I was once very taken aback when I heard someone commenting that violin should not be counted as an Indian instrument because it is something from the West. I wonder how many people actually think the same way, and do they realise that in Carnatic music, the violin - adapted by Muthuswamy Dikshitar's brother Baluswamy two centuries ago - is tuned differently and played vertically rather than horizontally like the western violin. It is supported between the musician's ankle and shoulder blade instead of held with a shoulder rest at the musician's neck, so as to free the hand for sliding movements, to add 'gamaka' to the notes. One who rejects the Indian violin as part of our musical heritage is either a foolhardy cultural fundamentalist or someone trying hard to please a western tourist's curiosity for an 'untouched' world of 'exotic' Indian culture. Do you know that one of the musical instruments used in Chinese music is actually a kind of santoor? It has been in use in China for a few hundred years, got there somehow from Persia and was renamed as yangqing, and nobody now would ever think of it as a foreign instrument. And do you know that much of the drums and percussion in western orchestra and so-called western jazz and rock music today actually originated from Turkish military bands? The bass drum, cymbals, triangle, kettle drums. Even today Zildjian (a name from Turkey) remains a famous brand for cymbals.

The way to protect a heritage is not to imagine how things were like 1,000 years ago and deny whatever happened after that. Dr L. Subramaniam not only knows Carnatic music but also has a master's degree in western classical music. Ravi Shankar would not have become so famous if he never collaborated with western musicians. This is not to say that you have to give everything a disco beat or a western orchestration just so you can call it a contemporary work. But to say that we should only do things as what our gurus taught us is to fall into a trap that the western perception has set up for us: you must either be 'purely' traditional, or the minute you touch fast food you are getting westernised, there is no middle way, whereas a Westerner can eat Indian food today and have Chinese takeaway tomorrow and still remain a Westerner. By all means, let those musicians who want to experiment just do it, as long as they don't forget how to do a traditional concert. Time will tell if those experiments prove memorable. Ravi Shankar has written a couple of sitar concertos based on the western orchestra, using not just a different raga for a different movement but also several ragas within the same movement. That is something interesting that deserves a page in history, although the symphonic format is not something that will be popular among Indian listeners in the foreseeable future. In a western symphony or concerto, the habit is to sandwich a slow movement of adagio or whatever between fast movements of allegro and so on. In Indian music, however, one simply goes from very slow to very fast, from alap to jhala in Hindustani music, or ragam-tanam-pallavi in Carnatic music. It is a habit just like a fixed sequence in one's meal from rasam, sambar, moru to paisam. You can eat with fork and spoon if you like, but basic things like one's taste, that doesn't change.