Arijit Singh

Indian singer-songwriter and record producer Arijit Singh is best known today as a playback singer, having recorded a vast oeuvre of hits for actors to lip-sync to in Bollywood box office smashes. Born April 25th, 1987 in Jiaganj, West Bengal, Singh was brought up as a tabla player and student of classical music, receiving a government scholarship at just nine years old to train as a singer. Acutely aware of classical music’s declining commercial appeal, he crossed over to pop music in 2005, making a name for himself aged eighteen as a contestant on TV talent show Fame Gurukul. After signing to Tips for an LP which never saw the light of day, Singh returned to reality TV as a participant in 10 Ke 10 Le Gaye Dil, winning the show and investing his prize money into a new recording studio. In 2009, he found his niche as a playback singer, with his first notable hit later coming in the form of “Duaa”, a Mirchi Award-winning contribution to the 2012 film Shanghai. Landing increasingly high-profile soundtrack work under the direction of the likes of A. R. Rahman and Sajid–Wajid, he has since scored a plethora of national chart-toppers, including two from 2016’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, the Befikre theme “Nashe Si Chadh Gayi”, and the 2017 Harshdeep Kaur collaboration “Zaalima”, taken from the Shah Rukh Khan film Raees. Seeking to expand into new pastures, Singh announced in 2020 that he would be venturing into popular music outside of film, sharing such works via a new label of his own, Oriyon Music. The first of these releases, “Rihaa”, arrived in October 2020, with both Hindi and Bengali-language versions available.