Presenting: the real faces behind Emotional Attyachar

For nine long years, the legend went that two obscure singers hailing from Himachal Pradesh were the voices behind Emosanal Attyachaar, from Anurag Kashyap’s most famed work Dev D.

But now that composer Amit Trivedi has revealed that it really was lyricist Amitabh Bhattacharya and him crooning the song, fans are taken by surprise.

While all the songs on the soundtrack enjoyed their own fame, Emosanal Atyachar struck chords with heartbroken lovers everywhere and went on to become the biggest hit of the year.

Interestingly, the song was credited to two unknown singers — Band master Rangeela and Rasila.

Both Anurag and Amit were tight-lipped about them, and maintained that the duo had vanished without a trace post recording.

In a recent interview, however, Trivedi spilled the beans on how the song was composed for the film, which released in February of 2009.

“Anurag had a vision for the song — he wanted it to be a certain way. In fact, he also coined the term ‘emotional atyachaar’. The idea of doing it in a brass wedding band style was also him. I just executed his vision and plan,” he says.

“When Amitabh and I were creating the song, we thought we will sing it ourselves when first presenting it to Anurag. We then decided that we would get some qawali singers on board or some really interesting cool guys to sing it,” he adds.

Things took a turn when Anurag liked the scratch version.

“Anurag got angry and asked why we want to change the voice. When I told him that this was a rough draft that Amitabh and I were singing, he said that is exactly what he wants. Amitabh was scared because he wasn’t singing in his normal voice. We tweaked it a little bit, and made our voice caricaturish. And he wanted to be a singer so he got scared! He said ‘I want to be a singer and if this is debut I won’t get work.’ Both of us were nervous! We changed the name to bandmaster Rangeela and Rasila. So, yes, we are them!” the composer laughs.