A sitar is (re)born: Peters Township resident returns to instrument she once played on Indian radio, TV
Harry Funk / Staff Peters Township resident Asawari Jadhav is playing the sitar again after a two-decade hiatus.
Harry Funk / Staff Peters Township resident Asawari Jadhav is playing the sitar again after a two-decade hiatus.
Harry Funk / Staff Peters Township resident Asawari Jadhav is playing the sitar again after a two-decade hiatus.
Considering the population of her native country, Asawari Jadhav probably had one heck of an audience when she used to perform on All India Radio.
“Then I did my first performance on TV, when it had just come to India,” the Peters Township resident said.
That was back in the 1980s, when as a teenager she’d show off her skills on the sitar, which the average American might vaguely recognize from George Harrison playing it on some songs by the Beatles.
By the time she reached her early 20s, the combination of a career, family and the death of her sitar guru caused Jadhav to effectively put her instrument away for a couple of decades.
It did make the trips with her as she moved from India, first to Plymouth, U.K., and to Peters in 2004. But it wasn’t until recently that she really picked it up again.
“I thought I would not be able to play,” Jadhav said. “But it’s almost like swimming. You just get into it, and you realize it’s not lost.”
Like the guitar player who hasn’t touched one in a while, she noticed her fingers weren’t quite used to the strings.
“I’m slowly getting my calluses back, which is good, because it makes it a little more easier,” she explained.
A guitarist ¬- Peters resident Bill Loughman, who teaches her husband, Rajendra, and older son, Aaryan ¬- started prompting Jadhav to try again once he learned she plays the sitar.
“Every time he’s in here, he asks, ‘Are you going to go back? Are you going to go back?'” she said, and Rajendra can take a lot of the credit, too: “He’s been asking me to play, and I keep telling him, ‘There’s never enough time.'”
Now that there apparently is, Jadhav has done a couple of performances, including accompanying a dance drama. And perhaps more will be on the horizon.
“I am always a little apprehensive to play somewhere,” she said, comparing the sound of the sitar with more familiar Western instruments: “It’s so different.”
In the meantime, she is seeking other Pittsburgh-area sitar players, along with those who perform on other popular Indian instruments such as the percussive table and four-string tanpura.
As for the sitar, it takes about 20 strings. Six or seven of them are played over curved, raised frets, which can be moved along the neck for proper tuning. The rest are sympathetic strings that resonate along with the main ones, giving the sitar its distinctive drone.
Jadhav, who started learning the instrument when she was 7, had the opportunity to see the man who for decades was the world’s foremost sitar proponent: Ravi Shankar (1920-2012) played a concert she attended in England when the master was in his early 80s.
“It was such a nice performance, and he got a standing ovation for it,” she recalled.
Shankar’s style is close to what Jadhav usually plays.
“What I’ve learned is mostly Indian classical music. I do pick up a couple of Bollywood songs every now and then,” she admitted, referring to tunes made popular in the Hindi film industry.
She also will admit that it’s going to take a lot of work for her to compare to what she used to do for audiences across India.
“To play at the level I was playing, it’s going to take a lot of practice.”