“His tunes were so original in his interpretation of the emotion of a situation that a conventional ear will take time to let it sink in,” RGV wrote. Soon enough, the music of Rangeela left them dumbfounded. The very fact that AR was not signed by any top Hindi filmmaker after Roja is proof-enough, they reasoned,” he wrote. “My investors preferred Anu Malik, as they felt the success of the music of Roja’s dubbed version was a fluke, and that this kind of music would not work in Hindi. Roja’s uber success got Rahman a National Award, and while he continued to be a sensation in Tamil cinema, Hindi cinema saw it as a “fluke.” Ram Gopal Varma, who was the first director to rope in Rahman for his Hindi film Rangeela, shared in his blog in 2013 that his investors at the time saw Roja’s success as an anomaly. Humma Humma or Chaiyya Chaiyya, they are all phonetics in a way, and so we can get away with not being region-specific,” said Rahman in the same chat as he discussed the pan-Indian nature of his music. This is one of the reasons why we settle for phonetics. So, the next movie, Bombay was such a challenge. “We didn’t even know that the music was going to work in Hindi, but it was so big in Hindi as well.
Roja’s music was a success, not just in Tamil, but also in Hindi, and it caught Rahman by complete surprise. Also, I thought it was absolutely fantastic and it was just going to lift my visuals,” he said.
So, I was not worried if somebody would get it. In a conversation with The Times of India in 2017, Mani Ratnam was asked if the unique nature of Rahman’s music made him wonder, ‘What if people don’t get it?’ “The film was called Roja, it was set in Kashmir and the music that he played had the feel of that winter - that cold of that place. When Mani Ratnam’s Roja released in 1992, the film was a massive success but what captured the audience was its music, it was something they had never heard before, and it was by a first time music composer – AR Rahman. We often hear that music breaks language barriers and in a country like ours, where dialects and languages change with every city, there can be no better unifying factor than music but somehow, popular culture woke up to this realisation much later than expected.