From Ali Akbar Khan’s pioneering U.S. concerts in the 1950s and Ravi Shankar’s rise in the counterculture era to Zakir Hussain’s global collaborations and Falu’s Grammy wins, Indian classical music continues to inspire new generations of artists and audiences. Even though the tradition is being reimagined through fusion and the possibilities of the digital age, the genre remains firmly rooted in the ancient and universal language of sur and taal.
At the 64th Grammy Awards in 2022, Falguni Shah — known to audiences as Falu — became the first Indian-origin artist to win a Grammy. An American singer whose music blends ancient classical Indian melodies with contemporary western sounds, Falu’s Grammy-winning album, A Colorful World, is a good indication of a remarkable musical possibility: that ragas and alaps can mix and merge with jazz and waltz.
From Ravi Shankar at Woodstock to Falu’s Grammy triumph, Indian classical music in America has evolved over seven decades into a vibrant, ongoing dialogue between tradition and reinvention. The success of ragas such as Bilawal and Khamaj with global audiences affirms that Indian music has not merely survived its journey westward — it has thrived.
How it All Began: Ali Akbar Khan, Woodstock, and the Raga Revolution
The earliest known major Indian classical music concert in America was a sarod performance by the legendary Ali Akbar Khan at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1955.
Celebrated violinist Yehudi Menuhin had invited sitarist Pandit Ravi Shankar to perform, but Shankar declined and recommended his brother-in-law instead. After his performance at MoMA, Menuhin described Khan as “the greatest musician in the world.” The praise proved prophetic. Khan became the first Indian musician to record a raga LP, the first to perform on American television, and the first to establish an Indian classical music school in the United States — the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music in Berkeley, California (which is still thriving today).
A year later, Ravi Shankar toured the country as a soloist. Western audiences were enraptured, many likening his ragas to jazz — an intuition that would prove farsighted. Together, the two men laid the foundation of an Indian classical movement in America.
In 1967, George Harrison of the Beatles invited Shankar to perform at the Monterey Pop Festival. Two years earlier, Harrison had used the sitar on the Beatles track, “Norwegian Wood,” the first appearance of the instrument on a Western pop record, giving rise to the “raga rock” genre and inspiring the Rolling Stones and many others. By 1969, Ustad Alla Rakha was performing alongside Shankar at Woodstock, his tabla playing captivating Western musicians. His legacy was carried forward by his son, tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain.
Hussain made his American debut in 1970, at age 19, at the Fillmore East in New York City. He would go on to work with Mickey Hart, Van Morrison, and George Harrison, and co-found Shakti, the first Indian jazz fusion band, with guitarist John McLaughlin. A four-time Grammy winner, Hussain became perhaps the single most consequential figure in bringing Indian classical music to Western ears — not by diluting tradition, but by expanding it. He died in December 2024, and his absence is already felt as a seismic shift in the world of Indian classical music.
A Family Tradition
What made the classical movement in America endure across decades was less an institution than a sensibility — that of a large, intergenerational musical family. Older musicians took younger ones under their wings, trained them, and introduced them to audiences built over years of relationship. Chicago-based guitarist Fareed Haque, who recorded with virtuosos of the Jazz world, Joe Henderson and Dave Holland, and toured with British sensation, Sting, speaks to the particular genius of Hussain in fostering this spirit. “During my first meeting with him, I was nervous about playing my version of South Asian music in front of him, as it had elements of jazz and classical guitar. But Ustad couldn’t be less concerned about conventions. He told me to just play. It was this genius to reach outside the conventions that made him the legend that he was.” Sabir Khan, a ninth-generation sarangi master and son of Padma Bhushan Ustad Sultan Khan, offers a vivid illustration of how this family culture operated in practice. In 2005, at age 18, Khan accompanied his father on the “Master of Percussion” tour as a caretaker — not a performer. “Zakir chacha,” as he called Hussain, had other ideas. He insisted the young Khan be given a slot, and Sabir performed the Rajasthani folk piece Panihari as the finale.
