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Sep 13, 1999 |
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 Beat' em Pal would be grateful for the empathy. In a decidedly patriarchal profession, it has taken her years to break out of the "novelty factor". She was eight when she started learning the tabla. At 13, after a concert, she mustered up enough courage to ask Zakir Husain to accept her as his student. Her performance at a concert four years later earned her the name "Zakira". At one time, when the teenaged Pal would enter the stage with her tablas, the inevitable murmurs would begin. Today the Mumbai-based musician has her own all-woman percussion ensemble, Stree Shakti, and is looking forward to the release of her first film score -- a mix of various percussion instruments accentuated by rhythmic chanting. "I don't want to be a novelty," she says. "I have to be as good (as the men) or not at all." Which, of course, is as it should be.
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When M.F.
Hussain gave Anuradha Pal a brief for Gajagamini, he took the word literally.
"You understand me and what I want," he said, and with that one sentence
commissioned the 28-year-old tabla player to do the background score for his cinematic
opus. As he awaits the film's October release, Hussain now says: "Anuradha is a
phenomenon in her own right. She has proved herself in a very male-dominated arena."