Pt Shivkumar Sharma: Maestro from Jammu took santoor to dizzying heights

Sreevalsan Thiyyadi

Two major coincidences took place in the life of Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, enabling the artiste to first enhance the status of a string instrument from folk to classical and then introduce its ethos to his country’s popular music. Thus, just into his early twenties, the wizard from Jammu got the santoor slotted in Hindustani concert circuit and soon spread its resonance across Hindi film songs as well.

Straddling classical & popular strains

Barely into his twenties, Shivkumar Sharma got the santoor slotted in Hindustani concert circuit and soon spread its resonance across Bollywood as well

Born into a heritage-rich Jammu family, Shivkumar’s early initiation into vocal and tabla classes helped the boy gain a good sense of tunes and rhythms from the age of five. The unique twin drill came in handy as an early teenager, when his father-guru Uma Dutt Sharma introduced him to the 100-string santoor. With its 25 bridges, the trapezoid-shaped instrument caught Shivkumar’s fancy with its parallel demand for virtuosity in melody and meter. He went on to improvise the santoor, and debuted at an illustrious festival in Bombay in 1955.

Serendipitously, that was the year Bollywood was sprucing up to release a dance film which starred an array of maestros. Vasant Desai, who was assigned the background scores of ‘Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje’ directed by V Shantaram, invited 22-year-old Shivkumar to chip in with his santoor. A quarter century later, in 1981, Yash Chopra-produced ‘Silsila’ saw the emergence of a tunesmith duo named Shiv-Hari, where Sharma paired with equally celebrated flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia. In fact, one and a half decades before that movie tryst, Shiv-Hari had heralded fresh notes of revolution through an experimental 1967 album titled ‘Call of the Valley’. It was nothing surprising, given Shivkumar had prodigiously re-invented the santoor bodily and spiritually. The instrument used to be played on a stand; it warranted smaller size to be kept on the performer’s lap. Along with it, a customary emphasis on drumming gave way to more of rubbing with the ‘kalam’ strikers to produce high-frequency taps. “I didn’t have a role model for any of these ideas and their implementation,” Padma Vibhushan Sharma (1938-2022) used to recall. “The santoor has no parallel anywhere in the world. The jal tarang too employs sticks, but that’s on water bowls, not metallic strings.”

Pandit Shivkumar thus gifted santoor with grainy reverberations to generate the effect of ‘meend’ (glide) that is integral to Hindustani classical. He wouldn’t take the credit. “The trigger came from god,” he would look upward. A similar self-effacing comment follows when the maestro would speak of his santoor-playing son-pupil Rahul Sharma: “He rose with his own talent and skills.”