Strumming her pain

Whether finding joy in small things or writing lyrics on heartbreak, making music is an intensely spiritual experience for Anoushka Shankar

- ANJULY MATHAI

Three years ago, sitarist Anoushka Shankar, daughter of the legendary Pandit Ravi Shankar, released her EP, Love Letters. Its music was drenched in pain, coming as it did after her divorce from filmmaker husband Joe Wright, her anxiety over being a single mother to her two sons and health issues following painful surgeries, including one to remove abdominal tumours. “Am I still loveable if you stop loving me?” she sings about heartbreak in one of the songs. But there is also strength in the music— she is not voicing the pain as much as exorcising it. The album, in that sense, is almost a catharsis.

She’s written before about dredging music from this place of pain. “I’ve been struggling to write music lately and today, I’ve realised it is quite simply because, once again, I’ve been afraid that feeling too deeply will cause me to lose myself—that I will be engulfed by a pain I don’t want to touch or dive into,” she once shared. “Even though from experience I know it’s precisely that self-losing that allows me to change and heal.”