AR Rahman: The Composer Who Re-Engineered Indian Film Music

01Who is AR Rahman?

AR Rahman is an Indian film composer, record producer, playback singer and music-institution founder whose film career began with Mani Ratnam's Tamil-language Roja in 1992 and has continued without interruption into the 2020s. The catalogue is now over 150 features across Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, English and Mandarin productions and runs from mainstream commercial cinema through art-cinema scores into international stage musicals, Hollywood features and standalone solo albums; the Vande Mataram album of 1997, released around the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, is among the best-selling Indian non-film albums on record.

The public profile rests on a small set of partnerships and a small set of awards. The partnerships: Mani Ratnam continuously since Roja, Shankar from Kadhalan (1994) through 2.0 (2018), Imtiaz Ali across Rockstar (2011), Highway (2014) and Tamasha (2015), Ashutosh Gowariker across Lagaan (2001), Swades (2004) and Jodhaa Akbar (2008). The awards: six National Film Awards in India, the Padma Shri in 2000, the Padma Bhushan in 2010, two Academy Awards at the 81st ceremony in February 2009 — Best Original Score and Best Original Song for 'Jai Ho' with Gulzar's lyrics — two Grammy Awards in 2010, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA. Rahman remains the only Indian composer to have won at the Oscars and the Grammys, and the wins are now nearly two decades old; what has happened to his catalogue since is the more interesting analytic question.

02Origins: RK Shekhar, jingles, Roja (1967-1992)

The biographical line is well-known. Rahman was born to RK Shekhar, a Malayalam-cinema composer-conductor who worked across the Tamil and Malayalam industries, and Kareema Begum (then Kasturi); after Shekhar's death when Rahman was nine, the family ran a music-equipment business that put a young Dileep into the Madras session-musician circuit as a keyboardist. Through his teens he played for Ilaiyaraaja and MS Viswanathan among others; in his early twenties he converted to Islam, took the name Rahman, and built Panchathan Record Inn — a small home studio in Kodambakkam that would, over the following decade, become one of the most technically advanced film-music recording rooms in Asia.

The pre-film period that mattered, however, was the advertising-jingles work. Rahman scored hundreds of commercials through the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the consistently cited Cannes Lions credit — repeated in profile pieces but not always primary-sourced — belongs to this period. The jingles work shaped two things that would define his film method: a habit of treating each track as a self-contained production with its own sound design, and a comfort with non-mainstream playback voices selected for timbre rather than star value.

Mani Ratnam, then preparing the Tamil-language Roja, heard the jingles and offered Rahman the score over the more obvious continuation with Ilaiyaraaja. The choice broke the convention that a director would stay with a single composer across a phase, and the resulting album won Rahman the National Film Award for Best Music Direction at his first attempt — a record at the time. The Hindi-dubbed release the following year carried the score into the national market and began the larger reset.

03The Mani Ratnam continuous partnership (1992-2025)

Rahman has scored every Mani Ratnam directorial since Roja. The list runs through Bombay (1995), Iruvar (1997), Dil Se (1998), Alaipayuthey (2000), Kannathil Muthamittal (2002), Yuva and the Tamil Aayitha Ezhuthu (2004), Guru (2007), the simultaneously-shot Hindi Raavan and Tamil Raavanan (2010), Kadal (2013), O Kadhal Kanmani (2015), Kaatru Veliyidai (2017), Chekka Chivantha Vaanam (2018), the two-part Ponniyin Selvan (2022 and 2023), and Thug Life (2025). The thirty-three-year continuity has no comparable equivalent in Indian cinema as a single composer-director relationship at this output and visibility.

It is also the partnership where Rahman has done his most experimental writing. Bombay (1995) is the clearest case: the wordless 'Bombay Theme' — a flute-and-strings minimalism set against a tabla pulse — is one of the most concentrated examples of an Indian composer using the score, rather than the song-list, as the film's emotional argument. Iruvar (1997), the fictionalised MGR-Karunanidhi political biopic, used Carnatic and Hindustani classical forms — including a Hariharan-led 'Narumugaiye' that sits closer to a concert raga elaboration than to a film song — and anticipated the long-form classical writing of Ponniyin Selvan two decades later. Kannathil Muthamittal (2002), the Sri Lankan civil-war drama, gave Rahman a small ensemble and a child-protagonist register; the 'Vellai Pookal' choir against a sparse orchestral bed is one of the most economical pieces of Indian film scoring of the 2000s. Raavanan (2010) used qawwali-against-percussion, most audibly in 'Behne De', to carry the film's antagonist-hero ambivalence. Ponniyin Selvan I (2022) returned Rahman to long-form orchestral writing for a Chola-period epic, and the press around the release explicitly framed the reunion as the closing of a circle from Roja.

