4 FEATURE

March 3-4, 2018 theaustralian.com.au/reviewAUSE01Z01AR - V1

Anoushka Shankar had no choice in the path she took, she tells Jane Cornwell. Her mother played her

father Ravi Shankar’s ragas to her in the wombHaving learned to play the sitar at theknee of her maestro father, RaviShankar, before going on to win sixGrammy nominations as the star ofa plucked string instrument whose

shimmering textures seem to offer a hotline tothe divine, Anoushka Shankar has developed aroutine that keeps her on form, aiming high,thinking about the future.

There are the hours of daily practice, theyoga sessions and gym workouts, the concertdiary booked two years in advance.

There are the peace signs she does in thebath. “Feel these calluses on my fingers,” saysShankar, 36, laughing as she reaches across thesofa in her living room, located down one end ofa vast warehouse conversion in bustling eastLondon. “When I was still on tour in India lastweek they were solid black lines! They’re not asrock-hard as they need to be, so I have to becareful. Whenever I’m relaxing in a nice hotbath, I’m like this …”

She flops backwards, her hands forming twosets of Vs. It’s an ironically hippie-ish gesturefrom the younger of the two daughters born tothe Bengali-Indian sitar maestro Ravi Shankar,made heavier by his role as progenitor of the1960s “psychedelic” sound, collaborations withBeatle George Harrison, and appearances at theMonterey and Woodstock festivals that madehim a star in the US.

Anoushka famously didn’t meet her half-sister, American jazz chanteuse Norah Jones,until she was 16. They’re close now. Closer, per-haps, given recent personal events, more ofwhich later.

We’re here to talk about Land of Gold,Shankar’s most recent release, a 2016 concept

album she will perform in Australia next week,aided by a quartet on double bass and key-boards, the reed-like Indian shehnai and a set ofpercussion instruments — including the ambi-ent, wok-shaped hang — played by the work’sco-writer, Manu Delago. In turns beautiful andraw, simple and complex, with seven instru-mentals and three vocal tracks featuring M.I.A,Alev Lenz and a recitation by Vanessa Redgrave(all of which will be performed instrumentallylive), the album is Shankar’s response to theplight of refugees.

It’s a project that makes listeners sit up andpay attention. Titles such as Last Chance, Boat toNowhere and Reunion trace an arc from vulner-ability, fear and hope to relief and longing. Co-produced by film director Joe Wright(Atonement, The Darkest Hour) — Shankar’shusband and the father of her two sons, Zubin,6, and Mohan, 2 — Land of Gold is a cohesivework, a soundtrack to a movie being played outby the world’s dispossessed and voiceless. At itscentre — lamenting, communing, sparkling —is the sitar, underscoring the uniting power ofmusic.

“I released this album two years ago but theissues are still so relevant,” says Shankar, whohad recently given birth when the horrific imag-es of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on aTurkish beach after fleeing war-torn Syria withhis family, were flashed around the world. “I felt

overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness to al-leviate the suffering and injustice taking placeas the world looked on. But like many others Iwas painfully aware that it was impossible todeny my emotional connection, as a humanbeing, as a mother.”

She pauses for a beat. “What is doubly pain-ful is the sense that, as a society, it has becomeeven harder to talk about these issues because afatigue has set in. There’s a normalisation of thisstate of affairs that feels heartbreaking. So it isgood to be able to step into this music and talkto people from the stage. The lovely thing aboutspeaking through music is that you often havepeople who think differently in the same roomtogether, in a way that is increasingly rare. It’sreally important to reach across those bound-aries and belief systems.”

Shankar was last in Australia in 2010, per-forming alongside her father on his 90th birth-day farewell tour (he died two years later). Theirsublime interpretations of Indian classicalragas, the epic melodic forms attuned to differ-ent times of the day and featuring dazzlingexperimentation, had audiences swooning. Thesense of a baton being passed was palpable.

Little wonder. As Shankar writes in her 2002biography Bapi: The Love of My Life, she was justnine years old when she began learning the sitaron a smaller instrument that the great Pandit(master) Ravi Shankar had commissionedespecially for her. Aged 13, her solo debut inNew Delhi (at Ravi’s 75th birthday celebrations)confirmed the magic had indeed passed fromguru to protegee. Father and daughter wouldperform together regularly when their sched-ules allowed. Anoushka would gasp along witheveryone else at Ravi’s audacious flurries, then

Anoushka Shankar, main picture, and in Adelaide in 2010 with her father, Ravi Shankar, below right, before they played at WOMADelaide, top right

BUILDING ON ALEGACY

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