Sanyukta Iyer (MUMBAI MIRROR; May 16, 2017)

Pritam Chakraborty’s Bollywood career took off soon after he parted ways with his composing partner Jeet Gannguli in 2002, with back-to-back hits Gangster, Life in a… Metro, Jab We Met and Love Aaj Kal. In a bid to consolidate his meteoric rise, Pritam introduced a water-tight clause in his contracts four years ago to let collaborators know in no uncertain terms that he’d be the only composer on a project. Last year, he was the toast of B-Town as he swept every music award for the Karan Johar directorial, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. His score bagged him the award for Best Composer. It also picked up awards for Best Lyricist, Best Singer and the RD Burman Award for New Music Talent (for “Bulleya” sung by Amit Mishra) at the 62nd Filmfare Awards.

Dinesh Vijan’s debut directorial, Raabta, was his first album of the year. But in a Facebook post on Monday, the composer-singer announced that he has opted out of the Sushant Singh Rajput-Kriti Sanon reincarnation-drama. According to him, it was the presence of another composer on the project that forced him to take the step. “I had decided a while ago to only do solo albums and not have any outside song in my soundtrack. But for Raabta, the producers want to recreate a song from their music label as part of the promotions so I have decided to not continue with the film and requested the producers to take my name out of the credits and promotions. The album will be completed by my company JAM 8,” Pritam wrote on the social media.

He had launched his music production company with musicians Kaushik-Akash in April 2016. Whenever a filmmaker wanted multiple composers on a project, the credit was given to his company, as was the case with the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Raees which had Ram Sampat as the original composer with Pritam’s company contributing three tracks.

When contacted, Dinesh Vijan said that this was an issue between Pritam and the film’s producers (Raabta is a joint production by Dinesh Vijan, Homi Adajania and Bhushan Kumar’s T-Series) and that an official statement would be released immediately. At the time of going to press, Mirror hadn’t received any statement.