Sneha Khanwalkar enjoys being different.
But now she is being lauded for it and that’s something she has to get used to, especially after she picked up the Filmfare RD Burman Award for Most Promising Talent in Music last week.
“Well, it’s made all my relatives happy,” says Khanwalkar. “Suddenly, they want to know what I’m doing. I don’t mean that negatively. They’ve always been supportive of me. But it’s just drawn their attention towards my music.” The honour is worth celebrating over, especially since previous ‘winners’ include the likes of A R Rahman, Vishal Bhardwaj, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Vishal-Shekhar, and more recently, Amit Trivedi.
With soundtracks like ‘Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!’ and ‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha’ to her credit, the 26-year-old music maker is worth tailing.
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.
Hunting down gems
Sneha is currently working on Anurag Kashyap’s next, titled ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’, and has been exploring Jharkhand and the cowbelt region for the same. But call it research, and she counters saying, “It isn’t research. I think I have an innate urge to travel, because I couldn’t do it when I was younger. Now I incorporate it into my work.”
She explains that the process is spontaneous.
“I don’t set up appointments or such. When I went to Jharkhand, Bihar, I didn’t call up people in the Bhojpuri industry. I just go to these places, and stay with the locals, and get a sense of the sounds floating around. I have discovered quite a few gems this way," she points out. One of them is an “old, fantastic tribal singer” who she plans to record for an upcoming project. “I listen to the sounds in these places, come back to Mumbai to create my tracks and then connect them to things I found while travelling,” she offers.
While it may seem like her soundtracks come with a theme of their own — the ‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha’ soundtrack was said to be a satire on the big Bollywood sound — Sneha says that it isn’t so.
“‘Oye Lucky’, for example, wasn’t supposed to be a folk sound when I started. But it’s the singers who gave it that swing.”
And what sort of ‘swing’ does ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ have?
She clams up, saying, “I wouldn’t like to say. I don’t want to work with a theme in mind. It’s pointless to do a theme just for theme’s sake.”
In the company of stars
For Sneha, working with names like Dibakar Bannerjee and Anurag Kashyap has been an enlightening experience. About Bannerjee, she says, “His sense of music is very strong. He writes the lyrics for quite a few of his songs as well, which pretty much sets the tone for the music. Take the ‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha’ title track, for example. He set the song’s space, very clearly.”
Kashyap, on the other hand, is another story. “Though he’s involved with the music, he gives you a free hand with the sounds created,” she says.
Made for Bollywood
Khanwalkar explains that there is no such thing as a mainstream sound. “The way Bollywood is going, I think any song can be fit into any film, without wondering if it is ‘mainstream’ or not.”
So is a big banner film on the cards?
“I would love to do that sort of a film, I think. A completely pop sound. It would be fun to create,” she confesses. And given her talent, fun to listen to, no doubt.
About ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’
“The film is set in Bihar, where Anurag himself is from. So, naturally, the music is also going to involve a lot of Bihari folk sounds,” she says, also divulging that “the film spans over three generations. So there was some creativity involved in keeping the sound faithful to the film. There’s some lyrical experimentation, with the time lapse in the story getting us to record sounds in different ways for different time periods.”
Influences
While she listens to new music, Khanwalkar can’t have enough of the 1991 Dimple Kapadia-Vinod Khanna classic, ‘Lekin’, with music by Pandit Hridaynath Mangeshkar. “When I was younger, I was a bit lonely because I had nobody to share it with, since my friends weren’t into that sort of music,” she says.
She is also a fan of the legendary Kumar Gandharva, with whom she shares a personal connect of sorts. “He was actually from Karnataka, but for most of his life, he lived in Dewas, quite close to Indore. When I was young, I was thrilled to learn that he used to be an acquaintance of my family.”