Anoushka Shankar
by Michael Parrish

In May 1998, sitar master Ravi Shankar, now 79, performed at Chicago's Symphony Center. Shankar was, as usual, spellbinding. However, some of the most dazzling musicianship came from the second sitarist, his teenage daughter Anoushka. Although the younger Shankar clearly played a supporting role, her skill at crafting harmonic lines around her father's expansive improvisations showed a musical sensitivity far beyond her years, and her solo slot late in the program was perhaps the most exciting portion of the concert.

Anoushka Shankar's teen years have been quite eventful. At age 13, she began serious study of the sitar under her father, surely the world's best known classical Indian musician, and made her performing debut on the instrument at one of her father's concerts in New Delhi in February 1995. At 14, she made her recording debut, performing one of her father's pieces ("Adarini," with tabla player Zakir Hussain) for the Ravi Shankar box set, In Celebration. Since then, Shankar has toured with her father as second sitarist and made her solo recording debut last year, all before she turned 18. In a recent phone conversation, Shankar talked about her musical accomplishments, her solo CD, and plans for the future.

Shankar's early life came under a cloud of secrecy because she was conceived while her mother, Sukayana, now married to Ravi Shankar, was married to another man. When her parents married, Shankar, who had previously lived with her mother, was publicly acknowledged as her father's daughter. However, Shankar had come to know her father long before they lived together as a family. "He was always in my life. He didn't marry my mom until I was seven. He was never around much before that because he was on tour, but whenever he came to London, which was where I lived at that point, then he would always come see us, and we would see him. I would go to his concerts without fail. My mom would take me whenever he was in London. I hadn't started playing music yet at that point."

The young Shankar took to classical Indian music early, first learning to sing and dance from her mother, starting at the age of two. However, once she started living with her father, her musical focus shifted. "I started playing sitar when I was nine, I think. It was pretty superficial at that point, just 20 minutes a day or so, playing scales. It was more serious from when I was 12, which was when I got more into it."

Shankar is the only sitarist entirely trained by her father. "You wouldn't go to someone at my father's level for basic music training. You might start out with your parents or a local teacher, and once you learned the rudiments of the music you might go to someone like him for advanced training. In my case I had him at home, so we got to start at the very beginning – how to hold the instrument and what fingering to use." In her first years of training, Shankar used a specially built child-sized sitar, but soon switched to an adult-sized instrument.

"It's quite common for parents to teach their children Indian music, but it's not so common with daughters, it's much more so with sons. In my case it was not too difficult because I started really young. I wasn't going through some crazy adolescent phase when I was first learning, so it was quite natural for me to behave in a certain way when I was learning, to regard him with more reverence and respect. Also because that's how he's treated by practically everybody, so I have that feeling for him also, besides the love I have for him as a father."

This is an excerpt from Dirty Linen #85 (December '99/January '00)