Pulling at the Heartstrings

Sitar player and composer Anoushka Shankar will be performing in India later this month as part of her global tour

- Amit Gurbaxani

Almost 20 years after the release of her debut album as a composer, Rise in 2005, sitar player Anoushka Shankar feels people finally get it. “The change I’ve noticed in the last few years has been quite humbling in the way people call out certain songs at my shows,” she says. “Whereas at the beginning, I had to carve out an area for the type of genre-free music I was making, where I could feel the splits in the audience where some were coming for my classical work, and some were coming for the electronic sound. Now there’s a core listener group that really knows what I do.”

While her compositions can’t be called “pure classical music”, there’s no doubt that just like her father, the legendary Ravi Shankar, she has helped introduce the sitar to listeners around the world. “I’m like the gateway,” she says. “This is going to sound so stupid but at some point last year, I was sitting with my mom and the penny dropped about the word ‘culture’ and how things like yoghurt and other food items need a ‘mother culture’. And I was like, that’s exactly what I keep trying to explain, that no legacy, no culture ever stays frozen, it’s always imbibing what that new artist, new generation is bringing in while standing on the shoulders of everything that came before it.”