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The Parisian impresario from Bombay
Updated On: 03 April, 2022 08:37 AM IST | Mumbai | Jane Borges
Meet the one-woman army who became the force behind some of Indian classical arts’ heavyweights who performed in Europe in the 1980s and ’90s
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Shireen Isal. Pic/Bipin Kokate
In the Bombay Parsi home that London-based writer and former impresario Shireen Isal grew up in, it was Western music that prevailed. She was brought up on, and extensively studied, the piano. The Indian classical arts never really figured in conversations at home or even otherwise, she tells us, when we meet at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club on a weekday morning during her visit here. It comes as a surprise that Isal, in her later years, would go on to manage nearly 50 Indian classical artistes and their accompanists, spearheading almost 600 events in 16 European countries for them. She admits that nothing in her early years prepared her for it. But, her home city was where the groundwork for this began. While working at the Alliance Française de Bombay in the early 1970s, a chance encounter with Padma Shri, dance historian and critic Sunil Kothari, led her to discover other Indian classical arts. “For the next year-and-a-half or two, I went to every conceivable performance possible [in the city], and listened and watched, speaking to people in the field,” she recalls. By the time, she got married and moved to Paris, she realised that there’s “no other field I wanted to work in”.
In her new book, Joy, Awe and Tears: My Association with Sargam, available on parsiana.com, Isal goes down memory lane to when she started her own artiste management organisation, Sargam, which became the nerve centre for several leading Indian classical artistes, who wanted a platform in Europe. While working briefly as cultural assistant at the Indian Embassy in the French capital, she got the opportunity to liaise with French organisers and artistes involved with Indian culture. “Once, the cultural councillor asked me, on a very short notice, to organise a performance for Swapnasundari [leading exponent of Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam]. The show was a great success, and I remember, as we were returning to the hotel [where she was put up], I happened to tell her that I was planning on leaving [my job] as I was finding it very difficult to look after my baby. I asked her if she thought I could do this organisational work [on my own]. She said, ‘Not only will you be able to do this, I’ll also be the first artiste [you manage] next year’. She stuck to her word when I began in October 1979.” As an impresario, Isal says she represented Indian classical artistes—“I didn’t organise the events,” she clarifies. “I went through organisers [who wanted to do these shows, and call these artistes],” she says. It wasn’t a financially viable enterprise. “Artistes would give me 15 per cent of their earnings from their shows, which I ploughed back into my organisation, and that helped me cover my costs. It wasn’t easy, especially since I was doing this entirely on my own.”
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