Timeline
- 1990Born on 16 June in Mumbai to the music director Daboo Malik and Jyothi Malik.His younger brother is the singer Armaan Malik.
- 1998Begins learning music at eight, and settles on the piano.He trained in Western classical, jazz and rock at Trinity College of Music in London.
- 2005At fifteen, after finishing class ten, assists the composer Amar Mohile on Sarkar.Shootout at Lokhandwala followed in 2007.
- 2009Produces and arranges music for his father on Kisaan, including a remix of Mere Desh Ki Dharti with Daler Mehndi.
- 2012Works as a background score producer for Salim-Sulaiman and Sandeep Chowta on films including Rowdy Rathore, Heroine and Phata Poster Nikla Hero.
- 2014Makes his composing debut with three songs in Jai Ho, and composes a song for Khoobsurat.
- 2015Sooraj Dooba Hain becomes a commercial hit, and the singles Chal Waha Jaate Hain, Zindagi Aa Raha Hoon Main and Main Rahoon Ya Na Rahoon follow.
- 2016Scores M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, Airlift, Kapoor and Sons and Baaghi.
- 2017Composes for Badrinath Ki Dulhania and Golmaal Again, and is nominated for the Filmfare award for best music director.
- 2019Wins the IIFA award for best music director for Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety, and composes for Badla and Kabir Singh.
- 2021Composes his first solo background score for Saina, and works with Dua Lipa on an Indian remix of Levitating.
- 2025Enters Bigg Boss 19 on 24 August, becomes house captain twice, and finishes as the fourth runner-up on 7 December.
Who Amaal Mallik is
Amaal Mallik is a composer who grew up inside the Hindi film music industry and then had to earn a place in it anyway. His father Daboo Malik is a music director, his grandfather Sardar Malik scored films in the 1950s and 1960s, and his younger brother Armaan Malik is one of the most successful playback singers of his generation. A family like that gives a child access and expectation in equal measure, and Mallik's career has been a long answer to the second part.[1][2]
The answer is a body of work rather than an argument. He has composed for some of the biggest Hindi films of the last decade, including M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, Badrinath Ki Dulhania, Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety and Kabir Singh, and he has six Mirchi Music awards, four IIFA awards and two Filmfare awards in the record. That is a commercial career by any measure.[2]
His style is melodic and singer led. The songs that made him are built around a voice and a hook rather than around a production trick, which is why so many of them were sung by Arijit Singh, Shreya Ghoshal or his brother Armaan. In an industry where the composer is often a coordinator of other people's tracks, he writes the melody himself.[2]
He is also part of the generation that moved between film soundtracks and independent singles. The 2015 releases that followed his film debut were non film songs, released as singles at a time when that was still a new format in India, and the Dua Lipa remix in 2021 belongs to the same outward looking strand of his work.[2]
The Malik family and early training
Mallik was born on 16 June 1990 in Mumbai, the elder of two children. His father Daboo Malik is a music director, and the household was organised around sessions, recordings and the family business of film music. His grandfather Sardar Malik was a composer in the Bombay industry from the 1950s, which makes the family three generations deep in the same trade.[1][2]
He started learning music at eight and gravitated to the piano. The training was split between two traditions: formal Western classical, jazz and rock at Trinity College of Music in London, where his teachers included Benny, Xavier Fernandes, Tony Pinto and Joy Bose, and informal Indian classical under his grandfather. That combination, a Western harmonic training and an Indian melodic ear, is the technical basis of his sound.[2]
His schooling was at Jamnabai Narsee School in Mumbai, and he took a Bachelor of Commerce at Narsee Monjee College of Commerce and Economics. The commerce degree is not incidental. A film composer in India runs a small business as well as an artistic practice, with contracts, royalties and studio costs, and the profile sites note that his education gave him a business side to go with the music.[2][1]
The family connection is the part of his story that is easiest to tell and least interesting. A surname opens a door and then stops being useful, because a producer who hires the son of a composer still needs a song that works. Everything after 2014 is the part of his career he had to build himself.[1]
Assisting at fifteen
