Anoushka Shankar

Sitar player and composer Anoushka Shankar is a unique figure in the world of classical Indian music and contemporary world music. Her spiritual musicality has earned her several prestigious awards, including six Grammy nominations, the "House of Commons Shield" from the British Parliament, which she received as the youngest and first female recipient, being named "Asian Hero" by TIME magazine, the "Eastern Eye Award for Music," and "Best Artist" by Songlines magazine. Deeply rooted in Indian classical music, she studied exclusively with her father and guru Ravi Shankar from the age of nine, making her professional debut as a classical sitarist at 13. By the age of 20, she had recorded three classical sitar albums for EMI/Angel and received her first Grammy nomination – she was the first Indian woman and youngest musician ever to be nominated in the "World Music" category. In 2005, she released her groundbreaking, self-produced album *Rise*, which earned her a second Grammy nomination, after which she became the first Indian artist to perform at the Grammy Awards. As a solo sitarist, Anoushka Shankar has performed at many prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall, Barbican Centre, Sydney Opera House, Vienna Konzerthaus, Salle Pleyel, Royal Festival Hall, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Palais des Beaux-Arts, KKL Lucerne, Millennium Park (Chicago), and San Francisco Opera House. Additionally, she has appeared at festivals in Edinburgh, Verbier, "Prague Spring," Glastonbury, WOMAD, Celebrate Brooklyn, and the BBC Proms in London. She has performed her father's four sitar concertos with leading orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of esteemed conductors like Zubin Mehta. Her work as a composer has also resulted in cross-cultural projects with artists such as Sting, M.I.A., Herbie Hancock, Pepe Habichuela, Karsh Kale, Rodrigo y Gabriela, and Joshua Bell, showcasing the versatility of the sitar across different musical genres. In 2011, she signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon. This marked an artistically fruitful period with a series of innovative CDs: *Traveller* (produced by Javier Limón) explored the relationship between classical Indian music and Spanish flamenco; followed by *Traces of You* (produced by Nitin Sawhney, featuring Shankar's half-sister Norah Jones as guest vocalist) and *Home*, an album of classical Indian music, with which she returned to the ragas she had learned from her father. Her 2016 album *Land of Gold* was a response to the humanitarian trauma of the many uprooted people fleeing war and poverty. In 2019, the album *Reflections* was released, a retrospective of the highlights of her 20-year recording career. Her compositional work was recently honored in a "Zeitinsel" (time island) at the Konzerthaus Dortmund, where she had free rein to present various aspects of her artistic life in four full-evening programs. Commissioned by the British Film Institute (BFI), she wrote the music for the BFI National Archive's restored version of the 1928 silent film *Shiraz*, specially produced for the UK-India Year of Culture 2017. Other recent highlights of her work include leading a Tagore Festival at the Globe Theatre in London, dedicated to the legendary Bengali artist and polymath Rabindranath Tagore. She is featured as a soloist and co-writer in Arijit Singh's latest feature film and plays on the soundtrack of Stephen Frears' film *Victoria and Abdul*. Her 2018/19 season includes a tour in the Netherlands with the Metropole Orkest, featuring orchestral versions of her works by Jules Buckley; live performances of her film score for *Shiraz* at the Royal Festival Hall in London and the National Concert Hall in Dublin; as well as a very special revival of Ravi Shankar's and Philip Glass's *Passages* at the Philharmonie de Paris with her own ensemble and the Orchestre de chambre de Paris. She is undertaking a US tour with a new program that reflects her career to date, drawing on classical ragas and experimenting with new ideas in a dialogue of cultures that highlights the versatility of the sitar across different musical directions. In her artistic work, Anoushka Shankar increasingly seeks to express her commitment to women's rights and social justice. In response to the horrific gang rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi in 2011, she wholeheartedly supported the One Billion Rising campaign on Change.org. To support the campaign, she released a video in which she called for an end to crimes against women and revealed that she had been sexually abused as a child for many years. Afterward, she was invited to participate in a panel discussion on violence against women at the annual Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi in 2013. In other recent projects, she hosted a radio show on gender equality to support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and coordinated an appeal to the British government regarding the European refugee crisis, which was signed by over 100 leading figures in British cultural life and published as a full-page advertisement in The Guardian in September 2015. She is a narrator in *Stolen Innocence*, a documentary about human trafficking that premiered in autumn 2017. Anoushka Shankar is the author of a biographical portrait of her father, *Bapi: The Love of My Life*, and was a regular columnist for New Delhi's *First City* magazine and the *Hindustan Times*. 3/2019