Cinema today is often driven by recognisable sounds, repeatable moods, and safe musical identities — but every once in a while, you come across a composer who resists all of that.
Shashwat Sachdev belongs to that small, restless group of musicians who treat every project like a reset button, no recycled language, no comfort zone, just a new world built from scratch each time. That approach has led to a wildly diverse body of work: the delicate emotional honesty of Phillauri and the sharp, adrenaline-driven force of Uri: The Surgical Strike. With The Ba**ds of Bollywood, he leans into stylisation and attitude, while projects like Dhurandhar continue to show how easily he shifts between scale, restraint, and experimentation without repeating himself.
Now, with The India House, his Telugu debut, Shashwat enters yet another unfamiliar terrain, a politically charged period that demands both grandeur and intimacy. And if his track record says anything, it’s that he doesn’t just adapt to new worlds — he builds them from the inside out. In a conversation with Indulge, he opens up about the sonic world he is shaping for this new chapter.
Excerpts:
The India House is set during a politically and emotionally turbulent period in history. When you first read the script, what was the first sound or emotion that came to you musically?
The first emotion that came to me was young blood. Not just rebellion or patriotism, but that feeling of a young India trying to understand itself while carrying a lot of emotional turbulence. I felt this was the India of that time. A generation that was restless, wounded, ambitious, angry, idealistic and deeply emotional. So musically, I did not want to treat it only like a period film. I wanted to find the pulse of the people inside that time. The boys, the dreamers, the people who were still becoming who they were meant to be.
And then Ram Vamsi Krishna’s storytelling also stayed with me. His world has scale, but it also has emotion. It felt iconic and epic, but not empty. That combination really hit me. It made me feel that the sound had to carry history, but it also had to carry blood. Not the sound of a monument already built, but the breath before a monument is built.
Since this marks your Telugu debut, did you explore any new sounds or musical influences specifically for this film and its cultural setting?
Of course, working with people from a new world and a new industry was extremely exciting for me. There is always a certain nervousness and beauty when you enter a new language, because you do not want to enter it like a tourist. You want to enter it with respect. But I also feel Indian music has one emotional core. Our languages change, our instruments change, our colours change, but emotionally we are very connected people. We respond to certain values, certain pain, certain dignity and certain kinds of longing in very similar ways. So yes, I was listening, absorbing and discovering new textures, but I was not trying to force a regional identity from the outside. I was trying to find the emotional truth first. Once that is honest, the sound starts finding its own body. A language may change, but a mother’s grief, a country’s ache and a young man’s courage do not need subtitles.
In your view, should great film music be consciously noticeable, or should it work more subconsciously on the viewer?
I think it depends on the moment. In 2026, when someone goes to a theatre, they are going for an experience they cannot get on a phone. They want to feel scale. They want visuals, music and sound design to create something communal. That is the beauty of the big screen. So sometimes the music has to be powerful and noticeable. It has to build the hero. It has to make people feel that this music could play in their gyms, in their cars, in their heads when they want to feel stronger than they are feeling that day. But sometimes the music should work quietly. It should almost disappear and only guide the emotion underneath. The audience may not remember hearing it, but they will remember what they felt. I enjoy both. In the same 10 minutes of a film, I may use both approaches. Sometimes I want the music to be invisible. Sometimes I want it to stand like a monument.
You have worked across films driven by patriotism, romance, grief, ambition, and rebellion. Which emotion do you find the most difficult to translate honestly into music?
Real pain is always difficult. Because to write that honestly, I have to ground myself in something true. I cannot just create a popular emotion and place it on top of a scene. It has to come from somewhere lived, or at least somewhere deeply understood. Emotionally deep music is the most beautiful thing for me, and also the most challenging. It is honest to my own soul. But because it is honest, it demands something from you. You cannot fake it for too long. Music knows when you are lying.
In recent years, mainstream Bollywood music has relied heavily on remixes and recreated versions of older songs. What do you think this trend reflects about the industry today?
I think it reflects many things at once. A lot of the music we have grown up with is genuinely exceptional. It has lived with people for years, sometimes for generations. But the younger generation may not always accept it in its original language, because their listening habits have changed. Their sound world is different. So sometimes a recreation becomes nostalgia. Sometimes it becomes commercial caution. Sometimes it becomes a way of speaking to a younger audience in their own language. And sometimes, honestly, it is just a creative choice.
For me, the only time it makes sense is when it is true to the film. If it comes from the emotion of the story, then it has dignity. But if it is only being used to control the audience from the outside, then you can feel that also. In our case, when we worked on Dhurandhar, it was never about audience demand or commercial caution. It was not even nostalgia in that obvious way. It came from the style of the world we were building. A recreated sound must earn its place in the film, otherwise it remains only a memory being borrowed.
Has there been a film where you felt you were composing more for the psychology of the characters than for the narrative itself?
Yes, many times. In Attack, for example, the character was not just a regular hero. He was almost superhuman, almost a cyborg, so I felt the music had to run through his head. It could not just sit outside the film and comment on him. It had to feel like circuitry, memory, trauma and instinct moving together. I wish the film had performed better, but it was a very honest attempt by all of us. I am still proud of what we tried to do there. Article 370 was also like that for me, but in a completely different way. I did not want the music to become a temporary commercial song that lives for a few days and disappears. I wanted it to carry the feeling of a real Indian. That is why a lot of the sound came from Indian classical emotions and Indian roots. It was not just about plot. It was about the inner spine of the character. Sometimes you are not composing what the character is doing. You are composing what thecharacter cannot say.
Is reinvention something that is important to you as an artiste?
I think every composer has a basic emotional grammar. That comes from your childhood, your education, your failures, your memories, your first relationship with music. That does not completely change. But sound should change. At least for me, it should. Every film has its own world, its own hero, its own temperature. So I do not think I should walk into every film carrying the same sonic identity like a stamp. I like reinventing because cinema is world building. The hero changes, the wound changes, the ambition changes, the silence changes. So the music must also change. Maybe the soul remains mine, but the clothes cannot be the same every time. Signature, to me, is not sameness. Signature is honesty surviving in different forms.
Is reinvention something that is important to you as an artiste?
I think every composer has a basic emotional grammar. That comes from your childhood, your education, your failures, your memories, your first relationship with music. That does not completely change. But sound should change. At least for me, it should. Every film has its own world, its own hero, its own temperature. So I do not think I should walk into every film carrying the
same sonic identity like a stamp. I like reinventing because cinema is world building. The hero changes, the wound changes, the ambition changes, the silence changes. So the music must also change. Maybe the soul remains mine, but the clothes cannot be the same every time. Signature, to me, is not sameness. Signature is honesty surviving in different forms.
If someone were to listen to your body of work from the beginning until now, what do you think it would reveal about your evolution as a person and artiste?
I think art always reveals your true experiences, whether you want it to or not. When I listen back to my own music, I can hear my past in it. I can hear certain baggage, certain innocence, certain anger, certain hope. I started with Phillauri, which was very emotional and honest in a softer way. And now when I look at something like Dhurandhar, I feel there is more resilience in the sound. I think I have become more rebellious over the last 10 years. Not just in sound, but in thought also. I question more. I trust instinct more. I am less interested in sounding correct and more interested in sounding alive. So if someone listens to the work from the beginning till now, maybe they will hear the story of a person becoming more himself. More wounded perhaps, more certain perhaps, but also more free. And that is very gratifying to me. Because finally, the music should not only show what films I did. It should show who I was becoming while making them.