‘AI is stupid… more annoying than unnerving’: Dhurandhar, Cocktail 2 singer Madhubanti Bagchi

A still from the song Shararat from Dhurandhar

While two songs in Dhurandhar — Rambha ho and Shararat (with Jasmine Sandlas), generated enough buzz, they also reaffirmed Bollywood’s faith in Bagchi, who is increasingly being trusted with a variety of musical landscapes. Be it Amit Trivedi’s chartbuster item song Uyi amma (Azaad, 2025), Najariya ki maari — the delicate classical thumri — in Heeramandi (2024) and the sultry Aaj ki Raat (Stree 2), which won her a Filmfare Award or the breezy Jab talak in Cocktail 2 (2026), Bagchi has shown a wide sonic range, slowly building a repertoire without clear categorisation.

Born and raised in north Bengal’s Balurghat, Bagchi grew up in an academic household. Her father, a political science professor, later moved to Kolkata for work, determined that his daughter had access to better education and musical training. While Bagchi was learning classical music under vocalist Shubhra Guha, she did not like anything about it. It took her two years to start enjoying it. Bagchi is glad she persisted. “I wouldn’t have had the skill that I do now to navigate the film industry,” she says. “My father learned classical music as a child, but like many middle-class families, he never saw music as a secure profession. Coming from a small town with no industry connections, it simply didn’t seem like a viable career for me as well,” says Bagchi, who did her engineering and worked in the tech industry before she realised that she was not cut out for the corporate life. She also began to audition for local composers and landed a multi-singer song by composer Neel Dutt. It took a while before she got her next and the uncertainty was daunting. Her next, however, was Egiye de (2015), this time a duet with Arijeet Singh. In 2017, Bagchi moved to Mumbai, joining numerous others in pursuit of a Bollywood breakthrough. “I thought, what’s the worst that could happen? I’d fail. I could return and do what I was doing,” says Bagchi.

The move to Mumbai was a leap into the unknown. She began by sharing an apartment in Andheri with three people and initially survived by singing jingles. “The first slap on the face was that my entire month’s expense in Kolkata was just the rent in Mumbai. But ads — for Cadbury, Maggi, Royal Enfield among others — paid the bills,” says Bagchi, who, despite being an introvert, didn’t relent. What surprised Bagchi most about Mumbai was its generosity. In an industry often seen as fiercely competitive, she found people willing to pass along opportunities. That is how she met Sachdev and recorded a non-film song titled Kahaniyaan, followed by a thumri in Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019).

With a film inundated with more of the same songs, Bagchi says that businessmen are investing money and want their best payback. “They don’t want self-expression on their money. They are not concerned that good art has to be produced for people to listen to it. A lot of mediocre and less than mediocre things have worked, and then the good composers are also forced to create that mediocre song because it has worked in the past,” says Bagchi, who adds that the industry does not lack good composers or good songs. The question is if the labels even want to release them. “It is all about saleability,” says Bagchi, whose rise has also come up at a time when AI is the buzzword in the world of music: to clone voices, even to create compositions. Bagchi, however, is largely unfazed by the AI debate. She dismisses AI as “stupid”, arguing that while it may mimic a voice, it cannot recreate the emotion. “AI is more annoying than unnerving… It is unnecessarily being shoved down our throats. In my contracts, I have forbidden music companies from any kind of AI version or recreation,” says Bagchi, who is gearing up for her upcoming India tour.