For me, tradition becomes significant when it feels relevant and when it feels personal and truthful to who I am today. It is something that has a lineage; that is evolving with each person who passes it down.
Anoushka shankar
For me, tradition becomes significant when it feels relevant and when it feels personal and truthful to who I am today. From the time I was born, I was travelling across multiple continents – both with my family and eventually on tour with my music. So from a very early age, I had to define what it meant for myself to be rooted. To carry who I am and where I come from within myself regardless of where I happen to be. I grew up learning our beautiful Indian classical music and the incredible thing about it is that it’s simultaneously ancient and also improvised. So there’s a duality within it of being something that’s connected back down through ancestors, generations long, and also being very current, very in-the-moment and coming from that individual. So for me tradition is something that has a lineage; that is evolving with each person who passes it down. I think heritage is such a fascinating thing because it can be worn as something quite ‘weighty’, but it also can be worn lightly. I think the more I got comfortable with the fact that my heritage or my lineage is just simply within me by virtue of who I am, then it didn’t become something that I had to think too consciously about how to represent. It will flow through what I do because it’s already in me. I think how we get to define what it means to be Indian or to be global is something very very personal. For me, it means I’ve had the opportunity to feel comfortable in who I am around the world. It means that I get to represent my culture to people who may be less familiar with it. But I also get to come back to my country and still feel like I belong. Which is something I don’t take for granted, and I really feel grateful for it. What home is for me has changed over the years. I used to think that I could just feel at home anywhere. And I realise now that it’s more that I can feel comfortable in many places – but that’s not the same as feeling ‘at home’. Being at home comes from feeling small intimacies and understanding the rhythms of a place; when you get the nuances that people are speaking with, or when you know where to turn or have your favourite comforts. Those things come with time. What makes me feel at home is the people. If my children are there, if my key family members and the people I truly love are there, then I’m home. I have really distinct memories of India from when I was a child, because in my early years I lived between London and India. So whenever I would come back, the change would just really hit all my senses. I remember things like…eating a mango. My mum would say ‘those aren’t mangoes, THIS is a mango’ or ‘this is how a mango is meant to taste’. And other intense sensory things like the hot and thick rain that just envelops you. As my children grow up, we’re talking about India, about my roots, about where they come from. The thing we keep coming back to more and more are the family stories – the things that I’ve been told about my great grandmother from my mother, that if I don’t tell someone else that story will disappear. Or the little stories about my father. His big biography is known by a lot of people but what are those little nuances of what it was like to be him within his family, or what was his parents like? I just love telling those stories because when we carry that within us it’s something really special that we get to have. The world is becoming more and more international every year; there has been so much change in how different cultures interact with each other. When I was younger, things felt a lot more disjointed and separated, so for people of that age group it would have felt confusing to be partially Indian, partially American, and partially British. There was such a real sense of…breaking loyalty if you were not the right part of yourself in the right place. And I feel that it’s not disjointedness anymore – it’s a richness of experience. For me as an artist, my work has to represent who I am, it has to tell my story as someone that has Indian roots but has lived a global life. My music carries that respect for my tradition while also moving forward in a way that feels like it represents my world. Anoushka shankar, Grammy-nominated musician
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