Mehul Surti

Surti was born in Surat in 1977 to a doctor and a teacher, started a mechanical engineering diploma and did not complete it, and trained instead in two classical traditions, the Kirana gharana and the Mewati gharana. Those are vocal schools, which is a useful thing to know before listening to anything he has written: the melody comes first and the arrangement is built to serve it.

One thing this page will not tell you is when he started, because the record does not agree with itself. His Wikipedia biography says he began at twenty two with the 1999 film Narmada Tara Vahi Jata Pani. The filmography on the same page dates that film to 2002. Rather than pick the more flattering version, we leave the debut year out entirely.

Kevi Rite Jaish arrived in 2012 on a reported budget of about Rs 1.75 crore and is the film usually named as the start of the modern Gujarati wave. Surti scored it with Vishvesh Parmar and took Best Music Director at the 12th Transmedia Gujarati Screen and Stage Awards for it.

What followed was not a hot streak, it was a residency. Aapne to Dhirubhai in 2014, then Je Pan Kahish E Sachuj Kahish, Passport and Kookh in 2016, Vitamin She in 2017, then Montu Ni Bittu and Short Circuit in 2019. He won two separate Best Music Director awards for Montu Ni Bittu alone, from Transmedia and from GIFA, plus a GIFA Best Background Music award for Je Pan Kahish E Sachuj Kahish.

The Hellaro soundtrack is four tracks long and runs eighteen minutes and forty four seconds in total: Asvaar sung by Aishwarya Majmudar and Mooralala Marwada, Haiyaa by Shruti Pathak with Aditya Gadhvi on backing vocals, Sapna Vinani Raat by Aditya Gadhvi, and Vaagyo Re Dhol by Bhoomi Trivedi. Saumya Joshi wrote every lyric.

That is a very small amount of music with which to carry a film about women in the Rann of Kutch in the 1970s whose only available rebellion is dancing. Hellaro won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film at the 66th National Film Awards, the only Gujarati film ever to take the top national prize, on a reported budget of around Rs 2.5 crore against a reported gross of about Rs 16 crore. Surti won GIFA awards for both Best Music Director and Best Background Score for it, and the Gujarat State Film Award for Best Music Director.

Away from the cinema he has set more than two hundred Gujarati poems to music, by writers ranging from Narmad in the nineteenth century to Umashankar Joshi, Ardeshar Khabardar, Mareez, Jayant Pathak, Mukul Choksi and Saumya Joshi. Six albums have come out of that work, including Narmad dhara, built entirely on Narmad's verse. He has also written stage scores for Priya Pappa have To, Aakhar Ni Aatmakatha, Khelando, Koi Pan Ek Phoolnu Naam Bolo To, Samudramanthan and Dhaad.

This is the part that explains the film work. A composer who has spent years fitting music to Gujarati poetry has an ear trained on the language's own stress and breath rather than on a Bombay template with Gujarati words dropped in. When he later scores a film set in the Rann in 1975, he is not researching a sound, he already speaks it.

The workload has not tapered. 21mu Tiffin in 2021, Kamthaan and Kasoombo in 2024, Umbarro and Shastra in 2025. That is five features in five years, more than a decade after the film usually treated as his breakthrough.

Look at what those five have in common, which is nothing. A chamber drama about a woman running a tiffin service, a comedy, a historical drama, and two 2025 releases in different registers again. A composer who was a specialist would have been dropped by at least two of those directors. Surti keeps getting hired because he is the only variable they can hold constant.