Mother India

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Durga Jasraj is, well, Mother India.

It sometimes seems that her classic face – carved from the genes of two of India’s most prominent artistic families – is everywhere. In a modern society in an ancient land, where half the population of 1.1 billion is younger than 25, that face captures the ethos and ambitions of the world’s fourth-biggest economy, one into which Americans are pouring unprecedented investment.

It is also a face that invites attention to the fact that, notwithstanding the rapid economic development and consolidation of democracy that have lately seized the imagination of Americans, Indian society – perhaps far more than most cultures – is rooted in traditions of classicism.

Although Ms. Jasraj’s emphasis is on the arts, one is left with the impression that she believes that in order for the international community to better understand India (and thus do more business with it), it must understand those classical roots.

“I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve embarked on some kind of global campaign on behalf of India,” she said. “I stay close to classical music. But classicism does offer insights into what India is, and where it may go.”

Ms. Jasraj’s face is on television; on albums of Indian classical music, a millenniums-old genre that she’s made trendier; in films produced in a nation that turns out more features than any other country, and in the boardrooms of international corporations she’s persuaded to support her enterprises, which cannily meld an artistic sensibility and business acumen. She is founder of Art and Artistes India, which produces television programs, albums, and events.

“These days everything is about globalization,” Ms. Jasraj said. “So you have to present your own traditions in a manner that’s contemporary and relevant. For today’s young people, it’s difficult to connect to their own culture and music. They’re lured by other options.”

Those options include popular music and movies – to which Ms. Jasraj has contributed as one of the most prominent figures in the Indian entertainment industry. She said it was by joining the commercial industry that she was able to accumulate enough influence to obtain support for her efforts to reinforce and promote the languishing classical tradition.

“It has been a fight for me to get classical music into the mainstream,” Ms. Jasraj said. “Television and radio were ignoring this music, as they were ignoring folk music. It was all pop music, all the time. I realized that no one was likely to give me sponsorship for a 30-minute weekly program about classical music on TV unless I had my own celebrity. So I decided to become famous by getting into popular TV.”

Her entry into broadcasting was facilitated by Zee TV, a network affiliated at the time with Rupert Murdoch. The network’s subscribers included more than 225 million people of South Asian origin in 84 countries, including America.

The game show that Ms. Jasraj hosted was an instant hit. Overnight, she became a superstar, receiving the sort of adoration from fans that in most developing countries is reserved for soccer and cricket players and, of course, movie actors.

Movie roles followed. So did prominent assignments for ad campaigns. Ms. Jasraj became a sought-after figure as master of ceremonies of awards shows.

With that kind of exposure came privileged access to corporate sponsors. An international bank invited Ms. Jasraj to produce a diary and calendar illustrating the lives and work of six contemporary maestros of Indian classical music. The government run national broadcasting network Doordarshan asked her to film events focusing on the country’s two classical music genres, from North India and South India. In those programs, Ms. Jasraj points out that Indian classical music is one of the world’s oldest and richest musical traditions.

Ms. Jasraj, in cooperation with leading figures from the Indian music world and her partner Vikram Shankar, has launched the Indian Music Academy to sustain the momentum that resulted from her television productions and concerts.

These productions include “Tiranga,” a paean to the tri-colored Indian flag; “Panchatatva,” a visually eclectic recitation by several maestros, and “Golden Voice, Golden Years,” a multimedia celebration of what Ms. Jasraj calls “musicography.”

Most of these performers rarely enjoy the financial security in old age that India sometimes accords to its maestros.

Ms. Jasraj knows a thing or two about this. Her father, Pandit Jasraj, is the country’s leading exponent of North Indian classical music. He hails from a distinguished lineage of the Mewati Gharana – or family – and his father, Pandit Motiram, and older brother Pandit Maniram, were both famous figures in classical music.

Indeed, there’s a music auditorium named in her father’s honor in the Long Island community of Hempstead. The University of Toronto has established a music fellowship in his name.

Ms. Jasraj also has distinguished lineage from her mother, Madhura, whose father, V. Shantaram, was a prominent film producer and director. (He gave his granddaughter a role in one of his films when she was barely 5.)

“So I represent a synthesis: singing from my father’s side, acting from my mother’s side,” Ms. Jasraj said.

To her credit, she has been guarded about coasting on her extraordinary legacy. There is general agreement that Ms. Jasraj’s success has been her own.

“I happened to be at the right place and at the right time,” Ms. Jasraj said, with obvious modesty.

Her daughter, Avni, is now coming into her own. She’s a rising star in the designing world, and has her own popular brand.

That three generations of the Jasraj family have such a public presence at a remarkable time in India’s history suggests, of course, the dynamics of dynasty. The Nehrus and the Gandhis have been India’s best-known dynasties in the post-independence years since the British left 59 years ago. But they were practitioners of politics.

Ms. Jasraj taps into an even older tradition, that of the arts. And that makes her both a classicist and a contemporary icon.

What else to call her but Mother India? She represents continuity.


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