A. R. Rahman — Roja

A background to Roja

It’s hard to believe that the Roja soundtrack was a debut album, and that its composer, A.R. Rahman was only 25 when it was released. As an Indian of the post-Roja generation, I’ve only ever lived in a music world of which Rahman is the undisputed king. Since I was barely conscious when Roja was released into a world that had heard nothing like it, I have no first-hand experience of just how bewildering the new sound was for those who bought close to 3 million copies of the album. But with the benefit of hindsight, comparing it to even the best work of the most accomplished film composers of the decade leading up to Roja (of whom there are several), it’s easy to see why the album was such a phenomenon. Its music represents the best parts of the cosmopolitan society that a fast-liberalising India aspired to be: one that was inspired by influences from all over the world, but which was, at its core, rooted in its own historic culture(s). With added influences of Western orchestral arrangements, rock music, and electronic music, Roja is a fundamentally Indian (and in many ways, a fundamentally Tamil) soundtrack, and continues to be an archetype of the ‘Rahman sound’.

From Roja to Slumdog Millionaire

When Mani Ratnam offered him work on the soundtrack, A.S. Dileep Kumar, as Rahman was then known, was a quite successful composer of ad jingles considering studying music at the Berklee School of Music. The project, and its subsequent success, encouraged him to become a full-time film composer. In revisiting Rahman’s discography since Roja, I’ve been amazed at the long roster of classic soundtracks he’s released every year since. In the seventeen years between Roja and his Oscar win for Slumdog Millionaire in 2009, he’s written what I consider my favourite film soundtrack for each year except 1993, 2003, and 2005. Seriously. I made a list.

1992: Roja

1994: Duet

1995: Bombay, Rangeela

1996: Indian

1997: Minsara Kanavu

1998: Dil Se..

1999: Taal

2000: Pukar

2001: Lagaan

2002: Saathiya

2004: Swades

2006: Rang de Basanti

2007: Guru

2008: Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na

This evolution from Roja to Slumdog Millionaire displays a range that is straight up unknown in the discography of any contemporary music composer. As Indians, we’re often trained to think of other Indians as existing in a different artistic universe from Western artists. Our comparative study of the output of our entertainment industry is often insular, and very often, much to the (deserved, in my view) chagrin of many of our countrypeople, we measure our artists’ successes in terms of whether they cross over to the west. We don’t, therefore, imagine Scam 1992 in the same universe as, say, The Queen’s Gambit. While we feel compelled to speak to the experience of arranged marriage as showcased in Indian Matchmaking partly due to its success in the west, in no conversation about the TV show did I hear mention of Made In Heaven, a brilliant (and quite popular) limited series on Indian marriages that predated it by a year. In fact, I think it’s important to recognise that we’re living through a golden age of Indian television. It would be akin to beating a dead horse to talk about the roots of this thinking in colonialism, so I’ll just say Western colonialism has had massively detrimental and long-lasting effects on our society’s soul. I’ll just allow the well-informed readers of this piece to connect the dots from colonialism through the preceding conversation about the Indian entertainment industry to the perception of making it at Microsoft as being a cultural marker for real success. I, like most others, have internalised this way of thinking.

The best to ever do it

How is all this relevant to A. R. Rahman? Revisiting the works of A. R. Rahman through this lockdown has brought me to a very simple realisation. I don’t just think A. R. Rahman is the greatest Indian film composer of his generation. I think he’s the greatest film composer of his generation, and perhaps of all time. Roja was the start of this illustrious career, and is, in my view, among the most accomplished debut albums that have ever been released.