बिरवा

Released on 1 September 2025 by Zee Music Company, 'Birwa' is the emotional centrepiece of Anurag Kashyap's crime drama Nishaanchi. Composed by Anurag Saikia with lyrics by Dr. Sagar, and sung by Arijit Singh, the song is a slow, sorrowful ballad built around the image of a birwa — a sapling — struggling to find light. Singh's voice, at its most restrained and raw, carries the film's themes of twin brothers divided by crime and conscience. The song was released 18 days ahead of the film's theatrical premiere and quickly became the most-listened track in the 15-song album.

Anurag Saikia builds 'Birwa' from the ground up with extreme economy. The arrangement begins with a single instrument — possibly a sarangi-inflected string pad — before layering sparse piano notes and a barely-present tabla. The composition resists the orchestral swell that Arijit Singh's voice typically invites, keeping the focus tightly on lyric and breath. The result is a song that feels unproduced in the best sense — intimate and unguarded. Saikia, known for his work in Assamese cinema before Bollywood crossovers, brings a Northeast Indian sensibility to the sound: a certain plaintive quality that sits outside the mainstream Bollywood emotional vocabulary.

Dr. Sagar's lyric borrows from the folk-religious tradition of addressing the divine or the beloved as a gardener — and the self as a plant dependent on their care. The birwa (sapling) is the soul in its most fragile state: recently uprooted, unsure of finding soil, reaching toward a light that may not come. The language has a Bhojpuri-Hindi folk register that is entirely contemporary in feeling, avoiding the archaic vocabulary of classical film poetry while retaining its emotional directness.

Anurag Kashyap described Nishaanchi as his tribute to 1970s masala cinema. The film was shot over 69 days across Lucknow and Kanpur, producing four hours of footage ultimately split into two theatrical parts. 'Birwa' appears at a pivotal emotional moment in the film — when the twin brothers' diverging paths become irreversible. Kashyap gave Saikia unusual creative freedom, resulting in a soundtrack that spans folk, electronic, and classical influences across 15 songs.

'Birwa' became the defining song of the Nishaanchi soundtrack, earning Arijit Singh further proof of his ability to inhabit the emotional core of Anurag Kashyap's morally complex narratives. Anurag Saikia, largely known for Assamese compositions before this, established himself as a major Bollywood composer with this album.