Raavanan (2010) used qawwali-against-percussion, most audibly in 'Behne De', to carry the film's antagonist-hero ambivalence.

04The Shankar spectacle cycle (1994-2018)

The other major Tamil partnership is with Shankar, whose spectacle filmography depends on Rahman in the same way Mani Ratnam's filmography does, but in a sonically opposite register. Beginning with Kadhalan (1994) and Indian (1996) and running through Jeans (1998), Boys (2003), Sivaji (2007), Enthiran/Robot (2010), I (2015) and 2.0 (2018), the Shankar partnership has produced some of the commercially largest Tamil albums of the post-1992 period.

Where the Mani Ratnam scores are characterised by restraint, the Shankar scores are characterised by sonic maximalism: layered electronic production, large vocal ensembles, set-piece dance numbers built for the director's choreography-as-spectacle staging. 'Mukkala Muqabla' from Kadhalan was an early demonstration of the maximalist Rahman idiom, and the Sivaji and Enthiran soundtracks pushed the production budget and the layering further. The Shankar work is sometimes treated by Rahman partisans as the lesser side of the catalogue against the Mani Ratnam scores; the more honest accounting is that the two partnerships together cover the full range of Rahman's idiom — chamber-scale and stadium-scale within the same composer's hand — and that you cannot understand the first without the second.

05The Hindi conquest: Rangeela to Rockstar (1995-2011)

Rahman's Hindi career began with Ram Gopal Varma's Rangeela (1995), and the soundtrack landed in a Bollywood market that had spent three years arguing about whether the Roja sound could survive the move north. It could. 'Tanha Tanha' and 'Hai Rama' in Asha Bhosle's voice translated the Tamil idiom into a recognisably Hindi-pop register; Subhash Ghai's Taal (1999) extended the project; Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan (2001) — Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language Film and the project that established Rahman's name in international film circles — gave him an ensemble-cinema premise where the score had to do crowd-scene and intimate work in the same album.

The Imtiaz Ali phase from Rockstar (2011) onward is the most analysed late-Hindi run. Rockstar's Sufi-rock fusion — the Mohit Chauhan vocal carrying 'Jo Bhi Main' and 'Sadda Haq' against a guitar-and-tabla bed — sits inside a longer Rahman habit of pulling Sufi devotional vocal idioms into pop-rock production grammar, a habit traceable back to 'Chaiyya Chaiyya' on Dil Se (1998), where Sukhwinder Singh's voice and a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan-influenced melodic shape moved against an electronic-percussion bed. The Hindi catalogue across this period also includes Saathiya (2002), Swades (2004) with the Gowariker reunion, Rang De Basanti (2006), Jodhaa Akbar (2008), Delhi-6 (2009), Highway (2014) and Tamasha (2015). 'Tu Hi Re' from Bombay (1995, Hindi dub), 'Chaiyya Chaiyya', 'Jiya Jale' from Dil Se, 'Mitwa' from Lagaan and the Rockstar songs became the international shorthand for what Indian film music sounded like in the post-Rahman era.

06The international turn: Bombay Dreams to Slumdog and after

Andrew Lloyd Webber commissioned Rahman to compose Bombay Dreams, a stage musical with a Bollywood frame, in the late 1990s; it opened in London's West End in 2002 and on Broadway in 2004. 'Shakalaka Baby' was the most-circulated track. The commission was the first time a sitting British or American mainstream stage producer had handed an Indian film composer a full musical score, and it broadened Rahman's working register beyond cinema.

The larger international moment was Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008), for which Rahman composed the score and the song 'Jai Ho' with Gulzar's Hindi lyrics. At the 81st Academy Awards in February 2009, Rahman won two Oscars — Best Original Score and Best Original Song — becoming the first Indian composer to win in either category. The same body of work won two Grammys in 2010 (Best Compilation Soundtrack Album and Best Song Written for Visual Media), a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA. The wins repositioned Rahman from leading Indian film composer to a global film-music figure and led directly to the Hollywood scores that followed: Boyle's 127 Hours (2010), Million Dollar Arm (2014), Pelé: Birth of a Legend (2016), and a string of smaller projects. The 127 Hours score, in particular, sits closer to ambient-orchestral film scoring than to Indian film music, and is the strongest evidence that Rahman's score-only writing has its own grammar separable from his song work.