He did not wait for a degree to start working. After finishing class ten, at fifteen, he assisted the composer and background scorer Amar Mohile on Sarkar, Ram Gopal Varma's 2005 political drama, and then on Shootout at Lokhandwala in 2007. Assisting at that age means doing the unglamorous work: copying parts, sitting in sessions, learning how a score is spotted to picture.[2]
In 2009 he produced and arranged music for his father on Kisaan, Sohail Khan's film, and collaborated on a remix of the 1967 song Mere Desh Ki Dharti with the pop singer Daler Mehndi. A remix of a patriotic song is not an artistic statement, but it is a professional credit, and it put his name in a film's music department before he was twenty.[2]
The background score work came next. He produced scores for Sandeep Chowta and for the duo Salim-Sulaiman on a run of films including Rowdy Rathore in 2012, Heroine in 2012, R... Rajkumar in 2013, Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster Returns in 2013, Phata Poster Nikla Hero in 2013, Youngistaan in 2014 and Ab Tak Chhappan 2 in 2015.[2]
That list is the real education. A background score is written to picture, in a room, against a deadline, and the composer has to serve the scene rather than the song. Working for two of the most successful score producers in the industry taught him how a film is actually assembled, which is knowledge that a music director who only writes songs often lacks.[2]
Jai Ho and the composing debut
His first credit as a composer came in 2014, when he wrote three songs for Jai Ho, the Salman Khan film directed by Sohail Khan. He also composed a song for Khoobsurat that year. A debut on a Salman Khan soundtrack is a large platform, and it put his name in front of the audience that decides which songs become wedding standards.[1][2]
The soundtrack did not make him a star on its own. What it did was establish him as a composer who could deliver within a big commercial framework, which is the qualification that leads to the next five offers. In the Hindi film industry a debut is judged less on reviews than on whether the producer would hire the person again.[2]
The following year answered that question. Sooraj Dooba Hain, from the film Roy, became one of the most played Hindi songs of 2015, and it is still the credit that opens his press coverage. The song is a melodic pop track with a strong hook, and its success made him, at twenty five, one of the composers that a studio would call for a young lead film.[2][1]
He followed it with three independent singles in the same year: Chal Waha Jaate Hain, Zindagi Aa Raha Hoon Main and Main Rahoon Ya Na Rahoon. All three were widely heard, and together they placed him inside the wave of non film Hindi singles that changed how music was released in India in the middle of the decade.[2]
M.S. Dhoni and the 2016 run
The soundtrack of M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story in 2016 is the work that established his critical reputation. A biopic of a living cricketer needs music that carries a national hero without turning him into a montage, and the score he wrote for it is still the one his coverage cites as the turning point.[2][1]
That year he also composed for Airlift, Kapoor and Sons and Baaghi. Three films in one year, in three different registers, is the normal workload of a successful Hindi film composer and the reason a career can move from promising to established in twelve months. Airlift is a thriller about a rescue, Kapoor and Sons a family drama, Baaghi an action film.[2]
The range is the point. A composer who can only do romantic songs gets hired for romantic films. One who can do a patriotic theme, a family lament and an action cue gets hired for everything, and 2016 is the year that Mallik became that composer.[2]
Commercial success followed in the way it usually does, with more work rather than with a break. The films got bigger and the songs got more airplay, and by the end of the decade he was one of the small group of composers who could open a soundtrack on name recognition.[2][1]
Badrinath Ki Dulhania and the Filmfare nomination
In 2017 he composed two songs for Badrinath Ki Dulhania. He sang Aashiq Surrender Hua with Shreya Ghoshal, and wrote Roke Na Ruke Naina, which was sung by Arijit Singh. Singh won the Filmfare award for best male playback singer for that song, and Mallik received a nomination for best music director alongside Tanishk Bagchi and Akhil Sachdeva.[2]
A nomination shared between three composers is how the Filmfare music category often works when a soundtrack is assembled from multiple contributors, and it is worth being precise about it. The award for the song went to the singer. The composer nomination was for the soundtrack as a whole, and he shared it.[2]
