Arijit Singh

Arijit Singh was born on 25 April 1987 in Jiaganj, Murshidabad, West Bengal, into a family steeped in music. His mother sang and played tabla, his maternal grandmother sang, and several relatives were trained in Indian classical traditions.^[1] He began formal training young, studying Indian classical music, tabla, and Rabindra Sangeet under teachers in the Hazari family.^[1]

His entry into the national spotlight came through reality television. In 2005 he competed on Fame Gurukul, one of India's early major singing competitions.^[2] Although he did not win, he later appeared on the spin-off competition 10 Ke 10 Le Gaye Dil, which he won, using the prize money to set up a home recording studio.^[2] After the reality TV period, he worked as a music programmer and background score composer in Mumbai before his playback singing career took shape.

His breakthrough as a playback singer came in 2011 with the song "Phir Mohabbat" from the film Murder 2, but it was "Tum Hi Ho" from Aashiqui 2 (2013) that made him a household name across India. The song became a cultural phenomenon and earned him his first Filmfare Award for Best Male Playback Singer.^[1]

The momentum of that breakthrough carried directly into 2014, one of the most commercially dominant years of his career. He contributed to the 2 States soundtrack (composed by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy), where his lead vocal on "Mast Magan" -- a Sufi-inflected romantic ballad -- became one of the year's most-streamed tracks and a fixture at Indian weddings.^[6] By year's end he had been named the most popular artist of 2014 by Hungama Digital Media Entertainment, a recognition that reflected not just the commercial reach of individual songs but his total dominance of the Hindi playback landscape.^[6]

Two years after that breakthrough, Singh reunited with Gannguli for the title track of the 2015 Mohit Suri film Hamari Adhuri Kahani. Despite his growing dominance, Singh described the song as "one of the toughest I have ever sung," citing the difficulty of its opening melody specifically.^[32] He spent extensive time working through the composition at the piano before the session, and ultimately suggested to Suri and producer Mukesh Bhatt that they consider a more senior singer. The two spent several hours working with him before the recording was completed.^[32] The episode illustrated a recurring feature of his career: a genuine humility about individual songs that coexisted with, and sometimes worked against, his commercial standing.

Over the following decade, Singh became Bollywood's most prolific and in-demand male voice, lending his distinctively melancholic timbre to hundreds of films. Major highlights include "Binte Dil" (Padmaavat, 2018) and "Kesariya" (Brahmastra, 2022), both of which earned him National Film Awards for Best Male Playback Singer.^[1] He has won the Filmfare Award for Best Male Playback Singer five consecutive times, from 2016 through 2020.^[3] In 2025, he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest civilian honours.^[1]

The year 2016 was notable for demonstrating the breadth of Singh's register. He performed at the OVO Arena Wembley in London, one of the largest venues any Indian playback singer had headlined, reflecting his growing appeal to diaspora audiences worldwide.^[25] The same year he recorded "Nashe Si Chadh Gayi" for the Befikre soundtrack, an EDM-inflected number that required him to inhabit a purely euphoric, carefree register very different from the melancholic ballads that had made his name. The song became the first Hindi song ever to cross 300 million YouTube views, and eventually accumulated more than 670 million, demonstrating that his voice could anchor very different emotional territory to equal commercial effect. That same year he also performed the title track of Karan Johar's Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, a song built around unrequited love and spiritual devotion, which won him the Filmfare Award for Best Male Playback Singer at the 62nd Filmfare Awards -- his second win in that category.^[26] The album also contained "Channa Mereya," a wedding-set ballad about unrequited love that became one of the defining songs of his career, spending five months at number one on the Radio Mirchi Top 20 chart and winning him the Best Male Playback Singer award at the Stardust Awards.^[1]

One of the most enduring songs of his career came from the 2017 Half Girlfriend soundtrack, directed by Mohit Suri. Singh's performance of "Phir Bhi Tumko Chaahunga," composed by Mithoon and using lyrics that the lyricist Manoj Muntashir had originally written as a private poem in 2001,^[22] became one of Bollywood's genuine billion-view milestones. Without changing a single word of the sixteen-year-old poem, Mithoon built a melody around it that Singh rendered with characteristic precision and restraint. The song surpassed 1.1 billion views on YouTube by late 2025,^[22] placing it among the most-watched Bollywood recordings in the platform's history, and it won Listener's Choice Song of the Year at the 10th Mirchi Music Awards in 2018.

