deliberate provocation. The qawwali tradition is spiritual, ecstatic, a music of devotion and transcendence, and Dhar and Sachdev set it against bloodshed so that the holy and the horrific occupy the same acoustic space. The effect is to frame the killing as a kind of terrible worship, the operation as a faith demanding human sacrifice. Kamil’s lyric leans into the ambiguity, using devotional vocabulary that could address God or country or the dead, refusing to specify which. The result is one of the saga’s most discussed passages, precisely because it makes the audience complicit in finding beauty where they should find only horror. The technique of fusing the sacred and the brutal connects directly to the series’ broader treatment of violence as moral argument, a thread we follow through the staging of its set-pieces in our analysis of the way the films choreograph and frame their action.

By the second installment, the song strategy shifts in a way that mirrors the story’s darkening. Where the first chapter used songs to establish bonds, the revenge saga uses them to mark their destruction. The standout vocal number of the sequel is an elegy, placed after a loss the audience has been dreading for an entire film, and Sachdev strips it almost bare: a single voice, minimal accompaniment, long silences between phrases where the orchestration would normally fill the space. The restraint is the meaning. Grief this large cannot be scored conventionally; it can only be acknowledged and left mostly unaccompanied, the silences doing the work that strings would cheapen. Kamil’s lyric here is at its most economical, a few repeated images instead of a developed argument, because grief does not develop, it circles. This is songwriting as bereavement, and it is miles from anything the Bollywood playback tradition usually permits.

What unites these numbers, across both installments, is their refusal to function as breaks from the story. There is no item number, no purely celebratory dance sequence, no song that exists to sell a soundtrack independent of the narrative. Every vocal piece is load-bearing. Remove any one of them and the story develops a structural crack. This is rare in commercial Hindi cinema and rarer still in the action register, where songs are most often treated as obligations to be discharged. Dhar and Sachdev’s discipline here, the willingness to write fewer songs and make each one essential, is a quiet act of formal courage. The lyrical restraint that governs these numbers, the preference for what is implied over what is stated, belongs to the same sensibility that shapes the project’s spoken language, dissected at length in our study of how the films wring meaning from what characters do not say.

The Doja Cat Gambit

No single decision in the duology’s sonic life generated more conversation than the choice to anchor the very first teaser with an English-language track by the American pop star Doja Cat. For a Hindi-language espionage saga steeped in the textures of Karachi and Punjab, reaching across the planet for a Western artist to introduce the project struck many observers as either a masterstroke of global ambition or a baffling betrayal of the series’ own identity. The truth, as usual, is more interesting than either verdict, and unpacking the choice reveals a great deal about what the project believed itself to be.

Start with the commercial logic, because it is real and should not be dismissed. A teaser exists to travel. Its job is to generate maximum awareness across the widest possible audience in the shortest possible window, and a globally recognized pop voice is a travel visa. By attaching an internationally famous artist to the first footage, the series announced, before a single frame of plot, that it intended to be a world event instead of a domestic release. This was a statement of scale aimed as much at industry observers and overseas distributors as at fans. In a marketplace where Indian cinema increasingly competes for global attention, the gesture said: we are not asking permission to sit at the table; we have already pulled up a chair. The financial reasoning behind this kind of positioning, and how the franchise’s marketing translated into its eventual commercial performance, can be traced through the interactive collection data available when you explore the franchise’s complete box office journey.

But the decision was not merely commercial, and reading it as cynical marketing misses what the track actually does in context. The teaser pairs the Western pop production against imagery of a distinctly South Asian underworld, and that friction is the entire point. The series is, at its core, a story about a man living between two worlds, neither fully belonging to the country that made him nor the country he infiltrates. A teaser that sets an American voice against Karachi streets enacts that same in-betweenness at the level of form. The cultural collision in the audio is the cultural collision in the story. Whether the filmmakers intended this resonance or stumbled into it, the effect is genuine: the teaser feels like a dispatch from a borderless underworld, which is exactly the territory the duology occupies.

The controversy the choice generated is itself worth examining, because it exposed a real tension in how audiences think about cultural authenticity. One camp argued that a homegrown story deserved homegrown scoring, that reaching for a Western star was a kind of cultural cringe, an insecurity dressed up as ambition. The opposing camp countered that gatekeeping a film’s marketing by the nationality of its featured artist is its own provincialism, and that confident cinema borrows from everywhere. Both positions contain truth. The track does sit slightly apart from the franchise’s organic sound world, and a listener who comes to the films expecting the teaser’s energy will find something quite different inside. Yet the discomfort the choice produces is not obviously a flaw; discomfort is often where the most interesting art lives.

The crucial question for this analysis is whether the track works within the films, and here the answer is more complicated. It largely does not appear within the narrative proper, which is the right call. The Western pop idiom belongs to the franchise’s outward-facing skin, the promotional surface designed for a global gaze, not to its interior, which remains governed by Sachdev’s intimate, motif-driven orchestration. The project, in other words, wears one face to the world and shows another to the viewer who actually buys a ticket. There is something almost thematically apt in this: a story about a man with a public mask and a private truth was marketed by a project with a public mask and a private truth. The teaser is Hamza Ali Mazari; the score is Jaskirat Singh Rangi. Once you see the parallel, the much-debated gambit looks less like a marketing department’s whim and more like an accidental thesis statement about the entire enterprise.

Two Films, Two Sound Worlds

A franchise that spans two installments faces a choice that defines its identity: should the second chapter sound like the first, preserving continuity, or should it evolve, marking the passage of time and the deepening of stakes? Sachdev chose evolution, and the shift between the patient first chapter and the scorched revenge saga is one of the most instructive aspects of the entire body of work. The two installments do not merely tell different stories. They inhabit different sound worlds, and the distance between those worlds is itself a kind of narrative.

The first installment is, fundamentally, an infiltration story, and its acoustic character is correspondingly patient, watchful, withheld. Sachdev scores it sparingly, leaving long stretches with minimal orchestration, trusting silence and ambient texture to do the heavy lifting. The palette favors low, sustained tones, solo instruments, and a restraint that keeps the listener perpetually leaning forward, waiting for a release that the music keeps deferring. This is the sound of a man holding his breath for a decade. The orchestration’s reluctance to resolve, its habit of stating a figure and then withdrawing before completion, mirrors the protagonist’s own suspended existence, a life lived entirely in the conditional tense. The patience is not timidity. It is the hardest thing a composer can do in an action franchise: trust the audience to sit in tension without constant reassurance.

The revenge saga discards that patience, and rightly so, because the story has changed. Where the first chapter was about maintaining a fiction, the second is about its collapse and the violence that collapse unleashes. The orchestration grows denser, more aggressive, more willing to overwhelm. Sachdev introduces heavier percussion, a more prominent low end that you feel in the floor of the theater, and a willingness to let the full ensemble off its leash that the first installment almost never permitted. The held breath becomes a scream. This is appropriate to the material; a revenge saga that sounded as withheld as an infiltration thriller would feel emotionally constipated. The escalation in the audio is the escalation in the stakes.

