Since then, Rahman became Ratnam’s constant musical companion.
Subsequently, Ratnam and Ilaiyaraaja - the team behind such enigmatic classics as Nayagan, Mouna Ragam, Thalapathi and Anjali - also parted, making way for the young Rahman. It was a loss from which Tamil cinema would have never recovered, if not for Rahman’s timely arrival to fill the vacuum. Unfortunately, after their fallout in Puthu Puthu Arthangal (1989) Balachander and Ilaiyaraaja reportedly split.
Between them, from the 1970-80s onward, the trio has produced some of Tamil cinema’s greatest soundtracks in what can be described as Kollywood’s golden period. Now, as any Tamil cinema fan will tell you, Ratnam never worked without the legendary Ilaiyaraaja. This was a young film with relatively new faces that Ratnam was slated to make for his mentor, the great K Balachander. And what a revolutionary soundtrack it turned out to be, a massive game-changer as much for Rahman as for the Tamil and Hindi music industries.īack in the ’90s, A R Rahman was a maker of jingles and ready to mingle when director Mani Ratnam discovered him almost accidentally and got him on board for Roja. They got to know the maestro from Madras much earlier. For us, ’90s was a time when the familiar melodies spun by the likes of Nadeem-Shravan, Jatin-Lalit, Udit Narayan, Alka Yagnik and Kumar Sanu was comfort food. For the act of introducing A R Rahman’s ministry-of-new genius to Hindi movie-goers, we can forgive the unpredictable Ram Gopal Varma for all the experimental trash he subjected us to in the millennium. He had burst onto the Bollywood scene much earlier, with Bombay and Rangeela. The Western world first noticed him in Slumdog Millionaire with the big Oscar win. In a world where it’s easy to fall prey to mediocrity and complacency especially after reaching the peak, Rahman is the rare music composer who has managed to reinvent his sounds and aesthetics in every decade just when we think he’s about to run out of fresh ideas. Chronologically, it might be useful to see these as roughly the three phrases of A R Rahman. Roja redefined film music in India and gave us the peerless AR Rahman who, in his own way, is a gift that keeps giving.
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