One of the landmark moments of his career came in 2019 with his alternate version of "Bekhayali" from the film Kabir Singh. The song, composed by Sachet-Parampara and written by Irshad Kamil, became the first Hindi film song to top Spotify's Global Viral 50 chart globally,^[11] and the soundtrack became India's most-streamed album of 2019.^[12] Singh's interpretation of the song, a study in suppressed sorrow and controlled ferocity, introduced his voice to a new generation of listeners and cemented his status as Bollywood's defining voice for masculine heartache.

A second major collaboration with Mithoon for the same film, "Tujhe Kitna Chahne Lage," occupied different emotional territory. Where "Bekhayali" channeled anguish through scale and power, this song operated at a quieter register: a measured, almost prayer-like confession of love that has grown beyond all proportion and survives even its own futility. The song became one of 2019's most-streamed tracks on Spotify India, peaking at number two on the daily chart, and reached number one on the UK Official Asian Music Chart.^[13] It demonstrated a dimension of Singh's voice that audiences had heard in Aashiqui 2 but that "Bekhayali" did not foreground: the ability to hold a note with such minimal vibrato and such careful control that the restraint itself becomes emotionally devastating.

His classical training has always informed his film work, and this is perhaps most audible in songs that sit closer to the Hindustani nazm tradition. His contribution to "Rait Zara Si" from A.R. Rahman's Atrangi Re soundtrack (2021) is a key example: working with sparse instrumentation (sarod, flute, bass guitar), Singh's entry via humming before a single lyric is sung was widely cited as the track's defining performance moment, drawing on a classically-influenced restraint that few contemporary Bollywood voices can replicate.^[4][5]

Beyond film, Singh has increasingly collaborated with independent artists. His 2023 feature on Jasleen Royal's "Heeriye" became one of the biggest Indian tracks globally that year, demonstrating the reach of his voice outside the Bollywood ecosystem.

His vocal performance on "Satranga" from the soundtrack of Animal (2023) became one of the most discussed Hindi film songs of the year. Composer Shreyas Puranik stated publicly that what Singh does to a song is beyond what any other vocalist can achieve, describing the voice as carrying something almost divine.^[7] The song accumulated over 114 million YouTube views and charted globally, cementing Singh as the defining vocal presence of the 2023 Bollywood season.^[8]

Among his most significant contributions in 2023 was "Chaleya" from the action-drama Jawan, directed by Atlee and starring Shah Rukh Khan. The song, composed by Anirudh Ravichander in his Hindi film debut, paired Singh with Shilpa Rao in a duet built around the classical South Asian tradition of romantic surrender. It debuted at number one on the Billboard India Songs chart, crossed 35 million YouTube views in its first 24 hours, and became the fastest Indian song to reach 100 million streams on Spotify India.^[9] Shilpa Rao won the 71st National Film Award for Best Female Playback Singer for her performance on the track. "Chaleya" demonstrated Singh's particular gift for anchoring vast, commercially ambitious productions in something that feels deeply personal.^[10]

Singh's dominance extended into the streaming era in a way few artists anywhere in the world have matched. He was the most-streamed Indian artist on Spotify for seven consecutive years, a run that coincided with Spotify's expansion across South Asia.^[1] In 2024, his performance on "Sajni" from the film Laapataa Ladies earned him his eighth Filmfare Award for Best Male Playback Singer, equalling the all-time record previously held only by Kishore Kumar.^[6] That a song of understated village folk simplicity should be the one to tie the record reflects the range Singh has maintained across his career.

