Sneha Khanwalkar

Overview

Sneha Khanwalkar is an Indian music composer and singer, recognised as one of the few women to have established a career as an independent film score composer in Hindi cinema. She is best known for her work on Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), directed by Anurag Kashyap, for which she received the Filmfare Award for Best Music Director nomination, becoming the second woman to be nominated in that category. Her music is distinguished by extensive field recording, the integration of regional folk traditions, and the use of non-professional voices from across India.

Key facts

Background

Khanwalkar was raised in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, in a family with an interest in the arts. She moved to Mumbai to pursue music professionally and began assisting in the film and advertising music industry before establishing herself as an independent composer. Her approach is shaped by ethnomusicological methods, with frequent travel to small towns and villages to record local musicians, regional dialects, and ambient sounds, which she then layers with electronic and contemporary arrangements.

Career

Early film work

Khanwalkar's early significant credit was the score for Go (2007). She drew wider attention with Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008), directed by Dibakar Banerjee, where she incorporated Haryanvi folk singers and rustic vocal textures into a mainstream Hindi film soundtrack. She subsequently composed for Banerjee's Love Sex Aur Dhokha (2010).

Gangs of Wasseypur

For Anurag Kashyap's two-part Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), Khanwalkar travelled across Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab to record local performers. Tracks such as "Womaniya", "Hunter", "Keh ke Lunga" and "Taar Bijli" combined regional folk forms with contemporary production and brought non-film voices into the cinematic mainstream. The soundtrack received broad critical acclaim and earned her a Filmfare nomination for Best Music Director, making her the second woman to be nominated in that category after Usha Khanna.

Sound Trippin'

In 2012, Khanwalkar hosted and composed the MTV India series Sound Trippin', in which each episode was based on sounds collected from a particular location, including Punjab, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and overseas locales such as Trinidad. The show was credited with introducing field-recording-based composition to a young Indian television audience and won industry recognition.

Subsequent work

She composed for Manjhi: The Mountain Man (2015), directed by Ketan Mehta, and contributed to projects across films, advertising and independent releases. She has also performed live and released non-film tracks featuring collaborations with regional artistes.

Style and significance

Khanwalkar's compositional method places heavy emphasis on location-specific authenticity: Bhojpuri wedding songs, Haryanvi ragni, Punjabi folk and other oral traditions are recorded in situ and built into film scores. Her work has been credited with:

• Expanding the palette of Hindi film music beyond studio-based playback singing.
• Bringing untrained, regional voices into a film industry historically dominated by trained playback singers.
• Increasing the visibility of women in the technical and creative role of film music director, an area in which female representation has been historically limited.

Timeline

• 2007 — Composed score for Go.
• 2008 — Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!.
• 2010 — Love Sex Aur Dhokha.
• 2012 — Gangs of Wasseypur Parts 1 and 2; MTV's Sound Trippin'.
• 2013 — Filmfare nomination for Best Music Director.
• 2015 — Manjhi: The Mountain Man.

Related topics

• Gangs of Wasseypur
• Anurag Kashyap
• Dibakar Banerjee
• Hindi film music
• Folk music of India
• Usha Khanna
• MTV India
• Indore

References

• Filmfare Awards official records, 2013 ceremony nominations.
• Soundtrack credits for Gangs of Wasseypur, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Manjhi: The Mountain Man.
• MTV India broadcast records for Sound Trippin'.