Yet here a critical question arises, one this analysis cannot dodge: does the second installment’s score mature, or does it merely get louder? The answer is, honestly, both, and the proportion matters. At its best, the revenge saga’s orchestration achieves a tragic grandeur the first chapter never reached, particularly in its handling of grief, where Sachdev pairs the new density with sudden, devastating withdrawals into silence. The elegy discussed earlier is a case in point: the sequel earns its loudness precisely because it knows when to abandon it. But there are passages, especially in the back half, where the orchestration confuses scale with significance, where the brass and percussion pile up not because the moment demands intensity but because the project has trained the audience to expect it. In those stretches the music is working harder than the drama, and the listener feels pushed rather than moved. This is the price of evolution: in trading patience for power, the sequel occasionally forgets that power without patience is just noise.

What survives the transition, and what ultimately binds the two installments into a single composed object, is the leitmotif system. The figures established in the first chapter return in the second, transformed but recognizable, and Sachdev uses their evolution to track the protagonist’s deterioration. The home figure, already fragmented in the first installment, is in the revenge saga reduced almost to a ghost, a single interval that surfaces and vanishes, the last surviving trace of a self that has nearly ceased to exist. The cover figure’s rhythmic pulse, dominant by the end of the first chapter, becomes in the sequel almost the protagonist’s entire sonic identity, a man who has so thoroughly become his disguise that his music no longer remembers the melody it replaced. To hear the two installments back to back is to hear a melody being murdered by a rhythm across roughly seven hours of running time. That is sustained musical storytelling of a kind Hindi cinema rarely attempts, and the through-line connects to the larger structural conversation between the two films explored in our complete breakdowns of the first chapter’s construction and the revenge saga’s escalation.

Sound Design as Storytelling

To discuss Sachdev’s compositions without discussing the duology’s design of noise, breath, and silence would be to describe a painting by its colors while ignoring its texture. Score and sound design are distinct disciplines: the first concerns composed pitches and rhythms, the second the treatment of every other audible element, the gunfire, the footsteps, the room tone, the breath, the silence. In most action cinema these two disciplines operate in parallel, the composer writing the emotional layer while the design team handles realism. What makes Dhurandhar exceptional is the degree to which its sound design is itself dramatic, doing storytelling work that conventional films would assign to dialogue or score.

Begin with the franchise’s treatment of gunfire, because a spy thriller lives and dies by it. The standard Bollywood approach makes gunshots loud, clean, and satisfying, a heightened pop that rewards the audience’s bloodlust. Dhurandhar’s design team made a harder choice: the gunfire is loud but ugly, percussive in a way that startles rather than thrills, with a concussive low end that the audience feels as a physical assault rather than a kinetic pleasure. The decision is moral as much as technical. By making violence sound genuinely violent, harsh, disorienting, painful, the design refuses to let the audience enjoy the killing in the uncomplicated way action cinema usually permits. The franchise wants you to flinch, not cheer, and the sound is the instrument of that intention. This is sound design as ethical argument, of a piece with the duology’s larger interrogation of what it costs to watch men die for entertainment.

Then there is the matter of silence, which the series deploys with a confidence that borders on audacity. The most frightening passages in both installments are often the quietest, the moments before violence where the design strips the soundtrack down to a single element, a dripping tap, a distant dog, the protagonist’s own controlled breathing, and lets that minimalism stretch until the audience’s nerves fray. Silence in cinema is expensive, because it offers the audience nowhere to hide, no swelling orchestration to tell them how to feel, no comforting wall of sound to absorb their anxiety. By embracing silence, the duology forces the viewer into the protagonist’s own hypervigilant state, listening to the quiet for the sound that means death is coming. The held breath before the eruption is, repeatedly, more terrifying than the eruption itself. Few action franchises trust their audiences enough to make them sit in that quiet. Dhurandhar trusts, and the trust pays off in dread.

The environmental design deserves particular attention, because it is the series’ most underrated technical achievement. Lyari, the Karachi neighborhood at the story’s heart, was largely recreated outside its actual location, and a recreated place can easily feel like a set. The sound design is a primary reason it does not. The layered ambience of the streets, the specific quality of the call to prayer drifting over rooftops, the texture of crowd noise in a particular register of Urdu, the mechanical sounds of a working-class district, builds an aural environment so dense and specific that the viewer’s ear is convinced even when the eye might have doubts. We believe in this Karachi because we hear it before we examine it. The design constructs place at a level beneath conscious attention, which is exactly where conviction is forged. This achievement complements the visual world-building so completely that the two are nearly inseparable, a relationship we examine in our deep dive into the franchise’s photographic construction of its world.

Finally, the project understands the dramatic power of the audio cut, the abrupt removal or insertion of sound as a narrative shock. There is a recurring technique across both installments where a moment of chaos, a crowd, a firefight, a roaring engine, is severed instantly into total silence at the instant of a death or a revelation, the sudden absence hitting harder than any sound could. This is editing applied to the audio layer, and it requires precise coordination between the design team, the composer, and the picture editor. The silences are not accidents or pauses; they are punctuation, placed with the deliberation of a writer choosing where to end a sentence. The franchise’s willingness to use absence as aggressively as it uses presence is the clearest sign that its makers understood sound not as a finishing layer applied after the fact but as a storytelling instrument present from conception. Every gunshot, every silence, every layered street is a choice, and the choices add up to a world.

The Instruments of Disguise

Instrumentation is to a composer what casting is to a director: the choice of which voice carries which idea determines how the audience receives it before a single note is interpreted. Sachdev’s instrumental choices across the series are not decorative but argumentative, and tracing them reveals a coherent philosophy about what disguise sounds like.

The duology’s most consequential instrumental decision is its handling of the human voice, or rather its careful rationing of it. Wordless vocals, a humming choir, a lone female voice on a single sustained syllable, recur throughout both installments, but always at a remove, processed, distant, treated so that the voice sounds less like a person and more like a memory of one. This is deliberate. In a story about a man who has lost his name, the human voice itself becomes a symbol of the identity he can no longer claim. When the wordless voice surfaces, it functions as a kind of haunting, the ghost of the self Hamza buried, calling to him from beneath the disguise. By keeping these vocals always slightly unreal, Sachdev prevents them from offering comfort. They are not lullabies. They are reminders of loss.

Against the processed human voice, Sachdev sets a battery of acoustic instruments chosen for their associations with place and tradition. Stringed instruments from the subcontinental tradition appear at the project’s most rooted moments, anchoring the protagonist to a heritage the plot is steadily severing him from. Hand percussion, recorded with enough room sound to feel physical, grounds the underworld passages in bodily reality. And reed instruments, particularly in the longing figure discussed earlier, carry the franchise’s loneliest lines, their breathy, human, slightly unstable tone perfectly suited to music about yearning. These acoustic textures form the franchise’s emotional bedrock, the sound of what is real and being lost.

