Honey, I shrunk the album

Anoushka Shankar is doing big things: Playing Lollapalooza India, parenting, and giving sitar music a new direction. But little things are in store too, like her first mini-album and hope for a lighter, minimal world

- Noor Anand Chawla

Some 35 acts are slated to play at Lollapalooza India in Mumbai later this month, but only one artist slated to perform there is cool enough to have called one of the Beatles "Uncle George". And she's bringing her sitar. Anoushka Shankar, 42, started out with platinum-level privilege. Her father is the late Pandit Ravi Shankar, perhaps the best-known sitarist of the last century. He influenced jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, jammed with violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and collaborated with George Harrison (Uncle George).

But Shankar has also broken free of the inevitable comparisons to her tutor father. She's worked sitar music into classical, contemporary and electronic compositions, picking up nine Grammy nominations. She's paired the sitar with an upright bass, mridangam and clarinet in place of a bansuri. "Probably one of my greatest strengths as a musician is to have an ear for the way unusual sounds can work together," Shankar says.

The British-American artist has also been fearless in ways few artists in the Indian classical music scene are. Shankar has been open in discussing how her father was sexually abused as a child, and her own abuse by a person her family trusted, to highlight that it happens within high-profile families too. In 2019, she made news of her hysterectomy public on social media, addressing the tumours (13, all benign), the idea of womanliness and her fear of dying in surgery. Her 2013 song, In Jyoti's Name, was composed in the wake of the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape and murder -Shankar used the victim's name in the title (with the family's permission), in defiance with Indian law. It's remarkably upbeat. She released an extended version, titled In Her Name, last year, with lyrics by poet Nikita Gill.