A.R. Rahman becomes the face of Taj Mahal Tea’s next musical chapter

Hindustan Unilever has a new maestro for Brooke Bond Taj Mahal Tea. On November 2 the company named A.R. Rahman, the Chennai-born composer who won Oscars and Grammys for Slumdog Millionaire, as brand ambassador and opened a campaign platform called Awaken Your Masterpiece. In the film he hits a creative stall, reaches for a freshly poured cup, and finds a melody that lands on the brand’s old sign-off: Wah Taj!

That line is what he is really inheriting. In the late 1980s, tabla ustad Zakir Hussain sat across the Yamuna from the Taj Mahal, played through a riyaz that advertising equated with the patience of a tea taster, and answered praise for his playing with “Arre huzoor, Wah Taj boliye!” The spots made a premium Brooke Bond blend a household sound on Indian television, and for nearly two decades Hussain was the face of that argument. He died in San Francisco in December 2024. The brand ran a full-page tribute. Rahman’s appointment is the first major musical handover since then.

The new film is quieter than a monument shot. Where Hussain’s commercials made mastery look like long practice, Awaken Your Masterpiece treats it as a pause: even a celebrated composer can lose the thread, and the cup becomes the reset before the next phrase. Ogilvy India led the work, with Fritz Gonsalves and Jayesh Raut on the campaign and Prakash Varma of Nirvana Films directing. Varma has shaped the brand’s look for more than a decade. HUL’s beverages team cast Rahman as the next keeper of the music-and-tea bond, linking his hunt for the right note to the brand’s “Hazaaron Mein Ek,” one-in-a-thousand leaf selection.

Taj Mahal Tea has treated Indian music as more than a soundtrack for years: later classical partners, baithaks, tea-house sessions, even outdoor installations that turned rain and steam into raag. Rahman sits in a different lane from Hussain’s tabla classicism. He writes for Tamil and Hindi cinema, for Hollywood when the job fits, and for arena crowds that filled North American dates on his Wonderment Tour. For a diaspora shopper who already keeps the blue Taj Mahal box next to the masala tin, the name on the campaign matches a cupboard staple they already buy.

The product is easy to find outside India. Desi grocers, Amazon sellers, and delivery apps across the U.S. and Canada stock Brooke Bond Taj Mahal loose leaf, so the campaign reaches kitchens that already know the aroma. Wah Taj is still the closer. The voice saying it belongs to a different generation of Indian music.