रावण इंट्रो

Raavan Intro (रावण इंट्रो) is the villain-entry cue from Rohit Shetty's Singham Again (2024), composed by Ravi Basrur — the man behind the massive scores of KGF and Salaar — as the ominous soundscape that heralds the film's Raavan-inspired antagonist, played by Arjun Kapoor. Built as an ensemble chant rather than a conventional song, it is performed by a nine-voice troupe drawn largely from Basrur's own Basrur-family group, led by Bhaskaruni Sai Charan, with lyrics by Abhi Munde. Released as part of the Singham Again soundtrack — Saregama's first music collaboration with Rohit Shetty — the official audio-visual was uploaded to Saregama Music on 30 November 2024 and captures the menacing aura and rage the film maps onto its modern-day Raavan.

Raavan Intro is pure Ravi Basrur — the composer who turned the massy, choral, percussion-heavy background cue into a signature with KGF and Salaar, here bringing that thunderous idiom to a Rohit Shetty film for the first time. Rather than a melody-driven song, it is a slow-building invocation: a low, ominous drone thickens into a wall of male-chorus chanting, driven forward by heavy percussion and orchestral stabs designed to swell under the villain's on-screen entry. The nine credited vocalists — most from Basrur's regular Basrur-family ensemble, led by Bhaskaruni Sai Charan — stack their voices into a single menacing chant, prioritizing texture, weight and dread over hook or tune. It is background-score craft rather than pop songwriting: the cue exists to make an antagonist feel mythic.

Abhi Munde's text works as chant rather than narrative — an incantation built to be intoned by a chorus, not sung as verse. In keeping with Ravi Basrur's score idiom, the lyric is a compact set of repeated, forceful invocatory lines that name and summon the wrath of a Raavan figure, functioning more as sound and threat than as story. There is no mukhda-antara architecture and no romantic or lyrical development; the words exist to be shouted in unison, their rhythm and hard consonants doing the work of intimidation. (The full verbatim text is not reproduced here — this is a copyrighted 2024 recording.)

Singham Again (2024), directed by Rohit Shetty and released on Diwali (1 November 2024), is the fifth film in his Cop Universe and reframes the franchise around the Ramayana — with Ajay Devgn's Bajirao Singham cast in a Ram-like role opposite a Raavan-styled antagonist played by Arjun Kapoor. Raavan Intro is the score cue tied to that antagonist's entry: the aural signature that introduces the film's 'Raavan' to the audience. For the score, Shetty brought in Ravi Basrur, best known for the pan-Indian blockbusters KGF and Salaar, whose thunderous, chant-led sound was used to give the villain a mythic, terrifying scale. The soundtrack — of which this cue is a part — marked Saregama's first collaboration with Rohit Shetty, and the official video for Raavan Intro was released on the Saregama Music YouTube channel on 30 November 2024.

Raavan Intro sits within a broader trend of the 2020s: the pan-Indian, score-driven villain-entry cue becoming a marketable track in its own right, released and streamed like a song. Ravi Basrur had already made this a template with KGF and Salaar, and Singham Again extended it into Rohit Shetty's mainstream Hindi Cop Universe — his first score collaboration with the composer and Saregama's first music partnership with the director. As a standalone release, the cue drew well over a million and a half YouTube views on the official Saregama upload, evidence that background-score chants have become part of Hindi cinema's promotional and streaming ecosystem rather than remaining buried under the picture. It is a small but clear marker of how South Indian score sensibilities — thunderous chorus, percussion, mythic scale — have crossed into mainstream Bollywood event films.