The article which appears below, was originally published by Shekar Kapur on his blog in January 2009. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
I am really happy for A.R. Rahman. He is a musical genius and deserves everything he has achieved. In fact, I gave him the title “Mozart of Madras,” and it caught on. But does the West really understand his art and genius?
I remember getting into an argument with Andrew Lloyd Webber about allowing A.R. Rahman to explore his creativity for Bombay Dreams. We had co-produced the show, and I had introduced Rahman and his music to him.
I asked A.R. Rahman to score the music for Golden Age, and even then, I was allowed only to take him as a co-composer. I watched as the studio rejected the most beautiful compositions from Rahman because they didn’t understand or weren’t willing to embrace something from another culture. As it happened, the score of Golden Age was not half as good as it could have been.
Recently, Rahman did the score for my short film for Swarovski, called Passage, which I shot in Argentina. One of the pieces in it is a beautiful song and an aria in French. I often ask people to guess where it’s from, and they search among all the great composers of Western classical music. They are stunned when I tell them the piece was composed by A.R. Rahman, sung by an Indian girl from his Music Academy, and produced in his studio in Chennai.
That is the genius of A.R. Rahman. So why do we need the West to validate his greatness?
And that’s why I don’t understand the hype surrounding the Oscars for Rahman in the Indian media (Rah Rah Rahman was the TOI headline). He is bigger than the Oscars. Slumdog Millionaire is not his best work—his music has been far more evocative in other projects.
In India, we have a far greater culture of music. Our depth of understanding—its resonance, its culture, whether classical or modern—is far greater than any other culture I know. So why don’t we see the West celebrate when one of their artists becomes popular here in India? Why don’t we see headlines in the LA Times then?
Why do we admire the West so much?
Even in my career, I thought Bandit Queen was a far, far better film—a more heartfelt and meaningful film—than Elizabeth or any of the other films I made in the West. Yet, in India, I was suddenly celebrated as a filmmaker after Elizabeth. I was even awarded a Padma Shri after that film. Why? Because the film was nominated for seven Oscars, and Bandit Queen was not.
When will we stop being aspirational toward the West?