The larger international moment was Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008), for which Rahman composed the score and the song 'Jai Ho' with Gulzar's Hindi lyrics.

07Method: Sufi vocal, Carnatic line, electronic production, ensemble casting

Strip the catalogue to its grammar and four practices recur. The first is layered, long-timeline production: Rahman records vocal and instrumental tracks separately in his own studio over months, layering electronic textures (synth pads, programmed percussion, processed strings) under acoustic instrumentation (bansuri, sitar, sarangi, tabla, classical guitar, full orchestra). The grammar is closer to a hip-hop or contemporary R&B producer's session work than to the live-orchestra tradition of pre-1992 Indian film music, and the scale of the time-investment is one of the things that makes the Rahman sound difficult to imitate.

The second is the Sufi-devotional vocal idiom — qawwali phrasing, the long-line melismatic style — used as a recurring melodic source. 'Khwaja Mere Khwaja' from Jodhaa Akbar, sung by Rahman himself, is the cleanest example; 'Chaiyya Chaiyya' is the most-circulated; 'Kun Faya Kun' from Rockstar carries the practice into the 2010s. The lineage is partly Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, partly Bulleh Shah-via-Sukhwinder, partly Rahman's own post-conversion engagement with Sufi practice.

The third is Carnatic and Hindustani classical raga used at the structural level rather than as ornament — most legible in Iruvar, Kannathil Muthamittal and the Ponniyin Selvan films.

The fourth is the ensemble vocal casting. Rahman from Roja onward built a generation of playback voices that became identified with his soundworld: Minmini's career-launching vocal on 'Chinna Chinna Aasai', Hariharan's continuous Carnatic-pop work across the catalogue, KS Chithra and Sadhana Sargam carrying the female lead, Sukhwinder Singh as the principal Sufi voice, Naresh Iyer arriving in the mid-2000s, the contemporary roster of Karthik, Chinmayi, Shreya Ghoshal and Vijay Yesudas, and Rahman himself as a singer (Vande Mataram, 'Khwaja Mere Khwaja', 'Kun Faya Kun'). The pattern of a different and sometimes unconventional voice for each song — instead of a small pool of established playback stars — is the most-imitated part of the method. KS Chithra's continuity from the Ilaiyaraaja era into the Rahman era is itself a useful counter to any clean break narrative.

08The score versus the songs

Indian film-music conversation routinely conflates the song-list with the BGM. Rahman's catalogue is one of the cleanest cases for separating them. The Bombay Theme (1995) is a wordless score-statement that does the entire film's emotional argument outside any of the soundtrack songs. Iruvar (1997) embeds extended raga elaborations as score-passages. Kannathil Muthamittal (2002) uses a sparser orchestral bed than the songs would suggest. The 127 Hours score (2010) is essentially a score-only album, with the song 'If I Rise' as a coda; the writing is closer to ambient-orchestral than to anything in the Indian-cinema soundtrack tradition. Slumdog Millionaire (2008) is half a score and half a curated soundtrack, and the score-half — the recurring 'Latika's Theme' motif, the chase cues — is what won Rahman the Best Original Score Oscar.

The analytic point is that the Rahman score has its own grammar. It uses motif more rigorously than the songs do, leans on long-line minimalism, and is more comfortable with negative space than the album-side of the same project would suggest. Any serious account of his work has to treat the BGM as a parallel body of work rather than as link-music between the songs the marketing department actually sells.

09Voices and the playback ensemble

The catalogue can also be read as the most consequential expansion of the Indian playback ensemble since the SP Balasubrahmanyam era. Rahman's casting choices in the early 1990s — Minmini on 'Chinna Chinna Aasai', a then-unknown Hariharan moving from ghazal into film, an early Sukhwinder Singh — were a deliberate break from the established A-list pool. The post-2000 expansion brought in Naresh Iyer, Karthik, Chinmayi, Vijay Yesudas, Benny Dayal, Shreya Ghoshal, and a steady rotation of voices recruited from his own KM Music Conservatory. KS Chithra's continuity bridges the Ilaiyaraaja and Rahman eras; SP Balasubrahmanyam's death in September 2020 closed an era for both composers and is the implicit backdrop to a number of Rahman's post-2020 releases.

