Gulshan Kumar, the juice seller who rose to become the music mogul of Bollywood

Mint

9 hours ago

On a sweltering August morning in 1997, Mumbai pulsed with its usual chaos of cars and hawkers, along with the hum of Bollywood tunes wafting from roadside stalls. Suddenly, the comforting rhythm of daily life was rudely interrupted by the sharp crack of sixteen bullets at the gates of the Jeeteshwar Mahadev Temple, where Gulshan Kumar Rai had come to offer his daily prayers. The assailants, shadows of the notorious Dawood Ibrahim syndicate, vanished into the city's sprawl, leaving behind the crumpled body of a man who had, over the previous two decades, turned India's music industry into his own audacious symphony.
With his killing, a burgeoning business empire built on melody and commerce lay shattered. It was a brutal coda to Kumar's life lived at full, often reckless, volume.
Born in 1951 into a family that ran a fruit juice stall in Delhi's Daryaganj, his entrepreneurial education started early. In the 1970s, when a relative's records shop came up for grabs, the Kumars pooled their savings to buy it.
The cassettes business
For young Gulshan, the shop was a revelation. Behind the counter, amid stacks of vinyl from the Gramophone Company of India (now Saregama), he watched customers bewitched by the strains of Mohammed Rafi or Lata Mangeshkar. Music, he realized, wasn't just art; it was commerce too.
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In 1980, he set up Super Cassettes Industries that would, under its T-Series label, completely redefine the way Bollywood music was distributed. While the incumbent leader Gramophone Company of India stayed satisfied with its dominion over a niche market of record players and vinyl, Kumar saw a future that lay not in the cumbersome, expensive turntables of the elite, but in the torrent of affordable Japanese cassette players that had flooded the market, thanks to a liberal import policy.
He began producing cassettes at low cost by leveraging the concessions available to small-scale manufacturers and pricing them aggressively. Sales outlets were not restricted to high-end music stores but fanned out to the capillaries of India's informal economy, the panwallahs and neighbourhood grocers. By 1985, T-Series cassettes were everywhere, their garish covers promising hits from Bollywood's latest blockbusters.
His genius, and his most controversial manoeuvre, lay in exploiting a subtle lacuna in the Indian Copyright Act, which permitted the production of cover versions of popular songs as long as the vocalists and instrumentalists were different from the originals. A nominal royalty was all that was required.
To this end, Kumar tapped into a wellspring of untapped talent, including singers like Sonu Nigam, Anuradha Paudwal, Mohammed Aziz, Kumar Sanu, and Alka Yagnik, who, despite their immense gifts, struggled for a foothold in an industry still largely beholden to titans like Mohammed Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, and Kishore Kumar. Kumar paid them a fraction of what the established stars commanded, yet offered them an unprecedented platform.
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He was also an early evangelist for devotional music, seeing a vast, underserved market for spiritual hymns and chants. T-Series churned out tapes of spiritual songs, from Jai Mata Di to Sai Baba Aarti and Hanuman Chalisa, the latter sung by Hariharan and Vaishno Devi devotee Kumar himself. These tapes, sold at stalls outside temples, cemented T-Series as a cultural force, as much a ministry of faith as a music label.
An entertainment behemoth
By 1997, T-Series was a ₹500 crore behemoth.
Yet, with every rupee earned, Kumar was also notching up enemies. His cutthroat pricing strategies sent tremors through the established music industry, pushing rivals to the brink of collapse. Moreover, a significant portion of his empire was built on what some considered a grey area of copyright, and others outright piracy. It wasn't just the music labels that felt the sting; filmmakers, too, saw their potential profits from music sales eroded by these readily available, cheap, and often unauthorized, cassettes.
The resentment eventually boiled over into threats. Kumar received extortion calls from Dawood's lieutenant Abu Salem after a dispute with music director Nadeem Saifi over the music of the latter's album Hi! Ajnabi. The simmering tensions eventually exploded when contract killers, allegedly acting on the behest of the Mumbai mafia with reported connections within Bollywood, shot him dead.
The investigation that followed cast a wide net, even implicating Nadeem as a co-conspirator, though he was later acquitted. Eventually, Abdul Rauf, one of the assailants, was handed a life sentence in 2001. The case exposed the mafia's grip on the Mumbai film industry, leading to increased government scrutiny and crackdowns. The film industry too underwent corporatization and professionalization, reducing the reliance on informal financing and protection rackets.
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Happily, Kumar's death didn't mute the music of T-Series. His son, Bhushan, then barely twenty-two, inherited a wounded empire but a father's brilliant blueprint. Under his stewardship, T-Series diversified into film production while maintaining its musical dominance. Today, the company holds a 30% share of India's music market and, with over 296 million YouTube subscribers as of May 2025, trails only Mr Beast in global reach. Its channel, a digital cornucopia of Bollywood hits and bhajans, is a testament to Gulshan Kumar's grand vision.
His legacy, though, is no simple hymn. While some call him a democratizer who gave voice to the overlooked and brought music to the masses, to others, he was a predator whose empire was built on the margins of ethics.