One of the biggest draws of Dinesh Vijan’s time-travelling romance Raabta was the score by hitmaker Pritam. Not anymore. Pritam has exited the movie, which stars Sushant Singh Rajput and Kriti Sanon as lovers in the past and the present. Pritam’s name won’t feature in the credits after he refused to remix a song that he hadn’t composed for co-producer T-Series.
Pritam explained his reasons in a Facebook post.
“I had decided a while back to only do solo composer albums and not have an outside song in my album. In Raabta, producers want to recreate an existing song from the music label as part of promotions so I have decided to not continue with the film and requested the producers to take out my name from the film credits and promotions and the album will be completed by my company Jam 8.”
Raabta has been produced by T-Series and Vijan’s company Maddock Films. Rajput and Sanon play lovers in an ancient period who meet again centuries later and find history repeating itself. Although the plot of the June 9 release seems very similar to SS Rajamouli’s 2009 hit Magadheera, the writers, Siddharth-Garima, told Scroll.in that Raabta was an original story.
T-Series head Bhushan Kumar told The Indian Express that the decision was reached without any rancour. “He has not walked out really, there is a difference between walking out, leaving the album, and not continuing to work together,” he told the newspaper’s website. “It is an amicable decision between Pritam and us. Pritam as a composer does not want any other or old song to be recreated, it is his policy. These days as you know, old songs are recreated and it’s working big time, and we wanted to do something like that. So Pritam wasn’t ready to do that, and he told us that it wouldn’t be good at his part to do this.”
Some of Pritam’s songs for the movie have already been released. One of the tunes is a remixed version of the hit song of the same name from Sriram Raghavan’s spy thriller Agent Vinod (2012), which was produced by Vijan. The retooled version features Deepika Padukone, who has starred in Vijan’s productions Love Aaj Kal and Cocktail.
Limited-time offer: Big stories, small price. Keep independent media alive. Become a Scroll member today!
Our journalism is for everyone. But you can get special privileges by buying an annual Scroll Membership. Sign up today!