The upcoming edition of NCPA Citi Nad Ninad will make available rare recordings from the centre’s archives to explore the musicality of santoor virtuoso Shivkumar Sharma, who not only modified and adapted a little-known folk music instrument but introduced it to a global audience.
By Akshaya Pillai
One evening, alone in a small apartment somewhere in Tokyo, Takahiro Arai, who spent his twenties playing improvised rock in a band he formed after school, put on a CD a friend’s tabla teacher had lent them. The strains of Shivkumar Sharma’s santoor filled the room. “As the music unfolded, I lost my footing,” says Arai. “I couldn’t grasp what was happening. I couldn’t even find the sam, despite having spent 15 years playing music. That’s when I realised I needed to study Indian classical music. I felt that through it, I might come to understand music itself on a deeper level.”
The realisation brought Arai to Mumbai in 2006 where he finally met Sharma, the man who gave the santoor its classical voice, who took a folk instrument from the valley of Kashmir and carried it, single-handedly, into the concert halls of the world. “During that trip, I had the rare chance to receive two direct lessons from him. I returned to Japan carrying as many CDs of his music as I could, which at the time were almost impossible to find there,” says Arai about his first encounter with his guru. He would spend the next several years bridging the distance between that moment and his pursuit of music. And one evening, as he listened to Sharma play Raga Rageshri in Jaitaal with Zakir Hussain, Arai decided to leave his life in his homeland and move to Mumbai to be a devoted disciple.
Sharma died in May 2022. He was 84. What he left behind, besides the instrument he reshaped and the disciples scattered across the world, are recordings. Hundreds of hours of them, on CDs and vinyl records, and even before that, in the archives of the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, where the great musicians of the 20th century are still, in some sense, playing. This month, the NCPA’s Nad Ninad series opens those doors through a guided listening session built around Sharma’s archival recordings, led by people who knew his music from the inside—Dilip Kale, one of his senior disciples and foremost santoor players.
The NCPA recordings of Sharma’s music stretch from 1971 to 2019—nearly 50 years playing witness to a man and his instrument. The santoor came from Kashmir and was built for devotional singing, not the demands of Hindustani classical music. It couldn’t bend a note or produce the meend, the slow glide between pitches where so much of the feeling of music lives. When Sharma first brought it to a national concert in Mumbai in 1955, he was 17. The criticism was swift and, by most accounts, correct. He spent the next several decades proving it otherwise.
By the time he was invited in 1971 to the newly established NCPA to record for its archival project launched only a few months ago, Sharma had done something remarkable. Four years earlier, he had walked into a Mumbai studio one night with flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia and guitarist Brij Bhushan Kabra, all three of them around 30, and recorded Call of the Valley, a suite that followed a day in the life of a Kashmiri shepherd from dawn to dusk, using ragas the way a novelist uses chapters. George Harrison hailed it, so did Bob Dylan, David Crosby and Paul McCartney. It became the bestselling Indian music record in the world.
Sharma won the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1986, the Padma Shri in 1991 and in the intervening years, he scored the film Chandni with Chaurasia, which gave a generation its idea of romance. The Padma Vibhushan came in 2001 and in 2002, he published his autobiography, Journey with a Hundred Strings: My Life in Music. He was still performing at 80.
Through Nad Ninad, you can watch a mind at work, across five decades; the long arc of a musical life reveal itself in real time. A bevy of legends, established and in the making, appear on the line-up credits of these recordings: Zakir Hussain and Shafaat Ahmed Khan on the tabla in two separate sessions; Bhavani Shankar on the pakhawaj. Numerous obvious appearances with Chaurasia; a quiet emergence of his son Rahul Sharma as an accompanist in a recital. And mesmeric crossover collaborations with oud and qanun players; the latter could well be called the West Asian counterpart of the santoor.