Layered over and frequently against this acoustic foundation is a substantial electronic palette: synthesized drones, processed textures, low-frequency pulses that operate at the threshold of hearing. Sachdev uses the tension between the acoustic and the electronic as a structural metaphor for the franchise’s central opposition. The acoustic is the human, the rooted, the true; the electronic is the apparatus, the surveillance, the manufactured. When the espionage machinery asserts itself in the narrative, the electronic palette dominates. When the protagonist’s buried humanity surfaces, the acoustic instruments push back. The whole franchise can be heard as a contest between these two sonic families, the warm and the cold, the living and the engineered, and the gradual victory of the cold over the warm is the protagonist’s tragedy rendered in timbre. By the revenge saga, the electronic textures have largely conquered the soundtrack, and the few surviving acoustic phrases sound like endangered species.

There is also a notable restraint in Sachdev’s use of the orchestral brass and the massed choir, the two instruments Bollywood action scoring most reliably abuses. The franchise holds these in reserve, deploying full brass and choir only at genuine climaxes, so that when they finally arrive they land with the force of an event rather than the dull familiarity of a default setting. This rationing is a discipline most commercial composers abandon under pressure to make every scene feel big. Sachdev’s willingness to keep his most powerful instruments holstered for hours at a stretch is what allows them to mean something when he finally draws them. A composer’s restraint, like a director’s, is measured not by what is included but by what is withheld, and on this measure the franchise’s instrumentation is exceptionally disciplined, at least until the back half of the sequel, where the holster comes off a little too readily.

Irshad Kamil and the Discipline of the Unsaid

A film score is not only its instrumental architecture; in Hindi cinema, where the song carries so much narrative weight, the lyric is half the music’s meaning. Irshad Kamil, one of the most literarily serious lyricists working in the industry, brought to the duology a sensibility that matched Sachdev’s restraint phrase for phrase. Understanding what Kamil does, and refuses to do, completes the picture of why the franchise’s songs land as story instead of spectacle.

Kamil’s governing principle across the project is compression. Where a lesser lyricist would explain an emotion, Kamil implies it, trusting the listener to complete the thought. His lyrics for the franchise tend to circle a single image rather than develop a linear argument, returning to it from slightly different angles so that the meaning accumulates rather than progresses. This circling structure suits the material perfectly, because the protagonist’s predicament is itself circular, a man trapped in a loop of performance with no exit. The lyrics do not narrate Hamza’s situation; they enact its claustrophobia through their own refusal to move forward. Form and content fuse.

The bilingual texture of Kamil’s writing for the franchise deserves specific attention, because it does characterization work that no instrumental choice could accomplish. The lyrics move fluidly between Hindi and Urdu registers, occasionally incorporating the cadences of Punjabi and the local inflections of the Karachi setting, and these shifts are not arbitrary. The register a song occupies signals which version of the protagonist is being voiced. When the writing leans toward the Punjabi and the devotional, we are hearing Jaskirat, the buried self. When it leans toward the Urdu of the Karachi streets, we are hearing Hamza, the performance. Language itself becomes a marker of identity, and the protagonist’s constant code-switching, the defining behavior of a deep-cover agent, is encoded in the very vocabulary of the songs. This linguistic layering is the lyrical counterpart to the franchise’s spoken-word strategy, examined in our analysis of how the films use language as a weapon and a disguise.

Crucially, Kamil honors the saga’s larger commitment to suppression over expression. The most devastating lyrical moments are the ones where the words say less than the situation contains, forcing the listener to supply the grief the lyric withholds. The elegy in the revenge saga, mentioned earlier, contains almost no explicit statement of loss; it offers a handful of images and lets the silence between them carry the weight. This is the opposite of the traditional Bollywood lament, which names its sorrow loudly and at length. Kamil’s restraint asks more of the audience and rewards them more deeply, because grief that the listener has to complete themselves is grief they have participated in rather than merely observed. The discipline of the unsaid, the conviction that what is withheld carries more force than what is declared, is the single principle that unites Kamil’s lyrics, Sachdev’s orchestration, and Dhar’s direction into one coherent artistic intelligence.

What Kamil resists is as important as what he attempts. He writes no triumphalist anthem, no chest-thumping declaration of national glory, despite working within a franchise often accused of nationalist messaging. His lyrics keep their focus relentlessly personal, on the individual cost borne by one manufactured man, rather than zooming out to the abstractions of flag and country. This choice complicates any simple reading of the franchise as propaganda, because its songs, the part of any Hindi film most readily turned to ideological cheerleading, consistently refuse the assignment. The music mourns the spy; it does not celebrate the state. That refusal is a quiet but real act of artistic conscience, and it is worth weighing against the franchise’s louder political controversies, which we treat in full elsewhere in this series.

The Score Against Its Bollywood Inheritance

No film scoring is composed in a vacuum, and Sachdev’s work for the franchise gains its full meaning only when placed against the tradition it both inherits and resists. Hindi cinema possesses one of the richest film-music histories on earth, a lineage stretching from the melodic golden age through the rhythmic revolution of the nineteen-seventies into the genre-blending maximalism of the present. To understand what Sachdev achieves, one must understand what he chose not to do with that inheritance.

The dominant mode of contemporary Bollywood action scoring, perfected across the big-budget spy spectacles of the last decade, is what might be called the adrenaline wall: a relentless, high-energy bed of electronic percussion and orchestral hits engineered to keep the audience’s pulse elevated for the duration of a set-piece. This mode treats the score as a stimulant. Its logic is physiological rather than dramatic; it wants the body excited and is largely indifferent to the interior. There is craft in this approach, and at its best it produces genuine kinetic pleasure, but it has a ceiling. A stimulant cannot mourn. It cannot doubt. It cannot hold two contradictory feelings at once. The adrenaline wall is incapable of the confessional counterpoint that defines Dhurandhar, because confession requires the underscore to slow down and feel, which is precisely what the stimulant mode forbids.

Sachdev’s franchise work rejects the adrenaline wall in favor of a model closer to the great character-driven scores of world cinema, the European art-film tradition where music interrogates rather than excites. This is the lineage of composers who score the inside of a character rather than the outside of an action, who understand that the most powerful film music often works against the image rather than with it. By importing this sensibility into a commercial Hindi action franchise, Sachdev did something genuinely unusual: he proved that the interrogative score and the mass-market blockbuster are not incompatible, that an Indian audience raised on the adrenaline wall would accept, even embrace, a score that asked them to feel complexity rather than just excitement. That is a significant expansion of what commercial Hindi film scoring is permitted to do.

At the same time, the underscore remains unmistakably rooted in its own soil. Sachdev does not abandon the subcontinental tradition in favor of a generic international art-film sound; he fuses the two. The hand percussion, the reed instruments, the modal melodic figures, the devotional inflections all keep the scoring anchored in a specifically South Asian sensibility even as its dramatic strategy borrows from elsewhere. This fusion is the franchise’s real innovation: not the importation of a foreign mode but the grafting of an interrogative dramatic intelligence onto an Indian musical body. The result sounds like nothing else in the contemporary Hindi spy genre, which is exactly why it matters, and why the franchise’s overall sonic identity has become a reference point against which subsequent productions in the genre will be measured. Where this places the franchise relative to its action-cinema peers is a question we take up in our comparative study of how Dhar’s methods differ from the prevailing industry approach, accessible through our analysis of his evolution as a filmmaker across projects.

