Mumbai, Dec 6 Acclaimed sitar player, composer and Grammy-nominee Anoushka Shankar, is reflecting on her recent experience where her sitar was broken by the crew of an airline.
On Saturday, she took to her Instagram, and shared a series of pictures, and videos of her travels along with her sitars and their cases.
She also penned a long note in the caption, as she wrote, “It’s been an insane few days- I’m so grateful to Ajay Rikhiram @rikhiramoriginals for breathing life back into my sitar. I’m waiting for the polish to fully dry before playing it properly, but it looks like it’ll live to see another day! I need to stress that although it was Air India in THIS instance, I have had terrible mishaps over the decades on other airlines too. Over fifteen years ago I invested in a giant, unwieldy but magnificent flight case which made traveling truly inconvenient. but meant my instrument became perfectly safe”.
She shared that a decade later, she was finally able to commission bespoke, powerful but lightweight carbon fibre cases for her sitars, which genuinely changed her life. And it’s not just cases she has been investing in. After an incident in which both her father’s and her sitars were smashed on the same Air France journey many years ago, she started travelling with two instruments.
She further mentioned, “I always fly with one sitar in the hold, and one in a seat. I even travel with a sitar tech on-hand to assist with any issues upon landing. It is a huge privilege to be able to tour this way and one that I am acutely aware is not possible for many musicians who travel with their instruments. Although I have to say, doing all these things is also a forced ‘choice’ I wish I didn’t have to make, and one that causes a significant dent to my earnings. I just wouldn’t be able to tour the way I do without taking all these precautions as airlines universally take so little care of musical instruments”.
“It’s for that reason I’m really glad I posted a video of the near-catastrophic crack on my sitar. This situation would have been made immeasurably worse were I not in the position to have paid excess baggage fees to bring a second sitar with me, or have the kind of platform that meant the airline responded to my complaint. If there can be one good thing to emerge from this, I hope that @airindia will hold to their promise to update their internal handling policies for musicians overall, and that other airlines will follow suit. In an artistic climate that makes touring a near-impossibility for so many musicians, it is the least they can do”, she added.
Earlier, Anoushka had shared a video on Instagram showing deep cracks in her sitar after a flight. She said she first noticed tuning issues, and on trying to play it discovered the damage. She expressed that this was the first time in 15–17 years such a thing had happened, despite using a special protective case and paying a “handling fee”.
She called the incident “devastating and truly disturbed,” accusing the airline of negligence. She also lamented that “even an Indian instrument isn’t safe” with an Indian airline.
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