His collaboration with composer Tanishk Bagchi on "Ve Maahi" from the 2019 war film Kesari illustrated a different facet of his range: the Punjabi-Sufi romantic tradition. The song, a duet with Asees Kaur, opens with Afghan and Central Asian instrumentation before transitioning into a North Indian idiom, reflecting the film's setting on the North-West Frontier.^[15] Rooted in a classical Sufi convention of addressing the beloved as an existential necessity, the song became one of the fastest-streamed Bollywood love songs of 2019, crossing 200 million YouTube views within four months of release, and earned Singh the Best Male Playback Singer award at the Mirchi Music Awards that year.^[15]

A biographical thread connects Singh personally to one of his most celebrated recordings. His father's family relocated from Lahore to West Bengal during the Partition of India in 1947,^[1] giving him a direct ancestral link to the historical wound explored in the 2019 film Kalank. The title track from that film, which Singh performed for composer Pritam, earned him his fifth consecutive Filmfare Award for Best Male Playback Singer at the 65th Filmfare Awards.^[17]

Singh's relationship with Pritam has been one of the most generative in his career. Pritam described their collaboration in a Scroll.in interview, calling Singh "a fantastic musician for whom singing is a bonus" and crediting two years of studio work together as formative.^[16] On the Kalank title track, Singh performed not only as vocalist but played harmonium himself in the studio,^[16] an unusual dual role that Pritam cited as evidence of Singh's primary identity as a musician who happens to sing, rather than a singer who happens to know music.

Among the most celebrated products of the Singh-Pritam partnership is "Hawayein" from the 2017 film Jab Harry Met Sejal (directed by Imtiaz Ali), which became the most-streamed Indian song within a 24-hour window upon its release, accumulating 9.8 million YouTube views in a single day.^[24] The song, built around a wind metaphor for transient love, showcased Singh's ability to deliver emotional complexity with apparent effortlessness, and won him the IIFA Award for Best Playback Singer (Male) in 2018. It became a standalone cultural artifact, outlasting the mixed reception of the film itself to become one of the defining Bollywood romantic songs of the decade.^[24]

One of the significant milestones in the Singh-Pritam collaboration came with the 2015 Dilwale soundtrack. The film, directed by Rohit Shetty, was conceived as a reunion vehicle for Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol, one of Hindi cinema's most beloved on-screen pairings. Pritam described the creative brief as requiring songs with "more meaning" for the SRK-Kajol storyline, a depth that Singh's voice was uniquely positioned to deliver.^[29] The resulting ballad, "Janam Janam," built around the Hindu concept of soulmates reuniting across multiple lifetimes, became one of the most widely shared Bollywood romantic songs of the decade, attracting fan translations into sixteen languages across online communities^[31] and entering the permanent repertoire of Indian wedding celebrations. The song exemplified the mid-2010s Bollywood sound that Singh and Pritam defined together: intimate, restrained vocal delivery layered over lush, classically inflected orchestration drawn from the Hindi film tradition of the 1960s.^[30]

One of the most-documented episodes of Singh's career is his decade-long estrangement from Salman Khan. At a 2014 awards ceremony, a brief exchange between the two onstage was interpreted as a slight against Khan.^[13] The consequences were immediate and far-reaching: Singh's vocals were removed from or denied to several of Khan's subsequent films, including Kick (2014), Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015), and Sultan (2016).^[13] When Tiger Zinda Hai went into production in 2017, the role of singing the film's central romantic ballad, "Dil Diyan Gallan," was given to Atif Aslam rather than Singh.^[14]

Singh's response was characteristically quiet but pointed. In March 2018, he performed "Dil Diyan Gallan" live at a large outdoor concert in Mumbai, to an audience that understood the full weight of what they were hearing.^[14] The estrangement lasted roughly nine years in total. Reconciliation came in 2023 when Singh sang on the Tiger 3 soundtrack, with Khan subsequently acknowledging publicly that the original misunderstanding had been on his side.^[15] The episode is a reminder that Singh's dominance of Bollywood playback was maintained not despite powerful opposition but through it: he became the era's most-streamed artist while locked out of one of its biggest franchises.