We speak to Trilok Gurtu, Sid Sriram and Swaminathan Selvaganesh about inherited legacies, experiments in music and what they will be presenting at Citi NCPA Aadi Anant.
By Akshaya Pillai
Trilok Gurtu’s mother used to bribe him with mangoes. He was three, maybe four years old, toddling around the house in the afternoon heat of Bombay. A child does not question pleasure. The mango arrived second; the melody slightly ahead. His mother, the renowned vocalist Shobha Gurtu, would sing encouragingly and he watched her disappear into the sound, watched her face change, her breath deepen. And he mimicked, hands yellow and sticky, learning the shape of surs before he learned a single bol.
Each time musicians got together at home, Gurtu’s father was the first to say, “Ye bahut masti karta hai, make him play”. So, they would put the young Trilok behind the tabla. Watching, listening and playing— these happened all at once. “I listened to my mother, my grandmother and everyone else play, and talk about music. You know, how they loved what music can do, how to develop a musical phrase, to sustain the sur, the dynamics of it all,” says Gurtu from his home in Hamburg, where preparations are underway for his collaboration with Sid Sriram at the upcoming edition of Citi NCPA Aadi Anant, a series exploring the guru-shishya tradition and what happens when the boundaries within music begin to blur.
Gurtu shares what his family got right about teaching. The love for music was developed through pleasure. Discipline played a minor role. Play well, get the fruit. The body learns quickly that which brings reward. “My mother never shouted. If I played really well, sometimes I would even get 100 rupees.”
Outside his window, the light is losing its grip. The birds have gone quiet for the winter. Gurtu has been in Germany for decades. He looks at his hands, then up again. “You know, I was often called a ghati.” He asks me if I know what it means and then proceeds to explain the Marathi word. A slur for those who didn’t speak the right English, who weren’t fair-skinned, or didn’t live on Pedder Road or Altamont or Nepeansea Road. Colonial inheritance was still heavy in the Bombay of the 1960s and ’70s. Gurtu’s solution was to play for Parsi weddings to afford to play at all. He hired drums, hauled them across the city. And when he started blending Hindustani classical with electronics, the complaints came immediately. “You’re destroying our music, our culture,” the critics, including his brother, complained. “Every time someone tries something new, they frown.” By the mid-1970s, Gurtu had moved out of India.
It was his mother—for whom playing well still mattered above all else—who sang in his first rock group in 1984. The idea of Shobha Gurtu singing with electric guitars seemed radical but also somehow obscene to the guardians of classical purity. In this collision of styles, however, Gurtu heard possibility instead of pollution. Over the years, he went on to win the DownBeat’s Critics poll several times. “But nobody gave a damn about me in India,” he adds, with a smile that should, but doesn’t feel too bitter. There is a kind of worn, quiet, zen quality about him. “Whoever I can learn from is my guru. Why just humans, even the birds are my gurus. You can learn just by sitting quietly, listening to them. That’s what percussion is; you take [rhythm] from everywhere: nature, even the airport. Music and possibility is everywhere,” he says.
Gurtu refuses the title of guru. “I just guide my students. I have four or five of them.” Of course, he shouts at them if they mess up. He teaches them music, yes, but also to cook, to learn, to have fun. “They are like my friends,” he adds. When he teaches, he talks more about spirituality than music. “If you get that right, the music will fall in place. We all talk about music, but nobody talks about where it is coming from.” Gurtu’s world is monastic yet mischievous, one where the universe will agree to be your teacher if you stay attentive. This adhyatmik orientation and the insistence on locating the source rather than polishing the surface run counter to the endless-competition machine that now defines much of classical music training. “Musicians,” he says, “are lucky. They get very close to the state of meditation. They are blessed. My guru told me that godliness comes very quickly to musicians.” The question then is how do you use this power? Do you use music to reach towards the ineffable, or do you use it to accumulate credentials, concerts, and align with gharanas?
At Aadi Anant this year, Gurtu will seek answers to these with musician Sid Sriram. A meeting of two different musical geographies; Gurtu’s long journey through Hindustani, Sriram’s through Carnatic. But also of two men who learned first from their mothers. Sriram, too, was three when he started. “Learning from my mother was a process of falling in love with sound,” he says, and the phrase lands with particular weight when you consider what it means to fall in love with sound in a place where nothing in the ambient landscape confirms it. Carnatic music, learned in California, where you had to conjure India in the living room, maintain it through repetition, through an act of faith that what you were learning mattered even though the world around you didn’t speak its language. “Beyond just being a traditional learning environment,” Sriram continues, it was about “building the frameworks and tools by way of Carnatic music, to be able to react to sound from an intuitive place.”
For Sriram, the guru-shishya tradition means immersion. “My relationship with learning music has always been this.” He has been a long-time admirer of Gurtu’s work, especially “his fiercely unique perspective on bringing together different musical worlds.” Sriram talks about what struck him when they began conversations over Zoom about building the show, selecting songs, assigning parts. “There has been an openness and curiosity in the conversations we’ve been having. Being onstage will be all about this openness.”
