When the composer and his family converted to Islam from Hinduism when he was a teenager, he changed his name to Allahrakha Rahman, a name his mother liked. He was a roadie for a period and, later, a keyboard player for prominent artists like Ilayaraja, one of the first composers to incorporate Western music into Indian films. Sekhar died when Rahman was just 9 years old, ultimately pushing him to take musical jobs to help support his family. Sekhar, was a well-known musician, and the first composer in South India to own a Japanese synthesizer at a time when they were prohibitively expensive. Rahman was born Dileep Kumar in Chennai, and was raised in a musical family that listened to everything from Vangelis to John Williams to Zulu chants. As Beaster-Jones points out, there are at least 50 instances of re-emerging leitmotifs in Bombay that further convey the cycle of violence and reconciliation central to its plot.Ī. The inclusion of the instrumental piece in the soundtrack also signaled the importance Rahman placed on using themes and repurposing snippets of songs throughout a film to gesture at the emotional states of the characters. At the time, background instrumental pieces, known as film music in Indian cinema, were mostly outsourced by musical directors, but even early in his career, Rahman was creating both high-intensity pop songs and their sophisticated instrumental counterparts with ease. Rahman’s ‘Bombay Theme’,” Jayson Beaster-Jones writes that the song’s inclusion in the soundtrack was unusual, and perhaps a way for Rahman to flex the range of his skill. In his essay “Violence, Reconciliation, and Memory: A.R. It has been used in four other international films and added to countless “world music” soundtracks. “Bombay Theme” in particular has had a surprisingly successful trajectory for an instrumental piece. It would also become the best-selling soundtrack in Indian film history. The scope of the album solidified Rahman as the preeminent South Asian film composer for the next two decades, and arguably the one with the biggest influence on Western music. The tunes would come eventually, including a bombastic synth-pop number, a lovesick ballad, and a winding qawwali-inspired song. Rahman: The Spirit of Music, he told interviewer Nasreen Munni Kabir that the song, which opens with a sinuous bamboo flute singing out over a churning underbelly of synths and strings, “made a musical statement about non-violence…`and encouraged us to see the inner self rather than the outer.” When Ratnam first heard the song, he was silent for a few minutes and then jokingly asked, “Where are the tunes?” Instead, he surprised Ratnam with an instrumental piece he called “Bombay Theme.” In A. As the deadline passed, Rahman didn’t have a single song ready.
Ratnam gave Rahman a two-week deadline to make all the music for the complicated film.
The film ends with a cry for peace from Shekar, a reunion of the couple and their children, and the formation of a “human chain” of Hindus and Muslims who dramatically throw down their weapons, clasp hands, and choose to live in harmony. They move to Mumbai, where they raise twins and enjoy a blissful life together until riots wreak havoc on the city and separate their family. Into this world, Bombay brought the story of a Hindu man, Shekar, who falls in love with a Muslim woman, Shaila Banu. It was widely considered one of the worst instances of religiously motivated violence in Mumbai in the last 50 years. The riots started in December 1992 after Hindu fundamentalists burned down the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, and were further spurred by leaders of the Hindu supremacist Shiv Sena party in Mumbai. At the time, Hindu-Muslim tensions in India were escalating higher still when gruesome riots in Mumbai left over 1,100 people dead, the majority of them Muslim.
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