The mentorship continued offstage as well. “One day, he invited all the musicians to his home for dinner. He himself cooked biryani and asked me to perform in front of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. I performed a sarangi solo for two hours. This was his way of soft-launching me into his world.” Khan has toured alongside Hussain for more than two decades since. He is spending the summer of 2026 on a solo sarangi concert tour of the United States. “It is the first time I am here without Zakir Chacha,” he says, “and it is cathartic for me.”
The Digital Generation: Indian Raga
Indian classical music has always faced a structural challenge in finding younger audiences — more acute still for Indian Americans, for whom the music is a cultural inheritance but not always a lived practice. In 2013, MIT students Sriram Emani and Anasuya Mandal designed a solution. IndianRaga used technology to overcome the art form’s two main barriers: the length of traditional performances and the geographic distance between student and teacher. It produced short music videos for online distribution, offered instruction via video conferencing, and launched an annual fellowship competition drawing young performers to New York for master classes and collaborative recording sessions. By 2014, the competition drew more than 250 entries; alumni went on to win at Carnatic Music Idol and Cleveland Aradhana, and were invited to lecture at Juilliard and Berklee.
A decade later, the experiment has become something far larger. IndianRaga has accumulated more than 500 million video views and over one million subscribers. Its milestones include creating the world’s most-watched Bharatanatyam video, and a rendition of Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” that Indian government and cultural organizations use to showcase cultural exchange for visiting dignitaries. IndianRaga artists have performed at Lincoln Center, the World Government Summit, and the United Nations General Assembly’s International Day of Yoga celebrations. Its latest initiative, Raga Jam, is an entirely online collaboration series connecting musicians and dancers worldwide to create original work remotely. “The question in 2015 was whether Indian classical arts could find a place in the digital world,” Emani says. “A decade later, we’ve seen that they can thrive there, reach global audiences at scale, and inspire entirely new forms of artistic collaboration.”
Popularity, Bollywood, and the Real Crossover
The broader American public took notice of Indian classical music only in the 1990s and early 2000s, with the simultaneous rise of yoga culture, world music, and Bollywood’s growing diaspora footprint. The conventional assumption is that Bollywood’s accessible pop gave Indian music its Western breakthrough. Falu pushes back. “While Bollywood music is wonderful, the audience at a typical Bollywood concert in the West would comprise desis. But at a classical concert, the audience is almost totally Western. So the real crossover has happened with classical music.”
Pranita Nayar, director of Mandala South Asian Performing Arts Academy in Chicago, traces the classical tradition’s intimacy to its origins. “Classical music was presented in baithaks or kaccheris — it was meant for a niche, smaller audience and could go on for an extended time. It was always meant to be savored, not consumed.” Writer-musician Amit Chaudhuri, in his book Finding the Raga, frames the challenge with characteristic precision: Indian classical music, he writes, is as incomprehensible to most Indians as it was to the English. The medium demands cultivated patience. The idea is immersion, not consumption.
During the 2000s, composer A.R. Rahman extended that crossover further, blending Carnatic ragas, Sufi traditions, and electronics — from the Broadway adaptation of Bombay Dreams to the Oscar-winning score for Slumdog Millionaire — making Indian classical influences feel cosmopolitan and accessible without diluting their depth.
The implications are that while Indian classical music, like all classical, remains a pursuit of afficionados, it is, at the same time, continuing to innovate, and in doing so, is reaching ever more fans, Indian and global.
A Language Beyond Words
In April 2026, a concert titled Surrender at Carnegie Hall sold out weeks in advance. Falu Shah performed with a band drawing on instruments from sarangi and tanpura to harmonium and accordion — integration born of shared musical depth, not novelty.
Such music rising from a shared heritage is richly evident in New York-based tabla player Avirodh Sharma, whose 2022 album, Crossing Continents, blending Caribbean, electronic, and classical Indian influences, featured collaborations with Grammy winners Selvaganesh and Vikku Vinayakram. His work was named to the Top 100 list for Best World Music Albums at the 57th Grammy Awards. His digitally native record label, Globalstan Records, he says, grew out of his own life as a bridge between the music of the West Indies, India, and the world.
