Ilaiyaraaja is something of a legend in the Tamil film industry. He is a film composer, singer and lyricist, all rolled into one. In a career spanning 30 years, he has composed over 4500 songs and provided film scores for more than 900 Indian films in various languages. No wonder, he is referred to as the 'maestro'.
Ilaiyaraaja was born Gnanadesikan on June 2nd, 1943 as the third son of Ramaswamy and Chinnathayammal. He was exposed to a range of Tamil folk music from an young age. At 14, he joined a traveling musical troupe headed by his elder stepbrother, Pavalar Varadarajan, and spent the next decade performing throughout South India.

While working with the troupe, he penned his first composition, a musical setting of an elegy written by the Tamil poet laureate Kannadasan for Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1968, Ilaiyaraaja began a music course with Professor Dhanraj in Chennai, which included an overview of Western classical music.

In the 1970s, Ilaiyaraaja played guitar in a band and worked as a session guitarist, keyboardist, organist for film music composers and directors like Salil Chowdhury from West Bengal. He was later hired as the musical assistant to Kannada film composer G. K. Venkatesh and went on to work on 200 film projects, mostly in Kannada.

In 1976, film producer Panchu Arunachalam commissioned him to compose the songs and film score for a Tamil film called Annakkili ('The Parrot'). For the soundtrack, Ilaiyaraaja used modern popular film music orchestration to Tamil folk poetry and folk song melodies, creating a fusion of Western and Tamil idioms.

Ilaiyaraaja's new approach to Tamil film scores revolutionized the Tamil film music industry. By the mid-1980s Ilaiyaraaja gained in stature as a film composer and music director.

Besides Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada films, he has scored music for Hindi films like Sadma (1983), Mahadev (1989), Lajja (2001), Cheeni Kum (2007) and recently Paa (2009). He has worked with Indian poets and lyricists such as Gulzar, Kannadasan, Vairamuthu and T.S. Rangarajan and film directors like Bharathi Raaja, K. Balachander, K. Vishwanath, Singeetham Srinivasa Rao, Balu Mahendra and Mani Ratnam.

Ilaiyaraaja was one of the early Indian film composers to use Western classical music harmonies and string arrangements in Indian film music. According to experts, Ilaiyaraaja's methodical approach to arranging, recording technique, and his drawing of ideas from a diversity of musical styles broadened the range of expressive possibilities in Indian film music.

Ilaiyaraaja's composition Rakkama Kaiya Thattu from the movie Thalapathi (1991) was among the songs listed in a BBC World Top Ten music poll. He composed the music for Nayakan (1987), an Indian film ranked by TIME Magazine as one of the all-time 100 best movies, a number of India's official entries to the Oscars, such as Anjali (1990) and Hey Ram (2000), and for Indian art films such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Prize-winning Nizhalkkuthu ('The Dance of Shadows').

Ilaiyaraaja has also composed music for the 1996 Miss World beauty pageant that was held in Bangalore and for a documentary called India 24 Hours (1996). Western bands like the Black Eyed Peas and M.I.A. have worked with the maestro to create revolutionary new sounds.

Awards and honors
Ilaiyaraaja has won the National Film Award for Best Music Direction for the Tamil film Sindhu Bhairavi (1986) and the Telugu films Rudraveena (1989) and Saagara Sangamam (1984). He won the Gold Remi Award for Best Music Score jointly with film composer M. S. Viswanathan at the WorldFest-Houston Film Festival for the film Vishwa Thulasi (2005).

He was conferred the title Isaignani ('savant of music') in 1988 by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi and received the Kalaimamani Award from from the government in Tamil Nadu. He also received state awards from the governments of Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

In 2010, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian honour.

He is married to Jeeva and the couple's two sons (Karthik Raja and Yuvan Shankar Raja) and daughter (Bhavatharini) are film composers and singers.