When asked about Aadi Anant’s theme, boundaries and beyond, Sriram doesn’t speak in abstractions. “My whole career and relationship with music have been filled with endless experiments and exercises in crossing boundaries, refining my ability to be as intentional as possible with the experiments while also being open to any potential outcome.”
Could collaborations like this, between generations, geographies, traditions, be the modern expression of the guru-shishya idea itself? A passing on that happens not vertically but laterally, through dialogue rather than hierarchy? “I certainly believe collaborations like these open up new dimensions of artistic, sonic and cultural possibilities,” Sriram responds. “What’s been so beautiful about the conversations for this show is that everyone involved wants to try ideas and build something meaningful. It’s been an exchange of perspective and culture.”
“I can’t wait for the show,” he adds. And you can hear in his excitement what Gurtu described earlier: the love for playing, for the act itself, for the sense of the unknown when two people create something together in real time. The spontaneity and alchemy of it all.
In between flights from New York to Dallas, Swaminathan Selvaganesh finds pockets of time to tell me about his first music lessons. He does not like to think of them as lessons, though, as much as afternoons of watching. He was no more than a toddler when his grandfather, the legendary T. H. ‘Vikku’ Vinayakram, began taking him to their percussion school, Sri Jaya Ganesh Tala Vadya Vidyalaya in Chennai. There, among rows of students bent over mridangams, he sat cross-legged on the cool floor, the scent of sandalwood paste and talcum powder lingering in the air. “I think that’s how it began,” he says. “Just sitting there, hearing him teach.”
In a household steeped in rhythm, learning was not confined to the classroom. The guru was also a grandfather, the shishya also a favourite grandchild. When asked if that duality made learning easier or more complicated, Swaminathan pauses for a second. “Both,” he answers. “In class, he was strict. I even got a few beatings. But once the class was over, he was my thatha again. He would feed me sweets, laugh, ask what cartoons I was watching. That’s how he taught me that discipline and love aren’t opposites, they’re part of the same rhythm.”
For years, his training unfolded in public. First as an accompanist, then as a performer. “Thatha would suddenly ask me to play in a concert,” Swaminathan recalls. “No warning. I’d be terrified. But that’s when I learned the most.” Onstage, the embarrassment of having missed a cue or faltering at the tempo was an instrument of learning too. “He used to say that what we learn onstage never leaves us. And he was right.”
In the Vinayakram household, teaching has always been an act of continuity. Just as Vikku ji once nudged his son, V. Selvaganesh, and grandson into rhythm, his great-granddaughter now sits before him, tiny fingers tracing the air as she recites konnakol syllables. Tathva Vedaraman, all of seven, is already imbibing the family’s distinct percussion language. “We don’t make her sit with instruments for long,” Swaminathan explains. “It’s more about keeping it joyful; singing, dancing, counting beats as she walks. That’s how the body learns before the mind does.”
Last year, Tathva joined three generations before her at a concert in Mumbai. “It was Guru Poornima,” Swaminathan recalls. “We called it our 4G performance.” There’s pride in his words, and a trace of awe. To him, the concert feels more like a conversation stretched across time between a grandfather who once performed with John McLaughlin, Zakir Hussain and Shankar Mahadevan, a son who redefined fusion, a grandson finding his voice and a child just beginning to tap her foot in time.
At this year’s Aadi Anant festival, the family, including Vinayakram’s younger son V. Umashankar and his nephew N. Rajaraman, will perform works without melody, a concert of pure percussion. “It was my grandfather’s idea,” Swaminathan says. “He composed shlokas in Tamil and Sanskrit and set them to odd time cycles—seven and a half beats, nine and a half. To many listeners, it sounds almost like rap, but it’s all rhythm.”
The absence of melodic instruments, he explains, exhorts the ear to find music within percussion itself; the low hum of the mridangam, the crisp chatter of the kanjira, the answering roll of the ghatam. “When we perform these compositions, we are not trying to show off technique,” he says. “We want to make people feel the rhythm, not just count it.” In rehearsal, the family moves between precision and play. Although Vinayakram will not be playing at the concert, he decides the tala. Selvaganesh structures the arrangement, and everyone contributes ideas, even the younger ones. “When we’re making music, the hierarchy disappears,” Swaminathan adds. “They never make me feel like I’m the student. I’m an artiste among artistes.” That egalitarianism, he believes, is what makes their performances tick.
“For a long time, the rhythm player was only supposed to follow,” he says. “But now percussion has its own stories to tell.” His grandfather, Swaminathan reminds me, was among the first to imagine tala vadya as the centrepiece, composing intricate rhythmic songs that could stand alone and express emotion without melody. “He showed that rhythm isn’t just technical. It can be tender, funny, devotional, even romantic.” Perhaps that’s why, even after decades of performing on stages around the world, from Chennai to Copenhagen, Swaminathan still sees each concert as an offering. “Every time we play,” he says, “I think of it as a small thank-you to our gurus, to the people before us and to rhythm itself.” It sounds simple, almost de rigueur, but somewhere in it is the heart of the guru-shishya tradition; the endless relay between those who teach, those who listen, and those learning how.
This article was originally published in the December 2025 issue of ON Stage.