How the Score Lived Beyond the Screen

A film score completes itself in the theater, in the specific conditions under which an audience first encounters it, and the duology’s sonic identity was engineered for a particular kind of room. The mix is aggressive in its use of the low-frequency channel and the surround field, designed so that the concussive gunfire and the subterranean drones are experienced as physical events in a properly equipped auditorium. This is why the franchise rewards the premium theatrical formats so handsomely: in a large-format presentation with a capable sound system, the score’s low end becomes a bodily sensation, the silences become genuinely uncomfortable voids, and the spatial design places the audience inside the chaos instead of in front of it. Viewers who first encountered the franchise on a phone or a laptop, however convenient, received a fundamentally diminished version of the artistic object, because so much of the music’s meaning lives in frequencies and spatial cues that small speakers simply cannot reproduce. The franchise was composed for the cathedral of the cinema, and it loses something real outside that space.

Beyond the auditorium, the music took on a cultural life of its own, as the most successful Hindi film scoring always does. The romantic track and the qawwali-influenced piece in particular escaped the films to become independent presences in the broader listening culture, streamed and shared and reinterpreted far from the narrative that birthed them. This afterlife is double-edged. On one hand, it testifies to the songs’ craftsmanship, their ability to move listeners who may never connect them to the precise dramatic moments they were written to serve. On the other, it slightly betrays the franchise’s own design, because these songs were built to be load-bearing, to mean something specific in their narrative context, and stripped of that context they become merely beautiful, their tragic undertow lost on a casual listener. There is an irony here worth sitting with: the more successfully a Dhurandhar song travels as a standalone hit, the more completely it sheds the meaning that made it remarkable inside the film. The scoring is least itself when it is most popular.

The instrumental score, by contrast, resisted this afterlife almost entirely, as instrumental film scoring usually does, and that resistance is instructive. The leitmotif system, the confessional counterpoint, the collisions of figures, none of it makes sense divorced from the images and the story it was composed to inhabit. You cannot stream the home figure as a standalone experience and feel what it means, because its meaning is entirely relational, dependent on the breakage it suffers across two installments. This is the difference between a song and a score, and it explains why Dhurandhar’s most profound musical achievements are also its least commercially exploitable. The orchestration’s greatness is inextricable from the films; it cannot be extracted, packaged, and sold as a separate pleasure. In a content economy that prizes the detachable and the shareable, there is something almost defiant about a body of musical work whose finest passages mean nothing outside their home. The franchise’s commercial trajectory and the role its music played in driving repeat theatrical viewing can be examined in detail when you track the day-by-day collection patterns across both installments, where the relationship between the films’ immersive sound and their unusually strong word of mouth becomes visible in the numbers.

The Sonic Signature of Each Character

Beyond the protagonist’s warring figures, Sachdev grants the supporting players their own aural identities, and the precision of these character signatures is among Dhurandhar’s least celebrated triumphs. Each major figure in the story can be identified by ear before they appear on screen, because the composer assigned every one of them a distinct idiom that announces who is about to enter the frame.

Rehman Dakait, the Lyari crime patriarch who becomes a surrogate father to the disguised agent, is rendered through a low, repeating bass interval that does not so much play as wait. The interval is patient and predatory, an idiom built to suggest a man who never hurries because he has already decided the outcome. Crucially, Sachdev complicates this menace with occasional warmth, a brief lift in the harmony whenever Rehman shows the agent something like paternal affection, so that the listener feels the genuine tenderness that makes the eventual betrayal so devastating. The crime boss is not a cartoon villain in the orchestration; he is a man capable of love, and the ear knows it even when the plot demands his destruction.

S.P. Choudhary Aslam, the relentless police officer brought to thunderous life by Sanjay Dutt, receives a heavier, more martial treatment, percussion-forward and unyielding, the idiom of a man who has chosen a side and will not waver. Where the protagonist’s identity dissolves across the two installments, Aslam’s signature remains rock-steady, a fixed point in a story full of shifting loyalties, and the constancy of his musical treatment underlines exactly that thematic function. He is the immovable object against which the operation’s deceptions break.

Ajay Sanyal, the Delhi architect who manufactures the agent and dispatches him into the abyss, is the coldest presence in the entire palette. Sachdev scores him through clinical, processed synthesizer tones, the antiseptic idiom of a bureaucrat who treats human beings as assets on a balance sheet. There is no warmth in Sanyal’s signature, and that absence is the point: the man who created the protagonist’s tragedy never once feels its weight, and the orchestration refuses to grant him the interiority it lavishes so generously on his victim. The chill of his cue is a moral verdict delivered in timbre.

Yalina Jamali, as noted in the critical assessment that follows, receives the loveliest but least developed signature, a single graceful theme carried most often by a warm acoustic line. Within scenes it works beautifully, lending her presence a softness that contrasts with the harshness surrounding her. The limitation is that her theme does not evolve the way the men’s idioms do, a shortfall that says more about the broader conventions of the industry than about any failure of craft in the writing itself. Still, when her theme and the protagonist’s broken home figure briefly intertwine during their tenderest moment together, the orchestration achieves a fleeting, doomed harmony that ranks among the most affecting passages in either installment. For a few bars, two people who can never truly know each other share a single melodic line, and then the line dissolves, as it must.

Where the Franchise Falls Short

Serious criticism earns its praise by being willing to withdraw it where the evidence demands, and Sachdev’s work for the duology, for all its genuine accomplishment, is not flawless. To pretend otherwise would be fan worship instead of analysis. There are real weaknesses in this body of work, and naming them precisely is what separates an argument from a fan letter.

The most persistent problem is formula creeping into the very system that makes the franchise distinctive. The confessional counterpoint, so devastating on first encounter, becomes predictable through repetition. Once the audience has learned the rule, that the more controlled the face, the more naked the orchestration, the technique loses some of its power to surprise, and in the later stretches of the sequel it occasionally feels like a setting the composer reaches for by habit instead of a choice he makes fresh each time. The mournful cello under the stoic face is a profound device the first three times and a tic the tenth. A truly fearless score would have varied its own strategy more aggressively, denying the audience the comfort of the familiar even at the level of technique. By establishing such a strong system, the franchise risked becoming a prisoner of it, and in places it does.

The sequel’s loudness, discussed earlier, is the second real weakness, and it deserves restating because it represents a genuine failure of nerve rather than a defensible choice. There are passages in the revenge saga’s back half where the orchestration drowns the drama, where the brass and percussion assert an intensity the scene has not earned, where the music is manufacturing emotion the storytelling failed to generate. This is the adrenaline wall the franchise otherwise rejects, sneaking back in through the door of escalation. A composer as disciplined as Sachdev should have trusted his quieter instincts more completely in these moments. The loudness is not a stylistic evolution there; it is a crutch, and an artist of his evident gifts did not need it.

