The day we're scheduled to meet Anoushka Shankar at the Ravi Shankar Institute for Music and Performing Arts in Chanakyapuri in New Delhi, the sun's decided to come out and stay there after days in sulky, fog-induced greyness. Our lensman, after some deliberation and empty clicks, decides the portico, with a huge kolam-like pattern in the centre, is the place for a good picture. Anouskha doesn't need much convincing. “As long as the sitar doesn't touch the ground…” being her only concern. She goes back in and, in a few minutes, is back; replacing the pencil skirt with a floor-length lehenga.
While one might agree that Pandit Ravi Shankar's would be a long shadow to come out of, Anoushka is now an accomplished musician in her own right. There are seven albums, two Grammy nominations (for “Live at Carnegie Hall” and “Rise”), collaborators that range from Shubha Mudgal to Sting, guest appearances on records by Lenny Kravitz and Joshua Bell, and concerts at prestigious venues around the world. While her first few albums featured Hindustani compositions, later, around 2005, Anoushka started experimenting with cross-genre music, first seen in her record Rise. Was that a conscious decision to set herself apart from her famous father? Hardly, she says, for Pandit Ravi Shankar himself was ready to collaborate. “So, it was not really a separation from him at all. For me it was a conscious decision not to do crossover, not to collaborate for many years, because right from the beginning of my career in the '90s, from around the world there was a lot of Indian music collaboration happening. Whether in Electronic, in Pop, in Jazz, there was a lot going on, and people, promoters, managers — not my own but people around — saw me as a perfect person to make a poster child for that because I was young, I was female, I was his daughter… They wanted me to do fusion and be the modern sitar player, like Vanessa May on the violin,” she recalls. “I didn't want to do that, I didn't want to be that person. It felt, not for other people but me, too manufactured, too trendy. In fact, I resisted it for a while because I felt too obvious, felt like a sell-out… But eventually as an artiste I have to do what's honest for me. As someone who's grown up in three continents and lives today and has also studied ancient tradition, it's me — to be multi-cultural, to be modern and ancient. That's my truth. So, eventually, I couldn't put it off anymore,” she laughs.
It was this back-of-the-mind feeling of not giving in to the obvious that ensured that the sitar didn't become her first love — it was the piano. “I studied piano as well and for a long time I must say I liked the piano more than the sitar, part of it because the sitar felt too obvious, and it came with a lot of trappings. It came with some level of pressure, some level of intimidation… So even though I loved it, it was clouded by a lot of other things. The sitar, if you play it, was going to be a career, whereas the piano was just fun and something that I could just play because I enjoyed it,” ponders Anoushka.
It was after she was 10, she says, when she started spending more time with the sitar, that it seeped in. “The piano felt like my own little secret love that I could just play for myself, and strangely, kind of slowly, the sitar just came to get under my skin more and more.” She does play the piano now, but occasionally, as part of a composition or on recordings, when the need to explain something arises. “But not at the concert level anymore,” she adds.
Delhi's one corner of her life's triangle; the other two being London (where she now lives) and California (where she did her studies). Her debut sitar performance was in New Delhi, when she was 13. Growing up, a few months every year were spent in Delhi. “But three years I lived exclusively here when I was a child, from seven to 10. I went to the British School round the corner,” she recalls.
The sitarist is scheduled to perform in the Capital as part of the ‘Vh1 Handpicked presents Anoushka Shankar Traveller' tour, “Traveller” being her new album that explores the threads that tie Flamenco and Hindustani music. “This album came about more from loving Flamenco really. I've listened to it a long time, and more and more in this last couple of years it's become something I want to know more about and being a musician it makes sense to want to express that musically,” says Anoushka.
“I had done a couple of small collaborations with Flamenco musicians before and that kind of left me with a real desire to do more. I realised it was a very big idea because these are two very vast and great traditions, so doing just a small collaboration here and there wasn't really getting to it. So, more and more I felt it deserved a bigger palette, to take a whole album and to explore these two styles. It was very challenging, it was very rewarding; I kind of had to really immerse myself in Spain and Flamenco and learn a lot because I didn't want to disrespect the traditions, the same way I wouldn't want someone to come and do the same to my tradition.” The roots and connection between the two genres, she says, were already there: it was just about “uncovering them and seeing what would happen.”
On how long it took her to work on her album, Anoushka laughs and says, “One pregnancy.” Son Zubin was born early last year and has already accompanied his mom on her Europe tour to promote her new record recently — 30 cities in 40 days, as Anoushka informs us. “I didn't know I was pregnant when I started working on the album. But that definitely put a kind of an end point on when I wanted to finish working. We basically worked till I had Zubin.”
While career highlights as a musician are many, what she treasures are moments more than events. “One is playing with my father, because it feels like the ultimate musical experience. It's the highest level of music that I get to experience as a musician, and it's very magical, very spiritual and very beautiful,” Anoushka says. “And the second thing is to present anything deeply personal of my own and have that loved and appreciated. So whether it's a live concert where you're presenting something that you've composed or maybe playing something that was inspired by something very personal, that can be very vulnerable, and so it can be quite scary and that works. So when that works, that's the point of art really.”
