One intriguing nugget may be found on the highly commended Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack by AR Rahman: a Shankar Ehsaan Loy song from Shah Rukh Khan’s Don, which came out two years before the Danny Boyle movie won over the world.
For “Jai Ho,” a song that was originally filmed using Shankar Ehsaan Loy’s “Aaj Ki Raat” from Don, Rahman won the Oscars for Best Original Music Score and Best Original Song. The song was composed by Javed Akhtar and performed by Sonu Nigam, Mahalakshmi Iyer, and Alisha Chinai.
The Oscar-winning composer shared the history of Jai Ho’s birth in the most recent episode of Rahman Music Sheets. Rahman stated that he didn’t see the sense in employing a song that the Indian audience was already familiar with. Shah Rukh, Priyanka Chopra, and Isha Koppikar were used in the “Aaj Ki Raat” film.
“They had already shot the song with Aaj Ki Raat. I thought it was a song from another movie, so it doesn’t qualify for anything and it doesn’t seem right because Indian audience had already heard the song. So, a new song would be good. Then this song Jai Ho was done and the time stretched to exact beats per minute,” Rahman shared.
In the episode, Shankar Mahadevan, a composer and vocalist, was questioned about how Danny Boyle, long before AR Rahman had written the song that brought him international fame, shot the “Jai Ho” video on Aaj Ki Raat with Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, and a large number of background dancers.
Every filmmaker, according to Mahadevan, utilises a “dummy piece of music” to set the tempo, and in the case of Slumdog Millionaire, that “dummy piece of music” could have been any other Western or RD Burman composition.
“Eventually you have to change it. Rahman being the composer, all he had to do was maintain the beats per minute. If your beats per minute are 132, for Aaj Ki Raat, use the beats per minute and change the song, it is as simple as that. Jai Ho put India on the world map. Aaj Ki Raat had no role to play in that situation, it just gave Danny Boyle a tempo for the dancers to dance. That’s all, that’s the only contribution of Aaj Ki Raat for the film,” he added.