The same year he composed all the songs for Noor, two songs for Chef, two for Golmaal Again and two for Mubarakan, and sang on the last of those. It was the busiest year of his career to that point and it established the pattern that has continued since: a mix of large franchise films and smaller projects, with his own voice appearing on a handful of tracks.[2]
He also composed two singles in 2017, both sung by his brother Armaan. The working relationship between the two brothers is one of the more durable partnerships in the industry, and it has produced a run of songs across the decade without either of them making it the centre of the story.[2]
Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety and the IIFA
In 2018 he composed two singles, Ghar Se Nikalte Hi and Ready to Move, both sung by Armaan, and a song for Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety. That soundtrack earned him the IIFA award for best music director in 2019, which is the most substantial industry prize in his record and the one that his coverage lists first among the awards.[2][1]
The film is a comedy about a friendship tested by a girlfriend, and its music is built for a young urban audience: catchy, lightly ironic and designed to be shared. It is not the kind of soundtrack that wins awards for ambition, and it won because the songs worked, which is the whole point of a commercial music career.[2]
In 2019 he also composed Kyun Rabba, sung by Armaan, and Tum Na Aaye, sung by K.K., for Badla, the Sujoy Ghosh thriller. That score made him the youngest composer to write for Amitabh Bachchan, a distinction that the encyclopaedia records and that the industry treats as a milestone even when the audience does not notice it.[2]
He composed Chale Aana for De De Pyaar De and Yeh Aaina for Kabir Singh in the same year, the latter sung by Shreya Ghoshal. Kabir Singh was one of the biggest films of 2019, and a song in its soundtrack reaches an audience that no independent single can.[2]
Kabir Singh, Saina and the pandemic years
His work on Kabir Singh in 2019 is the credit that a younger audience is most likely to know him for. The film was the second highest grossing Hindi film of its year and its soundtrack was played through the second half of 2019, with Yeh Aaina among the tracks that carried it.[2]
In 2020 he released Zara Thehro with Armaan Malik and Tulsi Kumar on T-Series, and Dil Ko Maine Di Kasam, written by Kumaar and sung by Arijit Singh. He was also named in Eastern Eye's Dynamic Dozen for the Decade in its eleventh edition, a list that the British Asian publication uses to mark people who shaped the decade.[2]
His first solo background score came in 2021 with Saina, the biopic of the badminton player Saina Nehwal. A solo score is a different discipline from a soundtrack: it runs under the film for two hours, and it has to carry scenes that have no song in them. He wrote three songs for the film as well, sung by Shreya Ghoshal, Armaan Malik and himself.[2]
In September 2021 he collaborated with Dua Lipa, Sukriti Kakar and Prakriti Kakar on an Indian remix of Levitating. It was a licensing and production job rather than a composition, and it is notable mainly because it placed a Hindi film composer inside a global pop release at a time when Indian and Western pop were beginning to trade material directly.[2]
The pandemic years are thinner in the record than the years before them, which is true of the whole industry. Films were postponed, soundtracks were released without the films, and the singles became the main output. Mallik's profile in that period is a run of independent releases rather than a set of major soundtracks.[2]
Bigg Boss 19: two captaincies and fourth place
Bigg Boss 19 premiered on 24 August 2025 on Colors TV and JioHotstar with Salman Khan as host, and Mallik was one of the sixteen housemates introduced on the opening night. He was the only composer in a cast of actors, creators and influencers, and the show used that as his introduction: the man who writes the songs that the others have danced to.[3]
He became house captain for the first time on day 19. After Baseer Ali's tenure ended, the captaincy was opened to the winning team of the BB Sports Day task, and each contender gave a speech from the podium before a housemate vote. Mallik received the majority and took the post.[3]
His captaincy was put to a review on day 26, when Bigg Boss asked the house to evaluate his leadership. The majority voted in favour, and he was allowed to defend the post as a contender in the next captaincy task rather than being removed. That review is a feature of the season's parliament theme, in which the house could challenge any decision.[3]