Sharma describes what classical music provides that popular music cannot. “Classical music has survived because it has not lost its essence. It creates a bridge between the listener and the performer, without any words. The theory of the tabla is built on mathematical cycles — 16-beat cycles like teen taal. Many listeners come specifically for this rhythmic structure.”
That bridge crosses unexpected distances. Pranita Nayar recalls that Shakira attended one of her Chicago performances in 2006, came backstage to learn more about Indian classical music and dance, and invited Nayar to choreograph her MTV Video Music Awards performance incorporating South Asian dance forms. The collaboration began not with words but with shared aesthetic recognition. “Very often,” Sabir Khan adds, “Western audiences come to me crying after my performance. They say the music moved them, even though no words were spoken.”
Sharma finds the connections running in unexpected directions as well. “When I saw Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl earlier this year, the backdrop of sugarcane fields stirred strong personal memories — 200 years ago, my ancestors arrived in the West Indies from India as plantation workers for the colonizers.” Art, at its best, collapses distance.
The Next Generation: Heirs and Innovators
No discussion of the second generation of Indian classical music in the West would be complete without Anoushka Shankar. She studied the sitar from age nine under her father, Pandit Ravi Shankar, and gave her first public performance at thirteen. In 2025 she marked thirty years of global touring, backed by eleven Grammy nominations — making her the first Indian musician to perform live at the Grammy Awards and the first Indian woman ever nominated. Her music has moved through flamen- co, jazz, neo-classical, and electronic forms without ever relinquishing its classical center. A recent trilogy of mini-albums — Chapter I: Forever, For Now; Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn; Chapter III: We Return to Light — represents her most ambitious creative statement yet, an arc from transient joy through darkness and into regeneration. In March 2025, she performed the trilogy at the University of Georgia’s Hodgson Concert Hall in Athens — a reminder that the conversation between Indian classical music and American audiences extends well beyond the coasts.
Niladri Kumar, a fifth-generation sitarist trained by his father Kartick Kumar — himself a disciple of Ravi Shankar — has pursued a parallel but distinct path. He invented the zitar, a five-string electric sitar that holds its own in fusion and rock contexts while preserving the instrument’s tonal essence. He has collaborated with Zakir Hussain and John McLaughlin and performed globally, most recently at Lollapalooza India in 2025. The zitar may be the most literal embodiment of what this generation has accomplished: building a new instrument from an ancient one, without discarding either.
Los Angeles-born Malvika, a third-generation Bharatanatyam dancer, who is also a multidisciplinary artist creating cinematic pop music rooted in identity, recently released an EP music album titled “Online/IRL”, that blends contemporary pop, hip-hop, and R&B with traditional Indian classical instrumentation. “Those ragas and rhythms shaped my emotions,” she says of her classical training, which ran alongside a childhood immersed in Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga.
“When I began creating music, I didn’t add Indian elements for commercial success or media interest — they were already part of my vocabulary. It wasn’t fusion for novelty. It was integration.” For each song, she shared a reference Bharatanatyam piece with her collaborators to set the emotional tone. “If younger listeners discover classical nuances through my work, that’s beautiful. But my goal isn’t just preservation. It’s reinterpretation through lived experience.”
The Tradition, Continuing
The story of Indian classical music in America is not a narrative of nostalgia preserved under glass. It is a living tradition — one that has flourished by engaging, rather than retreating from, the world around it. From Ali Akbar Khan’s reluctant transatlantic crossing to Malvika’s cinematic pop, from Hussain’s Fillmore East debut to Indian Raga’s half-billion views, the music has kept faith with its own depths while refusing to be confined by them. The ragas endure not despite their encounter with America but, in some important sense, because of it. The dialogue between sur and taal and the land of rhythm and blues has been, from the start, a conversation between equals.
Zofeen Maqsood is a U.S.-based journalist who writes extensively