India’s A.R. Rahman Wants to Build a Better Nation

Double Oscar-winning composer A.R. Rahman has music projects in every corner of the world. But none is bigger than his long-term plan to build a better India through culture.

Rahman (“Slumdog Millionaire”) lifted the veil on his nation-building exercise and some of his immediate projects at a masterclass at the Internation Film Festival of India, in Goa, where he was interviewed by Variety’s Naman Ramachandran and introduced by filmmaker and festival director Shekhar Kapur.

The session was ostensibly held to honor the late playback singer Lata Mangeshkar, who died in 2022. But the scene for a wider-ranging session was set when the “Elizabeth” director said that for all his musical genius Rahman is also “an entrepreneur, a technologist and a spiritualist.”

The session got under way with a clip from “Headhunting to Beatboxing,” a documentary film that Rahman produced set in and about Nagaland, a part of India once considered to be wild frontier territory.
“Nagaland had a violent past. People there found a reason to make peace,” Rahman explained when for the reasons for his involvement. “Nagaland has a minster for music.”

The conversation swirled repeatedly into discussion of musical theater, which was the central topic of the masterclass, and Rahman’s plans to build physical infrastructure of a quality that matches his ambitions.

“When we think of musical theater we think of London or New York [and] watching the ‘Lion King’ or ‘West Side Story.’ Who comes here?,” Rahman said. “Musical theatre is valued higher than movies. Top actors [who can earn millions elsewhere] come and perform on [the Broadway or West End] stage for a time. That’s the change I want to see here in musical theatre.”

Although music is a central part of daily life in India, Rahman was critical of the amount of development and modernization in music, and the arts generally. He suggested that India, despite icons like…