The Doja Cat track, defensible as a marketing gesture, remains an awkward artifact when considered as part of the franchise’s complete sonic body. However neatly it can be rationalized as enacting the protagonist’s in-betweenness, the honest truth is that it sits apart from everything else, a promotional appendage rather than an organic limb. A listener experiencing the franchise’s audio as a whole feels the seam where the global pop surface meets the intimate orchestral interior, and that seam is a small but real flaw in the artistic object. The most generous reading turns the disjunction into a virtue; a more skeptical reading notes that a marketing department’s reach for a famous name does not become integrated art simply because a critic can construct a justification for it after the fact. Both readings have merit, and intellectual honesty requires admitting that the gambit’s success is genuinely arguable rather than settled.

There is also a quieter shortfall in the franchise’s treatment of its female characters through the orchestration. Yalina Jamali, the most significant woman in the protagonist’s Karachi life, receives a musical identity that is lovely but underdeveloped relative to the rich motivic architecture lavished on the men. Where Hamza gets a whole system of competing figures, Yalina gets a single beautiful theme that does little evolving. This is a missed opportunity, because the duology’s most interesting relationship from a moral standpoint, the bond between the agent and the woman he is deceiving, deserved an orchestral treatment as psychologically intricate as the one given to the protagonist’s internal war. The music, in this one respect, reproduces the broader Bollywood tendency to grant men interiority and women beauty, and a franchise this sophisticated in other ways should have known better. The supporting figures who orbit the protagonist, and how the franchise serves or shortchanges them, receive fuller treatment in our survey of the ensemble surrounding Hamza.

Finally, the franchise occasionally lets its sound design ambition outrun its narrative necessity. The audacious silences and the bodily gunfire are mostly triumphs, but there are moments, particularly in the sequel, where the design draws attention to its own cleverness, where a silence stretches a beat too long or an audio cut announces itself as technique rather than serving the story invisibly. The best sound design is felt and not noticed; in these instances the franchise’s design wants a little too badly to be admired. These are minor sins against an otherwise exemplary craft, but they are sins, and a clear-eyed account must record them.

The Bigger Argument

What does it ultimately mean that a commercial Hindi spy franchise produced a body of musical work this ambitious, this integrated, this willing to mourn rather than merely excite? The answer reaches beyond one set of films and into the question of what screen scoring is for, and where the Hindi tradition might be heading.

For most of its history, the dominant model of the Bollywood score treated music as an emotional teleprompter, telling the audience precisely what to feel at every moment, leaving nothing ambiguous, trusting the viewer with nothing. This model produced glories, but it also produced a kind of infantilization, a relationship between film and audience in which the scoring did the audience’s emotional labor for them. Dhurandhar’s score proposes a different relationship, an adult one, in which the underscore withholds, contradicts, implies, and trusts the viewer to do the work of meaning. By scoring the gap between what a character shows and what he feels, the franchise treats its audience as collaborators capable of holding complexity rather than consumers to be told what to think. That shift, from teleprompter to collaborator, is the franchise’s largest contribution, and it is a contribution to the form itself, not merely to one story.

The franchise also demonstrates, definitively, that this more demanding kind of film music is commercially viable in the Indian market, which has consequences for what gets made next. The conventional industry wisdom held that mass audiences require the adrenaline wall, that subtlety is a luxury for art-house productions and festival circuits, that a blockbuster cannot afford to make its audience uncomfortable. The franchise’s commercial success, achieved with a score that mourns its own hero and refuses easy catharsis, falsifies that wisdom. It proves that an Indian mass audience will embrace musical complexity when it is fused to a story worth telling, that subtlety and scale are not enemies. Every composer and director who comes after now has evidence that the harder path is open, that the audience is more sophisticated than the industry assumed. That permission, once granted, does not easily revoke, and the long-term influence of the franchise on Hindi film scoring may prove larger than its considerable immediate impact.

There is a deeper resonance still, one that connects the saga’s scoring to something universal about the human condition. Dhurandhar is a story about a man who cannot be himself, who must perform a false identity until the performance threatens to consume the original, and the score is the sound of the buried true self refusing to die quietly. Nearly everyone, in some smaller key, knows this experience: the gap between the face we show the world and the self we keep hidden, the performance demanded by a job or a family or a society, the private grief that no one else hears. Sachdev’s writing gives that universal experience a voice. When the home figure surfaces in fragments under Hamza’s blank face, every viewer who has ever suppressed their truth to survive a situation recognizes the feeling, even if they could never name it. This is what the greatest film music does: it makes the inaudible audible, gives sound to the parts of human experience that resist language. Sachdev’s franchise work achieves this, and that achievement is why the music will outlast the controversies and the box office records and the marketing gambits, persisting as a rare example of an action franchise that used its orchestration to tell the truth about being alive and unable to say so. The films may be remembered as a spectacle. The music deserves to be remembered as a confession.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who composed the songs and background score for Dhurandhar?

Shashwat Sachdev composed both the songs and the instrumental underscore for the franchise, continuing a creative partnership with director Aditya Dhar that began on their earlier collaboration. Sachdev is responsible for the entire sonic architecture discussed throughout this analysis: the leitmotif system, the confessional counterpoint between image and orchestration, the evolving palette across the two installments, and the close integration of composed music with the broader sound design. His work here represents a substantial step beyond conventional Bollywood action scoring, building an interrogative, character-driven body of music inside a commercial blockbuster frame. The lyrics for the vocal numbers were written by Irshad Kamil, whose contribution is detailed separately below.

Q: Who wrote the lyrics for the Dhurandhar songs?

Irshad Kamil wrote the lyrics, bringing a literary sensibility marked by compression, restraint, and a refusal to over-explain emotion. His writing for the franchise circles single images rather than developing linear arguments, and it shifts deliberately between Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and the local inflections of the Karachi setting to signal which version of the protagonist is being voiced at any given moment. Notably, Kamil resisted writing triumphalist or overtly nationalist verses despite the franchise’s politically charged subject matter, keeping his focus on the individual human cost borne by the protagonist. This restraint complicates any simple reading of the films as propaganda, because the songs consistently mourn the spy rather than celebrating the state.

Q: Why did the Dhurandhar teaser use a Doja Cat song instead of an Indian artist?

The decision served both commercial and thematic purposes. Commercially, attaching a globally recognized pop voice to the first footage announced the franchise’s ambition to be a world event rather than a domestic release, generating maximum awareness across international markets and signaling confidence to overseas distributors. Thematically, setting a Western pop production against imagery of a South Asian underworld enacted, at the level of form, the very in-betweenness that defines the protagonist, a man who belongs fully to neither of the worlds he inhabits. The track largely does not appear within the films themselves, which was the right call: the Western pop idiom belongs to the franchise’s outward-facing promotional surface, while the interior remains governed by Sachdev’s intimate, motif-driven orchestration. Whether the gambit fully succeeds as art remains genuinely debatable.

