A four-year wait led this composer to Hanuman Ansh

For composer and producer Dhirendra Mulkalwar, the road to Hanuman Ansh did not begin in a studio. It began at Kainchi Dham, the ashram of Neem Karoli Baba that he had tried to visit for four years.

He finally reached the shrine last April. A couple of months later, director Vishal Chaturvedi called with an offer he did not see coming: score a film about the spiritual leader.

“I could not believe what was happening,” Mulkalwar told India Today. “It felt like a miracle.”

A chant that became an anthem

One of the film’s musical signatures, Siyavar Ramchandra Ki Jai, was never planned as a song at all. It surfaced while he was scoring a background cue for a pivotal sequence in which a revolutionary is disguised as a sanyasi to evade the British.

Mulkalwar suggested that Sita Ram chants should rise in that moment, and Chaturvedi agreed. The sound grew from a scene cue into trailer material and eventually into a full-fledged track.

“Basically, we combined patriotism with spiritualism,” he said.

A childhood full of sound

His connection with Neem Karoli Baba actually predates the film by more than a decade. Around 2010, he came across a video of Ram Dass, the American spiritual teacher and Baba’s disciple, and began reading about the guru’s influence on figures such as Julia Roberts and Steve Jobs.

The composer grew up in Chandrapur, Maharashtra, near the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve. Music was not an obvious career path in what he remembers as a small, resource-constrained town. His training came through the late tabla player Rajiv Pillai, and his elder brother’s music collection opened up a wider world.

He moved to Mumbai to study audio engineering, spent a year in radio, wrote demos at night and gradually built a career in advertising.

• He composed more than 500 ads and jingles before his film break.
• His earlier credits include Uri: The Surgical Strike and Article 15.
• Those projects brought him to director Vishal Chaturvedi’s notice.

As a child, he would play cassettes and pretend to conduct an orchestra. Time spent in the forests around Tadoba also shaped his ear. “I used to close my eyes and imagine myself in some nature symphony,” he recalled.

Why the film keeps finding audiences

Hanuman Ansh released in August, and the response has been larger than the team expected. Its theatrical run has been extended, and the film has also opened globally.

For fans of devotional and faith-driven cinema, the story sits inside a longer trend of films that treat spiritual figures with emotional rather than just mythological weight. The early previews, Mulkalwar says, moved people deeply, but the eventual commercial scale surprised the makers.

He is already in conversation about new projects, though he says he is not rushing to declare what comes next.

Source: India Today