Baluji – strings of a sitar
Minutes shy of 10:30, the last call for Eurostar Paris-London resonates through the compartments. Outside, the spring sky fills with impending rain. Coats and luggage accumulate in the narrow alleyway. Clad in a black leather jacket over his kurta, Baluji squeezes past and sits down beside me, folding a silver stick.
With a handful of Indian classical records to his name, the sitar player hailed by the Times as “a virtuoso instrumentalist” was on his way to the Gondoana Festival. This evening, he will be performing among other renowned musicians in this world beat concert held in Hackney.
Baluji is no stranger to live performances, a prodigy who made his concert debut at the age of six. But the instrument that made him famous was the sitar. Currently he is a much in demand session player who has recorded with the likes of Annie Lenox, Paul McCartney, George Michael and Boy George. He jokes, “I didn’t even know who Boy George was. I asked my wife why a child named George wanted to record with me and
she just laughed.” A far cry from his humble beginnings in the village of Usmanpur in Goa where he was blinded in his infancy, a victim of his country’s poverty. Baluji’s musical talent was nurtured at the Ajmer Blind School where he took up the sitar. He was doing a stint as a Professor of Music at a college in Agra when he was invited to teach in France by a student eager to learn the instrument. It is a tradition for the instrument to be taught using the old Indian gukurul system, when a student lives with his teacher or guru for the duration of their training. But due to a few unfortunate incidents, Baluji ended up a squatter in Paris. “I was never in any bad situations though when I have the sitar with me,” he says, reflecting on lodging offers due to his instrument.
Once a man interested in Baluji’s sitar even approached him with a job offer. “He took me to a noisy, crowded place with a really distinct smell and told me to play…it turned out to be a Metro station! I wasn’t expecting to be a beggar,” he exclaimed. His perseverance paid off when calls began coming in for gigs. It was also in France where he met his wife, a jazz singer from the UK, which saw him shift his talents across the English Channel. “I am not an adventurous man, but adventure seems to find me instead,” he says. Sixteen years later, Baluji leans back on his coach seat and smiles through his sunglasses. “We must be on English ground. Bumpy rails.”
Leave a Reply