Q: What is a leitmotif and how does the Dhurandhar score use them?

A leitmotif is a short recurring musical idea attached to a person, place, or concept, so that its return cues recognition even when the listener cannot consciously name what they are hearing. Sachdev built the franchise an unusually precise system of these figures. The home figure is a slow, descending, faintly devotional phrase representing the protagonist’s buried original self, and crucially it is heard whole only in the prologue, surfacing as broken fragments everywhere after, its incompleteness mirroring a man who can never go home. The cover figure, by contrast, has no melody at all, only a tense rhythmic pulse, because the disguise is a function rather than a soul. The drama plays out in how these figures fight for control of the soundtrack, with the rhythmic pulse gradually devouring the broken melody across the two installments.

Q: Is the Dhurandhar background score better than the songs?

This is a genuine question rather than a settled one, and the honest answer is that they accomplish different things. The songs, particularly the romantic track and the qawwali-influenced piece, are the series’ most immediately accessible musical pleasures and the ones most likely to live independently of the films. The instrumental score is the more profound achievement but also the less extractable one, because its meaning is entirely relational, dependent on how its recurring figures break and transform across hours of running time. You cannot stream the home figure as a standalone experience and feel what it means. If forced to choose, this analysis regards the instrumental underscore as the franchise’s deeper accomplishment, precisely because it does narrative work that no detachable song could replicate, but the songs are far from filler and carry real dramatic weight of their own.

Q: How does the Part 2 score differ from the Part 1 score?

The two installments inhabit genuinely different sound worlds, reflecting their different stories. The first chapter is an infiltration thriller, and its orchestration is correspondingly patient and withheld, favoring silence, solo instruments, and tension that the scoring refuses to resolve, the sound of a man holding his breath for a decade. The revenge saga discards that patience for density, aggression, and a willingness to let the full ensemble loose, the held breath becoming a scream. This escalation suits the darker material, but it carries a cost: in places the sequel confuses loudness with significance, reaching for intensity the scene has not earned. The leitmotif system binds the two together, with the home figure reduced almost to a ghost in the sequel and the cover figure’s pulse becoming the protagonist’s nearly complete sonic identity, a melody being murdered by a rhythm.

Q: Why does the gunfire and violence in Dhurandhar sound different from other Bollywood action films?

The franchise’s sound design team made a deliberate moral choice to render violence as genuinely violent rather than as kinetic pleasure. Where standard Bollywood action makes gunshots loud, clean, and satisfying, Dhurandhar’s gunfire is loud but ugly, harsh and concussive, with a low end the audience feels as a physical assault rather than a thrill. The intention is to make the viewer flinch rather than cheer, refusing the uncomplicated enjoyment of killing that action cinema usually permits. This connects to the series’ larger interrogation of what it costs to watch men die for entertainment. The design also makes aggressive use of silence, stripping the soundtrack bare before moments of violence so the audience is forced into the protagonist’s own hypervigilant state, and of the audio cut, severing chaos into sudden total silence at the instant of a death.

Q: Does the Dhurandhar soundtrack work as standalone listening without watching the films?

Partially, and the split is instructive. The songs travel well, moving listeners who may never connect them to the precise dramatic moments they were written to serve, though stripped of context they lose the tragic undertow that made them remarkable inside the films. The romantic track, for instance, is simply a beautiful love song outside the story, but inside it the audience knows the man singing it is a fabrication, which transforms its sincerity into tragedy. The instrumental score, by contrast, resists standalone listening almost entirely, because its meaning is relational, built from the breakage and transformation of recurring figures across two installments. The series’ most profound musical achievements are also its least commercially exploitable, which is part of what makes them admirable in a content economy that prizes the detachable.

Q: What instruments and textures does Shashwat Sachdev use in the score?

The palette divides into two warring families that mirror the franchise’s central opposition. The acoustic side, representing the human, the rooted, and the true, includes subcontinental stringed instruments, hand percussion recorded with physical room sound, and breathy reed instruments that carry the loneliest lines. The electronic side, representing the apparatus and the manufactured self, includes synthesized drones, processed textures, and low-frequency pulses operating at the threshold of hearing. Sachdev also rations the human voice carefully, using wordless, processed, distant vocals as a kind of haunting, the ghost of the protagonist’s buried identity. The gradual conquest of the warm acoustic textures by the cold electronic ones, especially by the revenge saga, is the protagonist’s tragedy rendered in timbre. Brass and massed choir are held in reserve for genuine climaxes rather than overused.

Q: How does the Dhurandhar score compare to Pathaan, War, and other YRF spy films?

The franchise represents a fundamental rejection of the dominant spy-spectacle scoring model. The big-budget YRF spy films rely on what might be called the adrenaline wall, a relentless high-energy bed of electronic percussion and orchestral hits engineered to keep the audience’s pulse elevated, treating the score as a stimulant indifferent to interiority. Dhurandhar’s music does the opposite, scoring the inside of a character rather than the outside of an action, willing to slow down, mourn, doubt, and contradict the image. A stimulant cannot mourn; the confessional counterpoint that defines Dhurandhar requires exactly the slowing-down that the adrenaline wall forbids. The franchise proves that an interrogative, character-driven score can succeed commercially in the Indian market, expanding what mass-market Hindi film music is permitted to attempt.

Q: How does the Dhurandhar score compare to Sachdev’s earlier work with Aditya Dhar?

Sachdev’s franchise work builds directly on the textural experiments he developed in his earlier collaboration with Dhar, but it represents a significant deepening. The earlier project established the partnership’s interest in sound as immersion and in music that serves drama rather than decorating it. Dhurandhar extends this into a full leitmotif system and the sustained confessional strategy, taking advantage of the franchise’s much longer canvas, roughly seven hours across two installments, to develop musical ideas over a timescale impossible in a single film. The relationship between director and composer is clearly one of deep mutual understanding, the kind that allows for the precise coordination between picture, score, and sound design that the project’s most striking effects require. Their working method is examined more fully in our analysis of Dhar’s overall filmmaking approach.

Q: Is the Dhurandhar music propaganda?

The music actively complicates the propaganda charge rather than confirming it. The part of any Hindi film most readily turned to ideological cheerleading is the song, and yet Kamil’s lyrics consistently refuse the assignment, writing no triumphalist anthem and keeping their focus relentlessly personal, on the individual cost borne by one manufactured man rather than the abstractions of flag and country. The instrumental score, similarly, mourns the spy rather than celebrating the state, scoring his interior collapse rather than his patriotic triumph. This does not settle the larger debate about the franchise’s politics, which extends well beyond its music, but it does mean that the films’ most emotionally direct artistic layer, their music, pulls consistently toward private grief rather than public glory. The score is, if anything, a quiet act of artistic conscience within a politically charged project.

