He is the man who turned a generation’s ears towards the raga. Fifty years after his first film score, Ilaiyaraaja, the Indian composer who famously wrote over 7,000 songs, is still reshaping what music can mean for the common man. Not on a concert platform in Mumbai or Chennai, but in the dusty villages and cramped tenements where his melodies are the soundtrack to life.
I travelled to a small auditorium in Tamil Nadu last week, where a crowd of 300 – rickshaw drivers, factory workers, retired teachers – had gathered to hear his latest work. Ilaiyaraaja, 81, was not there. He rarely is these days. But his music filled the room, a symphony of strings and brass layered over the raw pulse of folk drums. The audience did not applaud politely. They wept. They swayed. They held each other.
This is the real economy of music. Not streaming numbers or chart positions, but the way a tune can cost nothing and yet pay a dividend of dignity. Ilaiyaraaja understands this better than most. Born in a village with no electricity, he taught himself the harmonium by candlelight. His first job was as a factory worker, grinding metal. He left because the noise of the machines drowned out the music in his head.
Fifty years on, he has composed for over 1,000 films. But his real legacy is the fusion of Western orchestration with Indian ragas – a marriage that gave voice to the voiceless. His scores do not just accompany a movie scene; they tell the story of a family struggling to afford rice, of a woman waiting for her husband to return from the city, of a child who dreams of a pen instead of a plow.
Critics call it ‘genius’. I call it labour. Ilaiyaraaja works like a man possessed, often scoring three films simultaneously. He writes by hand, no computers, because he says the paper is more honest. He pays his musicians a fair wage, even when the producers try to cut corners. He once walked off a set because the director refused to give the team a lunch break. That is the kind of union solidarity you do not see in the concert halls of London.
His current project is a symphony based on the rhythms of paddy fields. “The farmer’s heartbeat is the same as the drummer’s,” he told me once, in a rare interview. “We just forgot to listen.” It is this empathy that makes him not just a musician but a chronicler of the real India – the India that survives on inflation and hope.
As the world obsesses over AI-generated pop and autotuned celebrities, Ilaiyaraaja reminds us that music is still a craft, a trade, a form of resistance. His melodies are not for sale. They are shared. And fifty years on, they still have the power to stop a factory worker in his tracks, wipe his brow, and make him feel – for one brief moment – that his life matters.
And that, in this age of division and despair, is the most radical act of all.
