The score was composed by Nitin Sawhney, one of Britain’s most original and gifted music creators. Over the last decade he has carved out a singular niche in British culture melding the musical barriers between East and West, between classical and popular, juxtaposing music from around the world with club-land-culture.

His fourth album, Beyond Skin (released in 2000) was short-listed as one of the albums of the year for the Mercury Music Prize and it also won the prestigious South Bank Show Award. Its successor, 2001’s Prophesy - recorded in five continents and featuring over 230 musicians - won Sawhney further honors including a MOBO, an EMMA and a BBC Radio 3 Award.  Sawhney’s latest album, Philtre, was released by V2 in 2005.                       

Besides his own albums, Nitin Sawhney is massively in demand to score for film and television.  "The Namesake, as a screenplay adaptation, was all about mood, emotion and spirit, providing ample sustenance for any composer," says Sawhney. "Mira’s tight and sensitive direction allowed me to find a voice in the music that spanned time, generations and countries through the epic journey of a struggling Bengali family. The score is subsequently both intimate and haunting, reflecting the sense of empathy, inner beauty and nostalgia evoked by the story. The whole experience was an inspiration on so many levels."

Says The Namesake’s director, Mira Nair on choosing Nitin Sawhney to score her film, "If I am blessed, a melody will capture me in the early days of the film’s conception, and stay with me throughout the growth of the film. In the case of The Namesake, it was Nitin Sawhney’s and Jayanta Bose’s ‘Boatman’s Song.’ The lyrics and the rhythm captured the elegant soulfulness of traditional Bhatially songs, and Nitin’s elegant scoring made it modern."

"I had loved Nitin’s concert music, and it was to him I turned for the score, keen to make The Namesake a flag of desi creative power," Nair continued. "Once we identified the theme of the film during one of his casual strummings – the haunting melody of ‘First Day in New York’ – the rest of the score tumbled out of him, forging an ancient-modern tapestry that beautifully cradled the span of thirty years in the Ganguli family. Since the film moved fluidly between New York City and Calcutta, so could the music: It moved in a freewheeling way between Geeta Dutt’s ‘Bengali Gaan’ from the ’60s to Susheela Raman’s contemporary take on Mukesh’s popular ’70s love song, ‘Ye Mera Diwanapan Hai’ to today’s rap of ‘The Chosen One’ to the heat and sway of ‘Postales.’ This is the privilege of cinema: to bring together the sounds, voices, instruments of that which you love and make it one with image."

Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake is the story of the Ganguli family whose move from Calcutta to New York evokes a lifelong balancing act to meld to a new world without forgetting the old. 

The film’s screen adaptation was penned by Sooni Taraporevala, with whom Nair previously collaborated on Mississippi Masala and the Oscar-nominated Salaam Bombay!