Q: What is the best song in Dhurandhar and why?

Rather than rank by catchiness, the more useful question is which song does the most dramatic work, and by that measure the romantic track tied to the protagonist’s relationship with Yalina Jamali is Dhurandhar’s most accomplished. On its surface it is a sincere love song with no irony, and that sincerity is precisely the trap, because the audience knows the man singing it is a fabrication. Every loving phrase becomes true and false at once, true because the man feels it, false because the man does not exist. Sachdev’s arrangement deepens the ache by swelling from intimate solo guitar into fuller orchestration that paradoxically makes the listener lonelier as it grows. Placed immediately before the operation’s first irreversible escalation, the song forces the audience to carry its tenderness into the carnage that follows. The franchise weaponizes its own most beautiful number.

Q: Why are there so many silences in the Dhurandhar score?

Silence is one of the duology’s most confident and effective tools. The most frightening passages in both installments are often the quietest, the moments before violence where the design strips the soundtrack to a single element, a dripping tap, a distant dog, the protagonist’s controlled breathing, and lets that minimalism stretch until the audience’s nerves fray. Silence in cinema is expensive because it offers the viewer nowhere to hide, no swelling orchestration to dictate the feeling, no comforting wall of sound to absorb anxiety. By embracing it, the franchise forces the viewer into the protagonist’s own hypervigilant state, listening to the quiet for the sound that means death is coming. The held breath before an eruption is repeatedly more terrifying than the eruption itself, and few action franchises trust their audiences enough to make them sit in that quiet.

Q: How should I watch Dhurandhar to best experience its sound?

The franchise was composed and mixed for the theatrical environment, with aggressive use of the low-frequency channel and the surround field designed so that the concussive gunfire and subterranean drones register as physical events. In a large-format presentation with a capable sound system, the low end becomes a bodily sensation, the silences become genuinely uncomfortable voids, and the spatial design places the audience inside the chaos rather than in front of it. Viewers who first encounter the franchise on a phone or laptop, however convenient, receive a diminished version of the work, because so much of the music’s meaning lives in frequencies and spatial cues that small speakers cannot reproduce. If a theatrical viewing is impossible, the next best option is a good set of headphones in a quiet room, which at least preserves the low end and the spatial detail that the design depends upon.

Q: What is the qawwali sequence in Dhurandhar about?

The franchise sets a devotional, qawwali-influenced piece structured around call-and-response against a sequence of violence, and the pairing is a deliberate provocation. The qawwali tradition is spiritual and ecstatic, a music of devotion and transcendence, and placing it over bloodshed makes the holy and the horrific share the same acoustic space, framing the killing as a kind of terrible worship and the operation as a faith demanding human sacrifice. Kamil’s lyric leans into the ambiguity, using devotional vocabulary that could address God or country or the dead while refusing to specify which. The effect makes the audience complicit in finding beauty where they should find only horror, which is among the series’ most discussed and morally challenging achievements. It exemplifies how the films fuse the sacred and the brutal rather than keeping them safely apart.

Q: How does the score handle the romance between Hamza and Yalina?

This is one of the few areas where the project’s compositional sophistication falls short. Yalina Jamali receives a musical identity that is lovely but underdeveloped relative to the rich motivic architecture lavished on the male characters. Where the protagonist gets an entire system of competing figures that evolve across two installments, Yalina gets a single beautiful theme that does little developing. This is a missed opportunity, because the bond between the agent and the woman he is deceiving is the saga’s most morally interesting relationship and deserved an orchestral treatment as psychologically intricate as the one given to the protagonist’s internal war. In this one respect the scoring reproduces the broader Bollywood tendency to grant men interiority and women beauty, a tendency a franchise this otherwise sophisticated should have resisted.

Q: What makes the Dhurandhar score historically significant for Bollywood?

Its largest contribution is a shift in the relationship between film music and audience, from teleprompter to collaborator. For most of its history the dominant Bollywood score told the audience precisely what to feel at every moment, doing their emotional labor for them. The series’ scoring instead withholds, contradicts, and implies, trusting the viewer to do the work of meaning by scoring the gap between what a character shows and what he feels. Equally important, the franchise’s commercial success proves this more demanding approach is viable in the Indian mass market, falsifying the conventional wisdom that subtlety is a luxury reserved for art-house productions. Every composer and director who follows now has evidence that the harder path is open and that the audience is more sophisticated than the industry assumed. That permission, once granted, does not easily revoke.

Q: Did the Dhurandhar music receive critical acclaim?

The duology’s scoring drew substantial attention and discussion, particularly for its integration of score and sound design and for the boldness of its confessional strategy, the willingness to let the orchestration contradict the image rather than reinforce it. The qawwali-over-violence sequence and the use of silence before eruptions of violence became frequent points of discussion among viewers and commentators. The Doja Cat teaser decision generated debate of its own, splitting observers between those who saw global ambition and those who saw cultural insecurity. As with most aspects of this polarizing franchise, the music was not universally adored, and some found the sequel’s loudness and the formula-creep in its later stretches less impressive than the first installment’s restraint. On balance, however, the sonic work was widely recognized as among the franchise’s strongest and most innovative achievements.

Q: Will Shashwat Sachdev return to compose for future Dhurandhar installments?

Speculation about future installments is exactly that, speculation, and any answer must be treated with appropriate caution. What can be said is that the creative partnership between Sachdev and Dhar has been central to the franchise’s identity, and the leitmotif system Sachdev established is so deeply woven into the storytelling that a change of composer would represent a significant rupture in the franchise’s sonic continuity. The figures established across the existing installments, the broken home figure, the devouring cover pulse, would lose their accumulated meaning in unfamiliar hands. If the franchise continues, there is every artistic reason to retain the composer who built its musical language, though such decisions ultimately rest on factors well beyond the artistic, including scheduling and the evolving creative direction of any future chapter.

Q: How does the Dhurandhar soundtrack compare to the music of Bollywood’s golden age?

The franchise’s relationship to the tradition is one of selective inheritance instead of imitation. It draws on the subcontinental musical vocabulary that the golden age refined, the modal melodic figures, the devotional inflections, the centrality of the human voice, while grafting onto that body a dramatic intelligence borrowed from the interrogative scoring traditions of world cinema. Where the golden age generally used music to express emotion fully and directly, the franchise uses it to withhold and complicate, scoring suppression instead of expression. The result honors the tradition’s sonic palette while updating its dramatic strategy for a story about concealment. This fusion, an Indian musical body animated by an interrogative dramatic mind, is the franchise’s genuine innovation, and it points toward a possible future for Hindi film scoring that is neither a rejection of the tradition nor a passive repetition of it.

Q: What does the broken “home figure” represent in the score?

