Home is where the art is

As she prepares for her four-city India tour, Anoushka Shankar explains the power of legacy, the creative process and her thoughts on being constantly viewed as ‘someone’s daughter’

Sitar virtuoso Anoushka Shankar may be a four-time Grammy nominee with millions of followers across the globe, but when she talks about her family or music, there is an endearing simplicity to her that can surprise you. As she gets ready for a four-city India tour in support of her new album, Home, she gives us a peek into her creative process, her family’s engagement with music, her own tryst with her father’s legacy and more.

“After my father passed away, I had played several tribute concerts for him in various cities, and naturally, these were classical in nature,” she says, explaining how she found her way back to pure Hindustani classical music after a series of notable non-classical albums, including the Grammy-nominated recordings Rise, Traveller and Traces Of You. “I felt very moved playing classical music after a long time, and in a way this re-ignited my love for it. Also, I felt a deep connection with my father through the playing of classical ragas. And I wanted to capture all of this on record,” she adds. Home sees her paying homage to the teachings of her father, the legendary Pandit Ravi Shankar, and also includes compositions in Jogeshwari, the raga written by him.

While Anoushka is known to be a tremendous performer on stage, one cannot help but wonder what she is like behind the scenes, while composing an album and putting it together in her home studio, in her own space. She shares, “I do tend to retreat into a shell, but only to an extent — decidedly less than the idealised cliché. With two small kids, it’s hard to retreat entirely. And I don’t mind that at all, but it can be very challenging to enter a creative zone while constantly being pulled away to answer phone calls about nursery, babysitting, emails and tend to sundry other work demands. I try to cut down where I can in terms of work, so that I can keep my focus on the creative process and my family.” Having created Home within such a scenario while she was pregnant with her younger son, does she feel that her experience of impending motherhood also fed into the music she has made “Indelibly so, but it’s hard to explain in what way this may have manifested. I think there was a sense of contentment and relaxed creativity to my general state of mind while pregnant, which hugely affected the way I play. When I listen to that music now, it feels like a mature, confident and emotional performance, and perhaps part of that is due to what was happening to me at the time,” she responds and adds that both her sons, Zubin and Mohan and her husband, filmmaker Joe Wright have always been enthusiastically involved with the music she creates. “Joe has always been very engaged with my music. On my recently completed album that’s coming out next year, he’s actually worked as my co-producer! Mo seems to love music too, but Zubin has been very involved recently, singing along to songs he likes and telling me when he doesn’t like something,” she reveals.

As one speaks of her family, reminiscence of her father is inevitable. And this brings another question to mind: What has her relationship with her family legacy been like over the years She has carved a place for herself on the global music scene as an individual today, indelibly — but along the way to where she stands today, what sort of an engagement has she had with the fact that she comes from the lineage of one of the greatest sitar players the world has ever seen “At times I’ve tussled with my legacy, at times I’ve been proud of it or afraid of it, or I’ve simply tried my best to ignore it! I’ve had to extricate and separate two entwined aspects of this legacy. There is no part of me that wants to leave behind the fact that my father is my guru. That is a central current running through my music and I wouldn’t be where I am without his teaching. Separately, I’ve felt diminished and frustrated by the fact that, in some eyes, no matter what I’ve done over a 20-plus year career, I’m constantly only viewed as someone’s daughter. Being a daughter and being a disciple are two different things in my mind, and I think they can get too tangled up in other peoples’ minds sometimes.

“Having said that, acceptance that this is the way things are is the only way to achieve any kind of sanity around it all. And so, I just try to keep my head down and do my work the best I can,” she says.