🇮🇳 A. R. Rahman

He was born in 1967 in Madras as A. S. Dileep Kumar, the son of R. K. Shekhar, a film-music composer and conductor for Malayalam cinema, and Kareema Begum (then Kashturi). His father died of an undiagnosed illness when Dileep was nine; the family — mother, three siblings — survived by renting out the father's musical instruments. The boy who would become Rahman was, by eleven, playing keyboard sessions on Tamil and Malayalam film recordings to support his mother.

He travelled through the Madras film-music world as a session musician, briefly studied at Trinity College of Music in London on a scholarship in the late 1980s, and returned to set up Panchathan Record Inn in 1992 — a small home studio in his Madras backyard that would, within a decade, become one of the most sophisticated recording facilities in Asia. In 1989, he and his family converted to Islam together. He took the name Allah Rakha Rahman.

Mani Ratnam heard a jingle he had composed and, in 1991, offered him a Tamil film called Roja. The film's soundtrack, released in 1992, was unlike anything Indian cinema had heard. Rahman fused South Indian classical scales with electronic textures, programmed beats, choirs, and an almost cinematic spatialisation. The album sold millions. He won the National Film Award for Best Music Direction at twenty-five — the youngest ever to do so. He has won the award several times since.

The 1990s and early 2000s belonged to him. Bombay (1995), Dil Se (1998), Taal (1999), Lagaan (2001), Rang De Basanti (2006), Guru (2007). With each soundtrack the palette widened. He composed in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam; he employed qawwali, Sufi devotional, hip-hop, Carnatic classical, flamenco, and orchestral idioms; he worked with Lata Mangeshkar and with global pop singers. Andrew Lloyd Webber commissioned him to compose Bombay Dreams for the West End in 2002, and he wrote the music for the stage adaptation of The Lord of the Rings in 2007.

Slumdog Millionaire arrived in 2008. Danny Boyle had wanted Rahman from the start and gave him only weeks. The score and the song 'Jai Ho' together won two Academy Awards, two Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA. Rahman became the first Asian to win two Oscars in a single night. The image of him on the podium, his mother in the front row, has been used by every Indian schoolteacher since to define the word breakthrough.

He built KM Music Conservatory in Chennai in 2008, a not-for-profit school of contemporary and Western classical music for Indian students, modelled in part on Berklee. He also composed for global films thereafter — 127 Hours (Boyle, 2010), Couples Retreat, People Like Us, Million Dollar Arm, and the score for the Persian-Indian co-production Muhammad: The Messenger of God. He continued his Tamil and Hindi work in parallel: Rockstar (2011) and Raanjhanaa (2013) remain landmarks of the streaming era.

He is, in 2026, working on multiple fronts simultaneously: scores for Mani Ratnam's Ponniyin Selvan series, immersive concert technology ventures, further international film projects, and a string of philanthropy projects including the AR Rahman Foundation. He has been awarded the Padma Shri (2000) and the Padma Bhushan (2010). The boy who lost his father at nine and supported his mother by playing keyboards in dust-floored Madras studios is, by every measure that matters in his profession, the most globally recognised composer his country has produced.

He has remained, throughout, an unusually private man — devoutly Muslim, soft-spoken, allergic to the celebrity press — and, when asked about his work, returns reliably to the same sentence with which he opened his Oscar speech: ella pugazhum iraivanukke. All glory to God. His Chennai studios — Panchathan Record Inn and the larger AM Studios — remain the centre of his working life, and most of the great Indian film soundtracks of the past three decades have been mixed inside their walls.