The home figure is the single most important melodic idea Sachdev wrote for the saga, and its deliberate incompleteness carries the protagonist’s entire arc. It is a slow, descending, faintly devotional phrase introduced whole only in the prologue depicting Jaskirat Singh Rangi’s life before grief turned him into a weapon. After that single complete statement, the listener never hears it intact again. Throughout the Karachi years it surfaces as fragments: three notes glimpsed beneath a line of dialogue, an opening interval stated and then strangled before it can resolve, the melody played on an instrument processed until it sounds like a memory of itself. That breakage is the character arc rendered in pitch. The man cannot go home, and the phrase that means home cannot complete itself. They are the same wound, and when even those fragments nearly vanish by the revenge saga, the listener understands that the original self has almost ceased to exist.

Q: How does the sound design create such a convincing Karachi when the films were shot elsewhere?

The Lyari neighborhood at the heart of the story was largely recreated outside its actual location, and a recreated place can easily feel like a set. The aural environment is a primary reason it does not. The design team layered street ambience with remarkable specificity: the particular quality of the call to prayer drifting over rooftops, crowd noise in a precise register of Urdu, the mechanical clatter of a working-class district, the texture of vendors and traffic and distant argument. This dense aural fabric convinces the ear before the eye has a chance to doubt, constructing place at a level beneath conscious attention, which is exactly where conviction is forged. Audiences believe in this Karachi because they hear it as lived-in space rather than examining it as scenery. The design builds the world in frequencies the eye cannot police.

Q: Is Dhurandhar’s score influenced by Hollywood or European spy thrillers?

Its dramatic strategy clearly draws on the interrogative scoring traditions of world cinema, the lineage of composers who score the interior of a character rather than the exterior of an action, and who understand that the most powerful screen scoring often works against the image instead of reinforcing it. This is the sensibility of the great European art-film scores and the more sophisticated Hollywood character studies, rather than the adrenaline-driven approach of mainstream action spectacle. What makes Sachdev’s achievement distinctive is that he grafts this interrogative intelligence onto an unmistakably South Asian musical body, the subcontinental strings, the hand percussion, the modal melodic figures, the devotional inflections. The result is neither an imitation of foreign models nor a passive repetition of tradition, but a genuine fusion that points toward a possible new direction for the Hindi screen score. The borrowing is structural and intelligent, not cosmetic.

Q: What role does the human voice play in Sachdev’s score?

The human voice is rationed with great care, and that rationing is itself meaningful. Wordless vocals, a humming choir or a lone female voice on a single sustained syllable, recur throughout both installments, but always at a remove, processed, distant, treated so they sound less like a present person and more like the memory of one. In a story about a man who has lost his name, the human voice becomes a symbol of the identity he can no longer claim, and when it surfaces it functions as a haunting, the ghost of the buried self calling from beneath the disguise. By keeping these vocals always slightly unreal, Sachdev prevents them from offering comfort. They are not lullabies but reminders of loss, and their spectral quality is a constant subliminal pressure on the protagonist and on the audience watching him disappear into his cover.

Q: Why does the score work against the image instead of reinforcing it?

This counterpoint between picture and orchestration is the saga’s defining technique and the source of its emotional power. Conventional screen scoring reinforces what the image already shows: the actor emotes grief, the strings emote grief, and the audience is told twice what they understood once. Sachdev does the opposite, making the orchestration carry information the image withholds. The protagonist cannot reveal his true feelings to anyone without shattering the cover that keeps him alive, so the orchestration reveals them for him. When his face shows control, the underscore reveals collapse, and the gap between the two is precisely where the drama lives. The rule the saga observes with near-mathematical rigor is inverse: the more convincing the lie on the protagonist’s face, the more naked the truth beneath it. The orchestration speaks loudest exactly when the character is most silent, which is why it amounts to a confession rather than a comment.

Q: How does Dhurandhar’s approach to film songs differ from typical Bollywood masala films?

The contrast is stark. Typical commercial Hindi cinema treats songs as semi-detachable attractions, item numbers and celebratory dance sequences designed partly to sell an album independent of the narrative, often pausing the story so spectacle can happen. Dhurandhar contains no such interludes. Every vocal number is load-bearing, placed where the story needs it and nowhere else, and removing any one of them would open a structural crack in the storytelling. The romantic track arrives precisely before an irreversible escalation so the audience carries its tenderness into the carnage; the qawwali-influenced piece scores violence to fuse the sacred and the brutal; the elegy in the revenge saga marks a dreaded loss with stripped-bare restraint. The saga writes fewer songs than the masala tradition and makes each one essential, a discipline that represents a quiet act of formal courage in an industry where songs are most often treated as obligations to discharge.

Q: Can the Dhurandhar soundtrack be appreciated on its own without watching the films?

Partly, and the split between the two halves of the work is revealing. The vocal numbers travel well, holding their shape as standalone listening because melody, lyric, and arrangement give them an internal completeness that survives the loss of the picture. A listener who never saw a single frame can still feel the ache in the romantic track or the devotional charge in the qawwali-influenced piece. The instrumental writing is a different matter. Stripped of the images it was built to converse with, the leitmotifs lose half their meaning, because their entire purpose is to comment on what the camera shows and to voice what the protagonist conceals. Heard in isolation, the home theme is merely a pretty melodic cell; heard against Hamza walking away from everything he loves, it becomes unbearable. The orchestration was composed as the second half of a dialogue, and a dialogue with only one speaker is necessarily incomplete. The songs are gifts you can carry out of the theater, while the instrumental writing is an experience that exists fully only inside the duology itself.

Q: What instruments define the duology’s sonic palette?

Sachdev assembled a deliberately hybrid ensemble that refuses the glossy synthetic wall of contemporary action scoring. At the foundation sits a low, breathing bed of plucked and bowed strings, often played with a roughness that keeps the texture human instead of polished. Above that he layers regional instrumentation tied to the geography of the story, with reed and string colors that evoke the Lyari setting without lapsing into postcard exoticism. Percussion is used sparingly and almost always for psychology instead of propulsion, a single struck drum standing in for a heartbeat or a held breath. The orchestration also makes pointed use of the human voice as an instrument, wordless vocal lines threading through key sequences like a conscience that cannot be silenced. What unifies the palette is restraint: every color is chosen for what it withholds as much as for what it states, and the arrangement leaves deliberate empty space so that silence itself becomes one of the most expressive instruments in the entire kit.

Q: How does Irshad Kamil’s lyric-writing serve the storytelling?

Kamil writes against the grain of his own industry’s habits. Where commercial Hindi cinema often rewards lyricists for grand declaration, here the discipline is concealment, the same concealment the protagonist must practice to stay alive. Kamil’s lines lean on indirection, addressing longing and loss through image and implication instead of plain statement, so that the words mirror a man who can never say what he means. The romantic number speaks of devotion without ever naming the cost that devotion will exact, and the listener only understands the full weight in retrospect. This restraint also keeps the writing from tipping into the propaganda register the premise might have invited, because a lyric that suggests is far harder to weaponize than a lyric that shouts. Kamil’s craft, married to Sachdev’s orchestration, produces vocal numbers that feel less like interludes and more like interior monologue set to melody, which is exactly the storytelling job the duology needed its songs to perform.