Dilip Kale heard Sharma for the first time in Aurangabad in December 1981. The concert played to a full house. Most people in that hall had never seen a santoor before, having only heard its sound drift out of radio sets and Bollywood films. Kale, already trained in the tabla and harmonium and hailing from a family of musicians, sat listening to the instrument he would soon devote his life to. He started attending every concert by Sharma he could reach. Kale would soon discover that santoors were only made in Kashmir and not easily found elsewhere, so he did what ardent students do. He modified a harp into one and taught himself on it. “When I demonstrated this experiment to Guruji, after one of his concerts in Pune, he gladly accepted me as his disciple. He shared the address of the only santoor-maker in Kashmir. I got the instrument in 1984 and my taleem began,” says Kale who has, when we speak, already spent some time sitting with the NCPA recordings in preparation for Nad Ninad. “I experienced Guruji in every note,” he says. “It made me feel that he is around, here with all of us.”
What Kale remembers most is Sharma’s absolute refusal to separate skill from soul. “‘Mere display of skill without expression is not music,’ Guruji would say,” recalls Kale. Sharma was spiritual in a particular way. He believed his concerts gave him the opportunity to witness the presence of God. Kale would know. During Covid, they spoke for hours on the phone and not just about classical music but about thematic compositions, folk music, films, what it takes to bring expression to one’s performance beyond technical ability.
Arai, who travelled with Sharma, received lessons in music as well as a sound grounding in how to listen, how to be on stage, how to communicate with a tabla player in the middle of a performance. What stayed with him most was something Sharma said about practice: record yourself, then listen back as if it were someone else playing. For those coming to Sharma’s music for the first time through the NCPA archives, Arai offers the counsel his guru would give freely. There is no need to understand music. Just feel it. “Guruji liked the analogy of a great meal: you don’t need to know the recipe to be moved by what is on the plate.”
Sharma’s style, as those who studied him closely have noted, came from an unusual confluence: melodic vocabulary expressed through the percussive instincts of a tabla player. He had studied the tabla seriously enough to accompany Ravi Shankar. He created Raga Antardhwani specifically for meditation, after listeners around the world asked him for music that could take them somewhere quieter than ordinary listening allowed. It remains one of the few ragas in the Hindustani tradition created by a single identifiable hand and almost nobody else has played it. His thematic albums—The Elements – Water; Feelings; Soundscapes – Music of the Mountains—reveal a musician constantly in search of new emotional and sonic landscapes within the classical form.
All of this, the searching and the reinvention, was something his son observed from up close since he was very young. Rahul Sharma watched his father’s students in riyaz. He received a small Casio keyboard from his father and loved fiddling with it, which is how he first engaged with music: as a way to spend time alone. The santoor came after that. Then the tabla and vocals. He began learning formally around 12 and first performed with his father in 1996. “He has laid down the language of the santoor for generations to follow,” says Rahul. “I remember when I composed Namaste India with Kenny G and it topped the US Billboard Jazz charts, or took the santoor into electronica with Deep Forest or more recently, into the world of symphony with the santoor leading a 50-piece orchestra, my father was the happiest. He told me he never imagined the journey of the santoor would continue in such diverse genres.” As a guru, he was liberal in ways that surprised people, though he himself stayed mainly in the classical realm. He knew what he had built. He trusted it to survive contact with the world.
When Rahul listens to the archival recordings now, he hears them in two distinct phases. The early ones in which a young man is establishing something, introducing the santoor to classical music, to the Hindi film industry, building the case note by note. The later ones in which the instrument, in a maestro’s hands, becomes a medium for melodic versatility. “His work is a constant source of learning,” says Rahul, who keeps going back to Sharma’s albums When Time Stood Still and Antardhwani: The Song Within. “Legacies are carried forward when torchbearers are not weighed down. A student should not be a replica of the guru. One must bring to the table new concepts and ideas,” he adds.
In the NCPA archives, a young Shivkumar Sharma’s music sits not too far from that of a seasoned virtuoso’s. A span of 50 years covered in a mere few feet. How he found ways to reinvent even after being met with applause, or what the santoor sounded like the first time he transposed the meend onto its strings after all those years of trying—the recordings don’t tell you any of this. But if you sit still listening long enough, in a room above the sea, you will meet a man who spent a lifetime with one instrument and mastered hearing new worlds inside it.
This article was originally published in the June 2026 issue of ON Stage.
