At the age of 14, he joined a travelling musical troupe headed by his elder step-brother, Pavalar Varadarajan, and spent the next decade performing throughout South India. Growing up in a rural area, Ilaiyaraaja was exposed to a range of Tamil folk music. Ilaiyaraaja was born into a poor rural Dalit family in Pannaipuram, Theni district, Tamil Nadu, India, as the third son of Daniel Ramaswamy and Chinnathayammal. He is married to Jeeva, and the couple's two sons (Karthik Raja and Yuvan Shankar Raja) and daughter (Bhavatharini) are film music composers and singers. In the 2000s, he composed a range of non-film music, including religious and devotional songs, an oratorio, and world music. He has thrice won the Indian National Film Award for best film scoring. His work integrated Tamil folk lyricism and introduced broader Western musical sensibilities into the South Indian musical mainstream. Ilaiyaraaja is a prominent composer of film music in South Indian cinema from the late 1970s till date. He is based in Chennai, the fourth largest city in India and the centre of the Tamil film industry (colloquially known as Kollywood).
He is a gold medalist from the Trinity College of Music, London, has composed over 4,500 songs and provided film scores for more than 900 Indian films in various languages in a career spanning more than 30 years. Ilaiyaraaja is a critically acclaimed Indian film composer, singer, and lyricist and the first Asian Composer to score a Symphony.