The Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye and Love, Sex aur Dhoka composer
Sneha Khanwalkar is on a new musical mission
She is the face of a show that discovers different sounds from musicians from
across the country , Conventional
is not her style. Sneha
Khanwalkar, the woman behind the distinctly different music of Gangs of
Wasseypur, delves into rustic beats from the heartland, teams up with local
folk singers and adds her own touch to produce a contemporary cocktail.
The composer says she just goes
with the flow and theme of a movie without any research, and it works!
"I do not research. It's
not like I put down things and decide intellectually. I just decide
generally," Khanwalkar, the woman behind Womaniya, Hunter
and Keh Ke Loonga from Anurag Kashyap's two-part crime thriller Gangs
Of Wasseypur, told IANS.
Khanwalkar, 29, one of the few
women composers in the male-dominated Bollywood space,
has carved a niche for herself by spotting rare talent - like 12-year-old Durga
who went from the rough environs of Mumbai local trains to a swish music studio
for the song Dil chhi chha ledar.
Even as part of MTV's show Sound Trippin,
Khanwalkar made inroads into some unexplored areas of the country to collect
sounds from there and compose a song at the end of each episode.
The composer clearly believes
in thinking local, and creating a truly global appeal.
"If a song is based in one
place, that place has its own quality. People have their own of way of thinking
and talking, which is different from how we think in the city. So it is
important to know how they sing and render their music.
"It is only after you know
the place that you will be able to imbibe its quality in the song. If the
director of the film is going all out to depict something skilfully, then I
just try to do the same thing with the music of the film."
It is in that sense that she is
unconventional.
"You might say that all my
songs are different, but I can only imagine them like this. For example, I
guess my idea of revenge song is very different from others. My idea of a
revenge song is something like Keh ke loonga, which is very different
from what someone else might think of it," she said.
Her efforts to be
"different" have worked consistently, and she credits the changing
taste of music listeners for it too.
"I think that listening
(audience) is also changing. The way we talk has changed quite a lot. Our
parents communicate differently, while we are quicker and edgier in our
conversations. Look at the sounds around us today, plus technology has also
contributed towards making music. Listeners are changing and with that the
music also changes," she said.
Such creativity and
experimentation also stems from working with open-minded directors, said
Khanwalkar, adding: "Thankfully, I have worked with directors like Dibakar
Banerjee and Anurag Kashap who let you do different things."
Her Bollywood journey began
with the film Kal: Yesterday and Tomorrow in 2005, and her
compositions for Banerjee's Oye
Lucky! Lucky Oye!, brought her notice. But with Gangs Of Wasseypur,
her musical talent has almost achieved cult status here.
"I have always been
curious about music. Music has in it the ability to elate you, depress you or
motivate you. I have been inclined towards music and it is this curiosity that
has led me to compose music," she said.
And being a woman never came in
the way of progress for her.
"A lot of factors like age, experience and all
come into play. As projects get more and more detailed, there are many things
which you need to take care of... Gender is a small issue; there are so many
more issues to be taken care of if you want your idea to come out correctly
through your work," she said,
The early years
Khanwalkar, who is known
for her off-beat sound in tracks like ‘Superchor’ and the ‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha’
title number, comes from the rather conventional but musical environs of Indore. She relocated to
Mumbai when she was in the tenth grade. “In Indore,
music was part of the mahaul at home,” Khanwalkar reveals, adding, “My mother’s
family belongs to the Gwalior
gharana of Hindustani music and my uncles were professors of music. One uncle
was the principal of a music college. In fact, Malini Rajurkar, the famous
classical vocalist, is part of our family as well.”For Sneha, such an
environment naturally led to expectations. “Even the kids in our household
talked music, be it sur, lai or taal,’’ she recalls. Every time we went to our
ancestral home in summer, the elders would have the tanpura out by four in the
morning and begin the day with music. Celebrations meant the younger members
had to sing for the elders. Even though I was the youngest, it always felt like
there was pressure to perform. Shifting to Mumbai in 2001 was quite a relief in
that sense. It was only after I got away from the pressures of home that I
realised I actually enjoyed music enough to take it up as a career.
”Best kept secret
The idea of becoming a
music director would have been so preposterous to her family that Khanwalkar
kept it a secret. “I didn’t tell my parents or anyone else about it. I was
still studying back then. But I had set a few of Rahim’s dohas to music of my
own, and I would carry them around. And I would try to meet music directors and
people from the industry whenever I could.”And then came her chance meeting
with playback artiste Sukhwinder Singh. “I met him at a suburban studio and
showed him my compositions, the dohas, and he was so enamoured that he started
recording them right there. It was a huge high, and I was stunned to see an
artist of his stature learning, understanding and recording my work,” she
begins. “By the time the recording was done, I had made up my mind about what I
wanted to do in life. I took the recorded tracks back home, made my parents
listen to them and told them this was what I wanted to do.
”Taking a detour
While she is considered
to be one of the more bohemian composers in Hindi cinema, Khanwalkar admits
that her foundation is the Indian classical music that surrounded her as a
child. “I don’t know whether it shows in my work, though. I guess it would be a
bit too easy, a bit too linear for me to create music on those lines. I’d like
to incorporate it into my music, but in a classy way,” she shrugs.Of course, a
big part of Sneha’s sound comes from her unconventional choice in singers. On
the ‘Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!’ and ‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha’soundtracks, she stayed
away from mainstream vocalists.“It was not a conscious choice but I didn’t want
the names behind the songs to take away attention from the music itself. On
‘Oye Lucky’, for example, we had a very Punjabi sound, for which we could have gone
with a Daler Mehndi, who’s a fantastic singer. But to get the dialect and the
feel right, we decided to go with singers like Des Raj Lachkani and Master
Mahaveer Chopra, who are local singers who perform at melas and such. They may
not be very well known, but they are absolute powerhouses when they start
performing in their genres,” she says.
childhood
