You Grew Up on Her Music Without Knowing It: Music Director Merlin D'Souza and the Hindi Lion King

Many Indian children met The Lion King in Hindi before they ever heard the English original. The songs as they reached Indian living rooms were shaped in part by Music Director Merlin D'Souza, who served on the Hindi version as vocal director, arranger and programmer.

It is one of the clearest examples of a pattern in her career: work that millions of people know intimately, under a name few of them have looked for.

The craft of the dub

Adapting a musical for another language is a discipline of its own. A translated lyric must still land on the original melody, keep the emotion of the scene and sound natural in the new tongue. The arrangement has to be rebuilt around those constraints, and the singers directed so that the result feels native rather than imported.

She did the same vocal work on the Hindi version of DreamWorks' The Prince of Egypt, and later on Disney's localised Ralph Breaks the Internet. Taken together, these films sit at the start of how many Indian families first encountered Western animated musicals, in their own language.

The sound you still hear without knowing it

The pattern did not end with animation. It moved into everyday life.

As a Founding Partner and Music Director at BrandMusiq, she is part of the studio behind Mastercard's global sonic identity: the short melody that sounds when a payment goes through, heard at checkouts around the world. The sound-branding agency amp ranked Mastercard the world's best audio brand every year from 2020 to 2024. Through the same studio, her work also sits inside the sonic identities of HDFC Bank and 7UP. We placed her alongside India's most internationally heard music directors in our list earlier this week.

The logic is the same as the dub. A sonic identity has to feel local in every market and still be recognisably one brand. A Hindi Lion King has to feel Indian and still be recognisably Disney. Both are exercises in translation that the listener is not supposed to notice.

From the circle of life to the Earthshots

There is a fitting line between that work and 17 November. The Lion King is, at heart, a story about balance in the natural world: what happens when it breaks, and the work of restoring it. Earthshot's first category is called Protect and Restore Nature. Its 2026 finalists in that category include the Indigenous Desert Alliance in Australia and the nation of Bhutan.

It would be too neat to say the film prepared anyone for the Prize. But it is fair to say that Music Director Merlin D'Souza has spent decades making stories sing for Indian audiences, and the Earthshot stage in Mumbai is a coherent next step. Our guide to the full Earthshot lineup sets out where she sits among the evening's performers.

The wider pattern

The Disney work sits alongside a long list of film credits. She was vocal director, arranger and programmer on Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Road, Socha Na Tha, Gangaajal and Agni Varsha, and her music is part of the Prime Video series Bambai Meri Jaan. The K3G connection, and what it means now that Karan Johar hosts the Earthshot night, is a story we told earlier in this series.

The through-line is translation in the broadest sense. She takes material from one world and makes it belong in another. That is also, more or less, what the Earthshot Prize is attempting in Mumbai: making a global idea feel at home in India. This is where the series began.

Kenneth Hopkins is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AltBollywood. Indofuturist, posthumanist and unapologetically Indocentric, he describes himself as an epimemeticist, a swaraji, a freakonomist, a lexicographer and a cartochronicler, mapping the ideas, words and quiet shifts that shape Indian entertainment. Follow him on Instagram at @kennethhopkins