She named a song, questioned a composer, and pointed at a pattern two decades in the making. The chorus was never just a musical choice. It was a decision about who gets to feel things out loud.
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Singer Sona Mohapatra has raised a pointed question about how Bollywood distributes emotional weight in its songs. At the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters (MBIFL) in Kerala, she said that heartbreak in Hindi film music belongs almost exclusively to male singers. Women, she argued, are often reduced to a few lines at the end of a song that gets marketed as a duet.
Her remarks landed with force. They named a specific song, a specific composer, and a specific pattern that many in the industry have stayed quiet about for years.
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Sona spoke candidly at the MBIFL, a platform known for open conversations on culture, art, and society. She said that every time she was called to sing a duet in Bollywood, she ended up with the closing chorus. The mukhra and antaras, the main body of the song, went to the male singer.
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She used the 2017 song Zaalima from the film Raees as her central example. The song, composed by Pritam, features Arijit Singh across the majority of the track. Harshdeep Kaur, not Sona, actually sang Zaalima. Sona’s point was about being called for such recordings and noticing the structural imbalance when she arrived.
She directed her question at composer Pritam. She asked: “Is the man making love to himself? What kind of a duet is this? Why do I come in at the end?”
She was clear that her criticism was not aimed at Arijit Singh. She called him a great artist and said the fault lay with the system, not the individual.
Zaalima was released as part of the Raees soundtrack in 2017. The film starred Shah Rukh Khan and Mahira Khan. The song became one of the most-played tracks from the film, racking up hundreds of millions of streams.
Arijit Singh sang the bulk of the song. Harshdeep Kaur’s voice appears in sections, but the song is widely associated with Singh. In common usage, it is referred to as his song.
This is Sona’s exact point. A song with two vocalists gets remembered as one person’s song. The vocalist who carries the greater portion of the track becomes the face of it. When that vocalist is almost always male, female singers lose not just screen time but cultural memory.
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