बंदी टोट

Bandi Tot (बंदी टोट) is one of the peppy, comic-toned tracks from Badhaai Do (2022), Harshavardhan Kulkarni's dramedy starring Rajkummar Rao and Bhumi Pednekar as a gay man and lesbian woman who marry each other to placate their families. Composed and sung by Ankit Tiwari alongside Nikhita Gandhi, with lyrics by Anurag Bhomia, the song was released by Zee Music Company in February 2022 as part of a soundtrack that used several different composers across its tracklist — Amit Trivedi, Tanishk Bagchi, Ankit Tiwari and Khamosh Shah each contributing individual songs. Built around a mother's comic warning against 'chakkar' (romantic entanglements) before an arranged marriage, Bandi Tot leans into the film's broader theme of families pushing their children toward conventional matrimony, turning that everyday domestic pressure into a bright, danceable duet.

Ankit Tiwari, composing and singing the track himself alongside Nikhita Gandhi, keeps Bandi Tot in an upbeat, contemporary pop idiom, with a bouncy rhythm section supporting the two voices trading verses in a call-and-response pattern typical of celebratory Bollywood duets. Tiwari's own vocal presence — better known from his romantic ballads elsewhere in Hindi film music — brings a more playful, lighter register here, paired with Nikhita Gandhi's versatile, bright delivery to keep the tone comic rather than earnest.

Anurag Bhomia's lyric opens with a mother's direct instruction — 'yaar mummy ne bola tha, chakkar na chalaiyo, marriage arrange kar, simple bahu laiyo' ('friend, mother had said, don't get into any entanglement, get an arranged marriage, bring home a simple daughter-in-law') — using plain, conversational Hindi peppered with colloquial words like 'chakkar' and 'bandi' to capture the register of a young person recounting parental instructions to friends. The comic tension between that instruction and the song's own celebratory, flirtatious energy mirrors the film's larger comedy of social expectation versus lived reality.

Badhaai Do centres on Shardul Thakur (Rajkummar Rao) and Sumi Singh (Bhumi Pednekar), who marry each other in a lavender marriage to deflect family pressure to conform to heterosexual expectations, all while navigating their real relationships in secret. Bandi Tot contributes one of the film's lighter, comic musical beats, built around the everyday social pressure — arranged marriage, parental expectation — that runs underneath the film's central premise, with its music video featuring Rao and Pednekar. The film, produced by Junglee Pictures, released theatrically on 11 February 2022 to strong critical reception for its handling of LGBTQ+ themes within a mainstream comedy framework.

Bandi Tot's official Zee Music Company video has crossed over 5 million YouTube views, making it one of the more-watched tracks on the Badhaai Do soundtrack. As a soundtrack built on individual songs by different composers rather than a single unified sound, Bandi Tot represents Ankit Tiwari's contribution to the album's mix of comic, celebratory numbers alongside the film's more emotionally weighted tracks composed by Amit Trivedi.