आज़ादी

Azadi (आज़ादी) is the soaring freedom anthem from Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar (2024), Sanjay Leela Bhansali's opulent Netflix series and his first-ever web project. Composed by Bhansali himself with lyrics by his longtime collaborator A. M. Turaz, the song is performed as a rising ensemble by nine women playback singers — Barnali Chattopadhyay, Archana Gore, Pragati Joshi, Aditi Prabhudesai, Arohi, Aditi Paul, Tarannum Malik Jain, Dipti Rege and Madhura Paranjape. Released by Bhansali Music as a promotional video song on 29 April 2024, days before the series premiered on Netflix on 1 May 2024, Azadi turns the tawaifs of pre-Independence Lahore into a chorus of the freedom struggle, its refrain 'Hamein dekhni hai azadi' building from a whisper of longing into a collective demand.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali scores Azadi the way he stages his cinema — as a build. It opens restrained, a solo voice over harmonium and tabla in the semi-classical, mehfil-rooted idiom that runs through the whole Heeramandi soundtrack, then gathers voices one by one until the nine-singer chorus and a swelling string section carry the refrain like a march. Bhansali, who composed the entire album himself, keeps the arrangement period-appropriate to 1940s Lahore rather than reaching for modern production, so the song's power comes from massed human voice rather than beats — the sound of a kotha turning into a rally.

A. M. Turaz builds the lyric around a single, unrelenting demand — 'Hamein dekhni hai azadi', we must see freedom, in every circumstance, at any cost. The genius of the writing is its double meaning: sung by courtesans of Heera Mandi in the 1940s, 'azadi' is at once the political freedom of a nation under British rule and the personal freedom of women whose bodies and lives are owned by others. Turaz keeps the diction plain and chant-like so the line can be taken up by many mouths at once, an anthem built to be answered rather than merely heard — the poetics of collective resolve rather than private feeling.

Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar is Sanjay Leela Bhansali's first web series, an eight-episode Netflix drama set in the Heera Mandi red-light district of Lahore in the years before India's 1947 independence. Starring Manisha Koirala, Sonakshi Sinha, Aditi Rao Hydari, Richa Chadha, Sanjeeda Sheikh and Sharmin Segal, it follows the tawaifs — courtesans who were also custodians of music and etiquette — as their world collides with the gathering freedom movement. Azadi is the song where those two threads knot together: the courtesans, so often written out of the nationalist story, step forward as participants in the struggle, and the number scores their turn from ornament to agent. Released as a video song on 29 April 2024, it functioned as one of the series' key pre-launch moments ahead of the 1 May 2024 premiere.

As the most overtly political song on the Heeramandi soundtrack, Azadi became the number most associated with the series' central idea — that the courtesans of Heera Mandi belonged to the freedom struggle as much as any celebrated patriot. Its official video crossed several million YouTube views, and the refrain 'Hamein dekhni hai azadi' circulated well beyond the show as a compact anthem of both national and feminine liberation. The song also sits within a wider 2024 wave of Hindi-screen patriotic music, but stands apart for locating its cry for freedom in the mouths of women usually kept at the margins of that story — extending Bhansali's long practice of composing his own films' music into his first streaming project.