Quotes of the Day

Dawn is breaking over a crowded neighborhood in Madras, and the murmur of early-morning prayers is dispersing the stillness of the night. A solitary light shines from the ground floor of a three-story house. Inside, a lone, curly-haired figure sits at a vast mixing desk, fingers skating across the controls. A.R. Rahman's work is almost finished. For as long as he can remember, Asia's most successful composer has slept through the noise of the day and composed in the silence of the night. And the past eight hours have been especially productive: Rahman has completed six songs, four remixes, and the background music for a movie.

It isn't just Rahman's phenomenal productivity that's so dazzling, but the quality—and success—of the work he's turning out. In 14 years, the 38-year-old has written music for more than 50 movies. And in an industry where the soundtrack is often considered more important than the plot, his scores have broken all records—more than 100 million of his cassettes and CDs have been sold. These days, he's so sought after that even Bollywood's deepest pockets are finding it hard to sign Rahman. Last year, he composed the martial score for Chinese director He Ping's Warriors of Heaven and Earth. This week, Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Bombay Dreams, for which Rahman wrote the music, transfers from London's West End to Broadway. And Rahman is currently writing songs for another big-budget West End production, a musical version of The Lord of the Rings. These projects are forcing Rahman out of his usual milieu. He says he knew nothing about Western musicals until he wrote Bombay Dreams and initially didn't even like the two Lord of the Rings movies that he watched before agreeing to do the project, saying he found them "too dark." But Rahman doesn't want to restrict himself to what he knows and loves. "This is not Bollywood," he says. "I'm not cashing in on what I have already been doing."

India's film industry is the most prolific in the world, with about 1,000 movies made each year (compared with Hollywood's 750), and they attract a global audience of 3.6 billion—a billion more than their American cousins. But until recently, Bollywood's talents were considered too foreign to make the jump to Europe or America. A handful of Indian directors and actors are escaping that mold, and now Rahman is breaking out too. The composer has long been a musical magpie, borrowing freely from an array of traditions: South Asian, Sufi, Irish folk, rock, reggae, even ragtime. And the outside world is discovering that beneath the tabla and synthesized sitar, his music isn't strictly subcontinental. "The sound of Middle Earth has to be a unique sound," says West End producer Kevin Wallace, who chose Rahman to score The Lord of the Rings. "And Rahman is a great classical composer who has also absorbed different cultures to produce searingly beautiful melodies. Once you have heard his melodies, you can't forget them."

Raised in a lower middle-class family in Madras, Rahman (whose real name is A.S. Dileep Kumar) grew up listening to his father's tiny but unusually diverse record collection, consisting of just three, wholly different LPs—one from China, one from Latin America, and the third by American country balladeer Jim Reeves. Rahman's Hindu family was also devoted to a local Muslim pir, or saint, who was a Sufi dervish. Sufis share the same devotion to Allah as other strands of Islam, but none of the rigid stoicism. Instead, Sufis believe the way to God is through vehement, ecstatic self-expression. With such a teacher, Rahman says he can't remember a time when music, and mysticism, wasn't his life.

Rahman's father died when he was nine, leaving the youngster to spend much of his adolescence hauling his violin around local recording studios in a dismal attempt to support his family. "Whenever I think of that time," he says, "I think of failure." (He hasn't forgotten those hand-to-mouth days: unlike many of his peers, Rahman pays his musicians on time and refuses to recycle earlier recordings, instead ordering fresh takes—and thereby creating more jobs—with each new score.) His big break came in 1992, when Madras-based director Mani Ratnam wanted a new sound for Roja, a film set in violence-ridden Kashmir. Kumar took the commission with one, unusual condition: he wanted to be credited using the Muslim name Allah Rakha Rahman. When Roja's soundtrack became a runaway success, A.R. Rahman was born.

Rahman worked with Ratnam on two more movies but by then was already trying to cope with a flood of offers from Bombay, capital of the Hindi film industry. Lloyd Webber heard of him three years ago while dining with Bombay-based director Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth and Bandit Queen) to discuss a screen version of The Phantom of the Opera. Kapur played a selection of Indian movie music to break the ice. According to Rahman, "Andrew would stop every now and then and ask, 'Who is this composer?' And every time he did that, it was me." Kapur called Rahman to say that Lloyd Webber wanted to work with him. "It just happened," says Rahman, still somewhat bewildered at the series of events that led to his involvement in Bombay Dreams. "I thought Shekhar was pulling my leg."

Rahman's future projects include the film 1857: The Rising, a big-budget historical epic based on the Sepoy Mutiny and starring Aamir Khan and British actor Toby Stephens. Ratnam has also booked the composer for his latest production Yuva, which is set to be released later this year. Hollywood, too, has beckoned. Rahman won't reveal who has made offers, but says he turned them down, mainly out of trepidation. "Things work in a different way there," he says. "Even big composers get changed. I don't want to be in that mess."

He even admits to being terrified by the Lord of the Rings job, but producer Wallace is confident that Rahman will come through. "It is very clear to me he knows how to take direction and briefing," he says. "He responds to story, he responds to character, and he knows the music has to enhance the drama."

Although Rahman's music has made him rich and famous, he remains something of a Sufi ascetic. He wears handloom shirts and jeans (though he admits to owning "suits and things" for special occasions), and drives a modest Toyota Qualis because "I don't need anything else." Gesturing at his studio, stuffed with the latest mixers and synthesizers, he says: "This is my BMW." He shares his house in Madras with his wife, his three children and his mother, who still handles his finances; Rahman asks her for money whenever he is short. "I like to be a musafir [vagrant] without any baggage," he says. Unlike other artists steering themselves on a predetermined career path, Rahman is a strong believer in taking a backseat. "Life is a journey, but I don't hold the steering wheel," he says. "Somebody else is controlling it. I just handle each day as it comes." Each day, maybe. But come the night, as the world is beginning to hear for itself, it's very much A.R. Rahman at the controls.

• Meenakshi Ganguly | Madras
• A.R. Rahman, Asia's most successful composer, is making the leap from Bollywood to Broadway