He won the post a second time late in the season, in a task that came down to endurance. After the other contenders were eliminated one by one, the season log records that he was the last standing and became house captain for the second time.[3]
His run to the final was not smooth. He was nominated repeatedly, and on day 91 he was one of the four housemates with the fewest votes, alongside Tanya Mittal, Malti Chahar and Kunickaa Sadanand. Kunickaa went that week and he survived, which put him in the last five.[3]
The finale aired on 7 December 2025. Gaurav Khanna won, Farrhana Bhatt was first runner-up, Pranit More second, Tanya Mittal third and Mallik fourth. He left the house on finale night as the fourth runner-up, which in a season of eighteen housemates means he outlasted thirteen of them.[3]
The placement is a fair summary of his season. He was not the loudest voice in the house and he was not the central story, but he was never evicted, he held the captaincy twice, and he reached the last night. In a format that rewards conflict, that is a result built on being liked rather than on being feared.[3][1]
Mental health and public life
In March 2025 Mallik spoke publicly about living with clinical depression. The disclosure came before Bigg Boss and was widely reported, and it is the most personal thing he has put on the record. The point he made was that professional success and public visibility do not protect anyone from the condition.[1]
The timing matters. An entertainer who talks about depression in the year before entering a reality show is doing something that the format usually punishes, because a house built on conflict rewards performance rather than honesty. The disclosure came before the season and was part of how a wider audience met him when he entered the house months later.[1][3]
The rest of his public life is deliberately quiet. The profile sites describe him as unmarried and list football among his hobbies, and there is no relationship, dispute or family story attached to his coverage. For a composer who became a reality television contestant in his thirties, that is an unusually clean record.[1]
His work continues to be the main thing he talks about. Interviews around the show returned to the same subject, which is the craft: how a song is written for a scene, why a melody survives a change of arrangement, and what a composer actually does in a room with a director.[1][2]
What has not been confirmed
His net worth is not disclosed. Bharat Fast estimates it at about 10 million US dollars and attributes it to composing, singing, producing and endorsements. No figure comes from him or from any filing, and the estimate is recorded here as the outlet's number rather than as a fact.[1]
His height and weight are not published by him. The profile sites print about 5 feet 10 inches and 77 kg, along with eye and hair colour, and none of it is sourced to an interview. The same sites print a religion and a marital status that he has not discussed publicly.[1]
His exact role in some of the films credited to him is not always clear from the record. Assistant work, arrangement, background score production and composition are four different jobs, and a discography that lists them together can make a decade of support work look like a decade of composing. The encyclopaedia separates them by year, which is why this entry follows its dates rather than the profile sites'.[2][1]
The award tally is stated in aggregate rather than by year. Wikipedia gives six Mirchi Music awards, four IIFA awards and two Filmfare awards without listing each one, so the individual wins apart from the 2019 IIFA for Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety and the Badrinath Ki Dulhania nomination cannot be dated from the record.[2]
His fee for Bigg Boss 19 has not been disclosed by him or by the makers, and the figures that circulated during the season are estimates.
Finally, there is no confirmed new film soundtrack since the season ended. The record shows the Bigg Boss appearance and the public statements around it, and nothing that can be dated to 2026 in the way that a release date can be. This entry does not fill that gap with a project that has only been rumoured.[2]
Questions about this entry
Who is Amaal Mallik?
Amaal Mallik is a Hindi film composer from the Malik family of music directors, the elder son of Daboo Malik and the grandson of Sardar Malik.
What is Amaal Mallik known for?
Amaal Mallik is a Hindi film composer from the Malik family of music directors, the elder son of Daboo Malik and the grandson of Sardar Malik.
When was Amaal Mallik born?
Amaal Mallik was born in 16 June 1990.
How current is this entry?
It was last updated on 7 November 2026, carries 1 revisions and cites 3 sources. The entry has been checked by the editorial team and carries the verified badge.