बाजा

Baaja (बाजा) is the propulsive ensemble track from Amar Singh Chamkila (2024), composed by A. R. Rahman and written by Irshad Kamil, sung by Mohit Chauhan, Romy, Suryansh and Inderpreet Singh. Rahman built the song around what he described as 'a Broadway kind of structure where the lyrics tell the story,' using multiple voices to speak directly to the audience and offer competing perspectives on who Chamkila really was, while retaining Punjabi folk rhythm underneath the theatrical framing. Director Imtiaz Ali reportedly spent considerable time before approving Mohit Chauhan's vocals for the track. Released with the film's soundtrack on 29 March 2024 through Saregama, Baaja was part of the album that won the Filmfare OTT Award for Best Music Album in 2024.

Rahman has described Baaja's construction as 'a Broadway kind of structure where the lyrics tell the story' — a theatrical approach layered over Punjabi folk rhythm, built to let four distinct voices (Mohit Chauhan, Romy, Suryansh, and Inderpreet Singh) trade lines rather than blend into a single melodic voice. The chant-like 'baj baaja baaja' hook functions as a percussive, fanfare-like anchor point between verses. Reports from the production note that director Imtiaz Ali took considerable time deciding on and approving Mohit Chauhan's vocal take before it was finalized for the film.

Irshad Kamil's lyric leans on 'baaja' — literally a band instrument like a trumpet or horn — as a metaphor for spectacle, noise, and the fanfare that both makes and unmakes a public figure. The recurring line 'khela shuru hai, aa dekhe aaja' (the game has begun, come and watch) frames the song as a direct address to the audience, an invitation into the drama of Chamkila's rise, rather than a conventional narrative verse-chorus structure — consistent with Rahman's description of the track as storytelling through multiple voices rather than a single narrator's point of view.

Baaja plays early in Amar Singh Chamkila (2024), Imtiaz Ali's biographical drama about Punjabi folk singer Amar Singh Chamkila (Diljit Dosanjh), using its multiple vocalists and direct-address structure to introduce competing public perceptions of Chamkila before the film traces his rise from a factory worker to one of Punjab's most popular — and controversial — performers alongside his wife Amarjot Kaur (Parineeti Chopra). The soundtrack was released on 29 March 2024 through Saregama, ahead of the film's Mumbai premiere on 8 April and Netflix release on 12 April 2024.

Baaja's official videos have drawn a combined audience of more than 2.6 million YouTube views across the soundtrack label's uploads, contributing to a soundtrack that critics singled out for its inventive, theatrical departure from typical Bollywood folk-pop. The song was part of the Amar Singh Chamkila album that won the Filmfare OTT Award for Best Music Album at the 2024 ceremony, where the film also swept Best Film, Best Director for Imtiaz Ali, and Best Actor for Diljit Dosanjh — cementing the soundtrack's reputation as one of Rahman's most structurally ambitious post-2020 works.