Stringing the santoor to give it global identity and classical pride
He began his journey in music as a tabla player when he was only five but Shivkumar Sharma soon found the santoor - and his musical destiny.
Stringing the santoor along as it were, Sharma, or Pt Shivkumar Sharma as he came to be known, took the little known folk instrument from Jammu and Kashmir into unexplored classical firmaments. And even the silver screen, ensuring that his audience spanned the globe and also the genres of Hindi film music and classical music.
Pt Sharma, among India’s best known classical musicians who also walked the world of popular music as a composer with flautist Hari Prasad Chaurasia with whom he formed the Shiv-Hari duo, died at his home on Tuesday morning. He was 83.
It had been a lifetime of music.
As the only son of Jammu-based musician Pt Uma Dutt Sharma of the Benaras Gharana, he was born into music. His father initiated him into the intricacies of tabla playing when he was just five years old.
“One day when he was fourteen, his father returned from Srinagar with a santoor and announced that he had found his son’s true calling,” reads the summary of his autobiography “Journey with a Hundred Strings: My Life in Music” that he co-wrote with author Ina Puri.
“It was my father who brought music into our home. Before him, my daadaji had been raj purohit (court priest), or chief priest, at the royal temple of the maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, Raja Pratap Singh,” Sharma writes in the memoir published in 2002 by Penguin India.
It was a huge risk for a young musician starting his journey to abandon his learnings in tabla and focus on a relatively unknown instrument like the santoor.
Critics initially dismissed the instrument as unsuitable for classical music but a determined Sharma changed the mechanics of the instrument, which originally comprises 25 bridges and 100 strings and was played while kept on a stand, to make it an important component in classical renditions.
?When I was seven-eight, I started playing the tabla for children programmes on the radio. One day my father said, ‘I want to teach you this instrument (santoor)’. And that posed a big problem for me. I thought why should I play this instrument? But when I started playing the santoor, since I knew ‘raagdaari’ as a vocalist and how to play the tabla, it benefited me,” Sharma recalled in a 2013 interview with RSTV’s talk show “Shakhsiyat”.
According to musician Durga Jasraj, her late father and classical vocalist Pt Jasraj, played an important role in the earlier part of Sharma’s. It was her mother Madhura, who got him his first film as a santoor player in her father V Shantaram’s 1955 film “Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje”.