MUSIC artiste and sitar player Anoushka Shankar was on a three-city tour to India in December last year where she presented her new work and in particular, the work that pays homage to countless women around the world who are victims of violence.
One of the new songs that she released during the tour In Her Name is inspired by her original version of the song In Jyoti’s Name, something which she composed as a mark of respect for Nirbhaya (Jyoti Singh) who was brutally gang raped in December 2012 in Delhi - an incident that shook the entire world.
The track, In Her Name, was premiered December (house style, no abbreviations) 16, to mark the 10th anniversary of the horrific incident. The song was renamed to highlight the universal nature of the violence against women that we see daily.
Clearly, Anoushka is one of the few of the genre-defying artists of our times who wish to speak out - and not just entertain us through her music.
Born in London to great Indian sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, Anoushka started training on the sitar with her father at the age of seven. Music is in her blood and had been an intrinsic part of her formative years and by the time she turned 10, she had started accompanying her father on the tanpura at his performances. She gave her first solo public sitar performance at the age of 13, accompanied by tabla maestro Zakir Hussain. By the time she was 15, she was accompanying her father at concerts around the world.
After her father passed away in 2012, Anoushka became the sole performer of some of his concertos for sitar. Taking inspiration from her father’s work and life, she has been doing cross-cultural collaboration with different musicians across the world.
She has also enjoyed creating music with crews almost exclusively led by women, but her performance with Firdaus Orchestra, mentored by music composer AR Rahman at Expo 2020 Dubai’s Jubilee Park, marked the first time that she played with an all-female band.
Her album Love Letters, which released in 2020, has often been considered her most personal work till date. The album incorporates a compilation of songs that delve into the emotional turmoil she was going through personally.
On November 15 last year when the nominations for the 65th Annual Grammy Awards were announced, Anoushka became the first female artist of Indian origin to be nominated for two Grammys in the same year.
The ceremony includes nominations for her in the categories of Best Global Music Performance (with singer Arooj Aftab for Udhero Na) and Best Global Music Album for Between Us… (Live) with the jazz and pop orchestra Metropole Orkest, conductor-composer Jules Buckley, and musician Manu Delago. With the latest nominations, her Grammy count goes up to nine.
With several awards and accolades in her kitty, Anoushka is a globally-acclaimed artist. However, she finds herself very often as being the “only brown woman in the room”. In a recent interview, she talked about the way in which she was looked at was woefully apparent in the fashion and magazine shoots that she was featured in where her “Indian-ness” was exaggerated and highlighted.
“While other musicians would be shot in a gritty way with their instruments, they would put me on an ‘Oriental’ carpet with flowers in my hair and people on the set sniffing around me, as if I [were] enjoying it all,” she said in a recent interview.