The casting practice has substantive consequences. Each Rahman album is, in effect, a small repertory company assembled for the project, and the resulting timbral variety — a Hariharan opener, a Sukhwinder middle, a Rahman-himself ballad, a Chinmayi closer — is one of the things that makes the listening experience feel less like a star-vehicle and more like a curated playlist with a single producer's hand audible across the cuts. The method has been widely imitated by post-Rahman Tamil composers but only partially absorbed by the Hindi mainstream, where the star-playback model has historically been more entrenched.

The method has been widely imitated by post-Rahman Tamil composers but only partially absorbed by the Hindi mainstream, where the star-playback model has historically been more entrenched.

10KM Music Conservatory, 99 Songs, the producer-author posture

Rahman founded the KM Music Conservatory in Chennai in 2008, named for his late mother Kareema Begum. The institution offered Western and Hindustani classical curricula at undergraduate and diploma levels and was the first of its kind in South India. The pedagogical project has expanded into masterclasses, talent searches, and a steady recruitment pipeline from the conservatory into Rahman's own studio band; KM Music graduates appear across the post-2010 catalogue.

The 2019-2021 Tamil-Hindi feature 99 Songs, which Rahman wrote, produced and scored, was the most direct expression of the pedagogical project as cinema. The film is structured around a young composer's formation, used several KM Music musicians, and worked as a kind of policy statement about what musical seriousness inside the film system should look like. The reception was mixed — the script was widely judged thinner than the music — but the project remains the clearest evidence of Rahman positioning himself across his career as an author-figure: a composer with a studio, a school, a publishing arm, and a public posture of cultural responsibility that earlier Indian film composers, working strictly inside the producer system, were not in a position to take. The Padma Bhushan citation in 2010 specifically acknowledged this broader cultural role alongside the film catalogue.

11Critical reception and the post-2011 reassessment

Rahman's reception has moved through three distinct phases. The first, 1992 to roughly 2008, was a long ascending arc in which the Tamil and Hindi mainstream press, the international film press after Lagaan, and the post-Slumdog global film-music conversation collectively treated him as the defining Indian composer of his generation. The second, the Slumdog and immediate post-Slumdog years, was a moment of unusual international visibility — two Oscars, two Grammys, a steady run of Hollywood commissions.

The third phase, beginning roughly with Rockstar (2011), is the more analytically interesting one. A serious strand in the critical conversation, audible in Film Companion long-form pieces by Baradwaj Rangan and others and in the Hindi music-criticism press, has argued that the Hindi work since Rockstar has been uneven — some albums (Highway, Tamasha) holding the standard, others (a number of the late-2010s Hindi releases, Atrangi Re in 2021) judged thinner than the back catalogue would lead one to expect. The Tamil work, on the same critical reading, has remained more consistent: the Mani Ratnam scores from Kaatru Veliyidai through Ponniyin Selvan and Thug Life have been received as serious work, and the Shankar finale 2.0 was a commercial event regardless of its musical reception.

The partisan argument with Ilaiyaraaja loyalists — a generational and cultural-political fault line in Tamil conversation — has hardened with time rather than softened, and is now part of the texture of any Tamil-cinema music discussion rather than a debate with a settlement in view. The honest account is that Rahman's catalogue is uneven inside any one decade and serious across the full thirty-three years; the binaries are less useful than the films.

12Where to start

A first listener can use a small set of films as anchors. Roja (1992) for the debut and the studio reset; Bombay (1995) for the wordless theme as score-statement; Iruvar (1997) for the Carnatic-classical writing inside a Mani Ratnam frame; Dil Se (1998) and Lagaan (2001) for the Hindi conquest; Kannathil Muthamittal (2002) for the chamber-scale Mani Ratnam late work; Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and 127 Hours (2010) for the Hollywood score-grammar; Rockstar (2011) for the Imtiaz Ali Sufi-rock period; Enthiran (2010) for the Shankar spectacle scale; and Ponniyin Selvan I (2022) for the thirty-year Mani Ratnam reunion and the late long-form orchestral work. From those entries, every other strand of the catalogue is one or two films away.