बंदे

Bande is the sole original song from Superboys of Malegaon (2025), Reema Kagti's acclaimed coming-of-age drama about the amateur filmmakers of Malegaon who created low-budget parodies of Bollywood blockbusters beginning in the late 1990s. Composed by Sachin-Jigar and written by Javed Akhtar, the 2:42-minute anthem is sung by Divya Kumar, Sayee Gagan, and Sachin-Jigar themselves. Released on February 21, 2025 — one week before the film's Indian theatrical debut — the song functions as a celebratory character sketch of the film's protagonists, produced under Excel Entertainment and distributed by Amazon MGM Studios.

Sachin-Jigar compose Bande as a warm, unpretentious anthem that reflects the spirit of its subject. The duo — known for Ik Vaari Aa, Nainowale Ne and a string of indie-Bollywood hits — deliberately keep the arrangement modest: acoustic guitar-led, with light dholak accents, piano, and strings that swell briefly at the refrain. The decision to sing the song themselves (alongside Divya Kumar and Sayee Gagan) gives Bande an insider quality — music composers celebrating the subjects of their own film. The 2:42 runtime is unusually tight for a Bollywood anthem, but precisely right for a film about people who made movies without resources.

Javed Akhtar's lyric for Bande is characteristically direct — he celebrates the 'bande' (the fellows, the men) of Malegaon without irony or condescension. The writing acknowledges their ordinariness while insisting on their extraordinary quality. For a poet who has written for A.R. Rahman and Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, this modest lyric is a deliberate act of solidarity with the working-class dreamers at the film's centre.

Superboys of Malegaon premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 2024, months before its Indian theatrical release on February 28, 2025. The film, produced by Zoya Akhtar, Farhan Akhtar, Reema Kagti, and Ritesh Sidhwani under Excel Entertainment, chronicles the real-life story of Nasir Shaikh and his collaborators who made low-budget parody films in Malegaon (Maharashtra) — a phenomenon that garnered international attention via the 2008 documentary Supermen of Malegaon (dir. Faiza Ahmad Khan). Bande was released on February 21, 2025, as the film's sole original song, accompanied by an unplugged version featuring the cast.

Superboys of Malegaon received an 89% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and won Best Feature Film at the 2025 NIFFA (National Indian Film Festival Australia). The film earned approximately ₹5.35 crore at the Indian box office despite its limited release. Bande stands as a rare instance of Javed Akhtar — one of Hindi cinema's greatest lyricists — writing specifically for a documentary-inspired story about real people from a small Maharashtra town, lending the film's musical identity an unusual authenticity.