The impossibility of defining Anoushka Shankar's sound
Image courtesy of the artist.
Words by Dalia Al-Dujaili.
Wintertime in India sees a reverse migration of the diaspora returning to play music festivals on familiar soil. For Anoushka Shankar, joining her father, the legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar, was a chance to become immersed in the ancient and classical sounds of India. But with a foot in multiple worlds, growing up between London, California and Delhi, the sitar player has become synonymous with the fusion of old and new, of classic and contemporary, and of typically eastern and western sounds.
At the age of nine, Anoushka began her sitar and Indian classical music journey under the guidance of her father. The singer and composer has led a life almost entirely devoted to music since then. At 13, she made her professional debut, before embarking on a worldwide tour with her father at 18. As a teenager, Anoushka explored the electronic music which embodied the famously psychedelic trance scene in Goa, India, and she was drawn to its parallels with the meditative, introspective qualities of Indian classical music. But this isn’t a parallel she’s keen to consistently be associated with. “It felt like whatever the genre of a particular song was that I was making,” she tells me, there was “automatically this kind of attachment, like an extra tail added on, of heritage and lineage.” Anoushka was eager to carve out a sound of her own, informed by all the various influences she’d consumed and come into contact with.
Her third album ‘Rise’ was the definitive evolutionary marker – the self-composed and produced album was an invitation for electronic music and Indian classical to marry one another, birthing a sonic blueprint resembling Anoushka’s own indefinite identity. It earned her a second Grammy nomination and formed the basis onto which her solo career blossomed.
She was the first Indian woman to be nominated for a Grammy – now holding nine Grammy nominations – the youngest and first female recipient of a British House of Commons Shield, and the first Indian musician to perform live or to serve as presenter at the Grammy Awards. But being the ‘first’ has meant that Anoushka has had to step into roles which didn’t necessarily fit her at the time – in fact, she wasn’t even aware that these were preconceived roles during her earlier career. “There were no other women that were doing similar things, with very few exceptions,” so the pressure to ‘represent’ culture and heritage sometimes led Anoushka to continue embodying the cookie-cutter classical Indian artist. Although she remains proud of representing South Asian women on British and global stages, in retrospect, she thinks “there was a kind of exoticisation and Orientalism by being a female that played this instrument, and it always came with this clutch of flying carpets and incense and yoga,” she tells me.
Growing up, Anoushka had always felt a split between the music she’d learnt to play for her career and the music she listened to with friends and peers. “We would joke about how I'd be on the dance floor till five in the morning, but then I'd be on Carnegie Hall’s stage,” she tells me, “there was a real rift initially.” Over the years, the two sonic worlds came closer and closer together. So playing at the psy-trance festival Boom in Portugal, many years after she’d been there partying with friends as a punter, was “a real apex” for Anoushka, solidifying what that fusion could feel like. “And I was pregnant and no one knew it yet... So it was just a very, very magical experience.”
Now, Anoushka welcomes the birth of another single, ‘In Her Name’, commemorating 10 years since the 2012 gang rape and murder in Delhi of Jyoti Singh. Anoushka will be taking the single on the road with her to India this winter, her first tour there since the pandemic. The song is a newly recorded and developed version of a track originally released in 2013, ‘In Jyoti’s Name’, from her Traces Of You album. The title of the new version of this song was adapted to reflect the devastating universal applicability of abuse and sexual violence against all women, “whether in India, or here, or anywhere else,” and to reflect “how many names there could be which the song would be about,” Anoushka tells me. And her efforts in highlighting crimes against women and human injustices reach beyond the artistic realm – Anoushka works with the UNHCR and Help Refugees to garner awareness for the refugee crisis, and almost three years ago was announced as the inaugural President of the F-List, a UK database created to help bridge the gender gap in music.
In July 2013, the United Nations estimated that one in three women would be beaten or raped in her lifetime, a figure which has remained unchanged 10 years on. Reciting the words of Indian poet Nikita Gill, Anoushka insists, “Do not let this death be quiet like all the thousands before it. Time cannot devour what we will not allow to be forgotten,” revealing her sense of shock that a decade can go by and still, so little has changed. Pleading for a global sisterhood to remain vocal in the face of gender-based injustice, Anoushka remains dedicated to the art of honouring the fight.