A.R. Rahman

A.R. Rahman is an Indian composer best known in the West for his collaboration with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber on the 2002 musical Bombay Dreams. But in India and the Indian diaspora, Rahman is a household name thanks to the hundreds of Bollywood film scores and hit songs that he's penned.

Born A.S. Dileep Kumar in 1966 in Madras (now Chennai), the future megastar grew up in a musical household. He began his music instruction early, beginning piano at the age of 4. After his father's death, young Dileep began to support his family as a professional keyboard player at the age of 11; dropping out of school for a life on the road. He would accompany the great tabla master Zakir Hussain on world tours, and eventually convert to Islam, taking the name Allah Rakha Rahman. And, despite Rahman's failure to complete his formal studies, his raw talent won him a scholarship at the Trinity College of Music at Oxford University, where took a degree in music and studied Western Classical forms. He returned to India in 1987 where he began a career in advertising, honing his pop skills by writing jingles.

Rahman opened his own studio in 1989—Panchathan Record Inn—and soon after moved from advertising to scoring the soundtracks to mainly Tamil-language films. His first great success came in 1992, with the film Roja. By 1995 he had moved on to the even bigger Hindi film market, making a big splash with the smash hit Rangeela. He followed this with string of chart-toppers throughout the '90s, including 1998's Dil Se and culminating in his 2001 masterpiece Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India , which was nominated for best foreign-language film at the 2002 Academy Awards.

Rahman's music is as day-glo and technicolor as the Bollywood films he scores; vivid and unafraid to employ synthesizers and big pop sounds. A big fan of '80s pop, Rahman's music often puts a sly, Indian spin on pop cliches—something that served him well in his collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber. In Bombay Dreams, Rahman adapted the melodies of original hits such as "Chaiyya Chayyia" to new, English language lyrics. The lavish musical was a smash hit in it's original 2002 production in London's West End, but later fizzled when transplanted to Broadway.—Tom Pryor