Anoushka Shankar’s experiments with the sitar

Anouska Shankar has never shied away from talking about abuse. Four years before the MeToo movement took hold globally, in 2013, the sitar exponent revealed that she had been sexually abused as a child.

So in a way, her latest song, Sister Susannah has been years in the making.

Written by poet Nikita Gill, and recited in spoken word by Anoushka over loops of the sitar, the track is a satirical take from the point of view of a controlling man. “It creates this tension in the song, which I hope will broaden the conversation around abuse and violence,” says Anoushka, over a call from her home in London, where she is waiting out the pandemic with her two sons.

‘“Sister Susannah’ is a song I have toyed with for some time, and the current situation, alongside people’s visceral reactions to our rare live performances of the song, prompted me to revisit and release it,” she says.

The “‘current situation” is what she calls a shadow pandemic of domestic violence and abuse, proven by the rising number of calls made to women helplines in the UK, US and India in the past year of lockdowns.

In ‘Sister Susannah’, Anoushka is creating the same space that we found in her previous album, Love Letters, with collaborations with many of the same women musicians and producers, including Alev Lenz. The track, with a few other unreleased singles and remixes, will be included in an extension of the album, called, Love Letters PS, to be released this June.

Evolution of the sitar

Her work on Love Letters led her to a nomination for the Grammys this year, where she rendered a performance of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Mercy Mercy Me’, with fellow nominees Alexander Desplat, Gustavo Santaolalla, Grace Potter and others.

Love Letters marks an experiment with the sound of the sitar, decidedly different from her last work in A Suitable Boy. For Mira Nair’s mini series, Anoushka’s music sets the scene for a newly freed India.

But for many years now, Anoushka has been trying to ‘de-exotify’ the sitar. Her calm and measured voice breaks into peals of laughter as she explains the word she made up.

“In any movie there is an opening shot of India, the sitar goes ‘treeaiuu’, and there we are. Someone gets high and ‘treeaiuu’, flying carpets and ‘treeaiuu’,” — the sitar, to the world, is a cultural marker of India. “The imagery is part of its journey but to limit it to one particular picture does it a disservice,” she says.

Having been surrounded by Indian classical music all her life — Anoushka had been performing with her father since she was 10 — she says, “I grew up with it, so of course I have all the love and respect for it, but I also think the sitar is a beautiful and fascinating instrument, independent of that musical style,” she says.

To do this, she has been trying to find different ways of miking it to get the full spectrum of its resonance.

“Traditionally, the sitar would be recorded with one microphone. It is a phenomenal acoustic with a bright sound, but it also would not translate into other situations very well. If you play with a band, a drum kit, or a plugged in guitar for example, the sitar just won’t be heard, it can’t compete with louder instruments,” she says.

“I was one of the first persons to start using an internal microphone system… and it changed my life. Suddenly I was able to play with anyone anywhere and I could still be heard clearly,” she continues talking about how placing multiple mics in different ways would help capture the body of the instrument and its lower tonalities a little bit better.

She wants to challenge the idea of what a sitar is, by finding different ways of playing it. “What happens if you play just the rhythm strings, or just the resonances? Maybe you don’t bend the notes at all but play in a staccato way,” she says.

Incidentally, her father taught the instrument to George Harrison of The Beatles, and it later featured in ‘Norwegian Wood’. In India too, there are ongoing experiments with the sitar with an Indian classical metal band, Sitar Metal making the instrument its star. It is a strangely fulfilling to experience, watching a metalhead sit down on stage and still rock out on stage with his band.

“That is my point, anyone who has a love of a different genre might find use of the sitar within it,” says Anoushka, “As long as it is a good musician, who understands the instrument, and also other forms of music. So that they are not just sticking Indian classical on top of that genre, but actually presenting a unique sound. It brings the sitar to a different audience, which is lovely.”