🇮🇳 Arijit Singh

He was born in 1987 in Jiaganj, a small town in Murshidabad district, West Bengal, into a household of musicians. His mother sang Rabindra Sangeet, his maternal uncle and grandmother trained in Hindustani classical, and his father — who ran a small business — encouraged him to learn the tabla from childhood and to sing daily. He took his first vocal lesson at six. He won the local Bengal music television competition Fame Gurukul in 2005 — and finished outside the top three.

He came to Mumbai at eighteen with the prize money. He spent the next several years, by every account, almost completely unable to find work. He composed and arranged for Pritam Chakraborty's production house, sang scratch vocals that other singers would re-record, taught music online to American students by night to pay his Mumbai rent, and watched the playback industry go to Sonu Nigam and Shreya Ghoshal and Mohit Chauhan and Mohammed Rafi reissues. He has said that he almost moved back to Jiaganj more than once.

The break came in 2013. Mohit Suri's Aashiqui 2 needed a male voice for the song 'Tum Hi Ho', composed and pre-recorded by Mithoon. Suri was unconvinced by the established options. Pritam suggested Arijit. He cut the song in a short session. The film released in April 2013 and the song became, within months, one of the largest-streamed Indian songs on YouTube to that date. Arijit Singh, in his mid-twenties, suddenly held the microphone for the entire industry.

What followed was unprecedented. Across the following decade he recorded for hundreds of films across Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, and other Indian-language cinemas. The signature songs of an entire decade carry his voice: 'Channa Mereya' (Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, 2016), 'Kesariya' (Brahmāstra, 2022), 'Apna Bana Le' (Bhediya, 2022), 'Phir Le Aya Dil' (Barfi!, 2012), 'Muskurane' (Citylights, 2014), and dozens more. He has won the Filmfare Award for Best Male Playback Singer multiple times, including a long unbroken run.

His voice is, by his own description, technically unusual. He trained classically but sings with a deliberately compressed throat, a half-cracked head register, and a willingness to break notes that most playback singers in his tradition consider unprofessional. Pritam, Vishal-Shekhar, Mithoon, Amit Trivedi — every major Hindi composer of the 2010s has built signature songs around the particular grain of his voice. He has been called, often, the sound of millennial Indian heartbreak; he has also called himself, more dryly, a singer who happens to have arrived at the right decade.

He lives, with deliberate quiet, in Jiaganj. He has refused to relocate his family to Mumbai. He runs the Let There Be Light Foundation for underprivileged children in Murshidabad, and travels to Mumbai only when recordings require him. He has been photographed at airports in flip-flops more often than in concert dress. He has refused, year after year, every attempt by the Indian celebrity press to dramatize his persona; interviews, when granted, often last under ten minutes.

He has been involved in a small number of public controversies — a famous on-stage moment with Salman Khan in the mid-2010s — but has navigated them without the apparatus of publicists most Bollywood stars employ. He owns no major brand endorsements outside the music industry. He gives, by the standards of his earnings, comparatively few concerts in metropolitan Indian venues; the few he does are extraordinary events.

He is, in 2026, the playback singer of his generation as Mohammed Rafi was of his and Kishore Kumar of his. The reality-show contestant who finished outside the top three in 2005 has, by 2026, the largest single-artist streaming footprint in Indian music history. He still wakes early, sings his daily riyaaz in the same Jiaganj room he sang in as a child, and travels to Mumbai when a major film needs his voice. The country that nearly didn't notice him in 2010 now cannot, by 2026, imagine a Hindi film soundtrack without him.