Bias in the world of percussion

Women performers have carved their niche but women percussionists remain a rarity in the world of Indian classical music

- Chitra Srikrishna

I had a flair for rhythm," the trailblazing percussionist and tabla artist Anuradha Pal told my students at Ahmedabad University, while describing how she came to learn the tabla as a child. A child prodigy who eventually trained under tabla maestros Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussain, Pal gave her first public performance on Doordarshan when she was nine years old. Whilst Pal, now 48, has performed across the world and won numerous awards, it has been despite the challenges posed by the patriarchy, hierarchy and hereditary transmission of Indian classical music. As Pal recently told SheThePeopleTV, "Not coming from a musician family and being a female in a male-dominated field and society without any godfather, meant I was against a stone wall."

By no means are these challenges confined to Indian classical music. The BBC Proms, a series of Western orchestral concerts held every year at the Royal Albert Hall in London the highlight of the UK's classical music calendar since 1895-featured its first solo woman percussionist, Evelyn Glennie, only in 1992.

Gender parity is still far away. A 2005 study of 8,146 community and youth band participants across 25 countries, published in the Bulletin Of The Council For Research In Music Education, found that male performers accounted for 80% of percussionists and wind instrumentalists. Globally, women percussionists are a small group, and in Indian classical music they are a rarity, though the first woman percussionist performed in public nearly 100 years ago.