Anoushka Shankar Opens Up on 'Terrifying Pressure' of Father Pandit Ravi Shankar's Legacy: Started Losing Hair At 24, Dealt With Breakdowns

Picture this: A young Anoushka Shankar, on a music tour in some corner of the world, sits in a room full of journalists twice her age, who take out their pens and ask what they believe is an important question to a teenager: "Do you feel it's going to be impossible to follow in your father, legendary sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar's footsteps?"

"I always had the answer, which was: I have chosen to play music because I love it, it makes me happy, I can only be in my footsteps," Anoushka recalls the mid-90s, before adding the clincher, "All these answers were logically true, but emotionally not. Of course, I felt the pressure, it was terrifying."

The sitarist was in conversation with select media at Soho House, Mumbai, as she dropped the first single Hiraeth from her highly-anticipated album Chapter III: We Return to Light.

The daughter of Sukanya Rajan and sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, Anoushka was born in London and raised between Delhi and the UK capital. She began training on the sitar at the age of 8, started accompanying her legendary father on the tanpura for public performances two years later, and gave her debut sitar performance in 1995, at the age of 13.

During a chat, of which THR India was also a part, Anoushka was asked how she navigated the pressure of coming from a family of such high musical lineage and finding her melody under the shadows of the sitar virtuoso.

"With all the opportunities it came with, it was also very difficult, emotionally, and psychologically. There was a lot of pressure at a very young age, a lot of fear and expectations, even if it is not directly coming from parents. But one could feel it in the ecosystem around, that people feel, 'Oh she's playing now! So she needs to be the next...' That's hard for a young kid," she says.

The 43-year-old began touring in 1995 and was thus thrust into the public glare. She was a young girl with music in her blood, but she was also a performer, the daughter of a man people revered.

"Maybe things are better now, but the kind of interviews I would give back then.... If I look back now, of a 13-year-old me sitting in a room doing interviews and the kind of pressured questions that were asked, it was just appalling. You were just thrust into that. Back then, we didn't have a language for mental health, boundaries, work... that was tough. But I didn't know it was tough until later."

How did she get through it? Anoushka breaks into a self-aware grin, "I had a breakdown or two and learned how to pick myself back up again."

In her 20s, she was touring 115 shows a year, across the world. Anoushka remembers the tone of the managers back then, who would emphasise on not missing a single territory, so as to not let go of potential bookings for the next big gig.

Pausing was not an option and work-life balance hadn't come into the discourse.

"It is the mentality where you make decisions out of fear; it's not healthy at all. You have the energy at that age for a while, but it is not a life. There are no friendships or romantic relationships to sustain. I was overly mature very young, because I was living this adult life, but I didn't learn the same thing that normal 18-year-olds did."

When she was 24, the stress and the toll of the tour began taking a toll: She started losing her hair.

"I had patches of hair falling off. My mother couldn't understand why I was under so much stress. I was doing 100 shows a year, I had been touring through high school and junior high. So we decided we would pause for a year and so I stopped touring."

"Ironically, that was when I found my own musicianship. That was the year I made my fourth album, Rise, which was the first one I composed and produced. There was enough space that I finally started making music, for the love of it, for myself. I thought I would relax during that time, but I ended up making more music, which felt more real and different," she recalls.

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Not that life became easy once she found her groove, Anouskha says, as she brings up another point in time when she was 27 and started touring the same old way. It hit her that she was back in the trap of "unhealthy" patterns and had to stop again for an intervention.

"I had to rethink how I wanted to live my life, and not just the way I was patterned from what I had learned from previous generations. So it is an ongoing process of having to stop and make scary decisions and take risks, where you might fear, 'Wow this might mean I don't have a career to come back to'. But if you don't hear and honour whatever is on the inside, it won't work anyway... something will break," she concludes.