Veteran composer Vanraj Bhatia, who provided the soundtrack to India’s new age cinema movement of the 1970s and 1980s, died in Mumbai. He was 93 and is understood to have been in poor health for some time. Born in Bombay, as the metropolis was known as then, in 1927, Bhatia studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and at the Conservatoire de Paris in the 1950s. Bhatia debuted as a composer for feature films with Ankur (1974), directed by Shyam Benegal, an independent alternative to mainstream commercial cinema.
