Composer Duo Sachin Jigar on How There's Room for Everyone in the Industry

Songs like "Fark Nahi Padta" features rapper DRV, while singer Saba Azad leads "Sab Farzi" off the recent web series Farzi

- ANURAG TAGAT

EVERY TIME ONE OF their songs has become popular, composers Sachin Sanghvi and Jigar Saraiya (Sachin-Jigar) lose sleep. Sanghvi says over a video call from their studio, “We come from a place where we don’t want to repeat ourselves.”

From “Saibo” off 2011 film Shor In The City’s soundtrack to “Apna Bana Le” sung by Arijit Singh for Bhediya in 2022, Sachin-Jigar have steadily defined what it means to be composing for varied audiences in India and beyond. Although they certainly serve big romantic and grandiose numbers for Bollywood movies like many in the industry, there’s also a certain edginess to them, especially when they get to compose for web series.

Among those recent ones is Farzi, the crime thriller created by filmmaker duo Raj & DK (who are also behind another action and crime series, The Family Man). With songs like “Paisa Hai Toh” featuring singer-composer Vishal Dadlani and hip-hop artist Mellow D, Madboy/Mink’s Saba Azad on the synth-inflated “Sab Farzi” and “Fark Nahi Padta” featuring rapper DRV aka Dhruv Rajpal and singer-composer Nikhil Paul George, Sachin-Jigar push the envelope even further. Jigar Saraiya says the brief was pretty much inviting them to break barriers of how Hindi music can be perceived. He adds, “Raj and DK were very particular about how it [music for their show] sounds and they’ve always wanted it to be new and coming-of-age-sounding stuff. When that’s the brief, it automatically changes your perception on even how to compose a certain song, because it needs to lend itself into a newer soundscape.”