Indian classical musician and educator honored with NC Heritage Award

Earlier this month, six people were presented the North Carolina Heritage Award, the state’s highest recognition for folk and traditional artists. This year’s honorees include a woodcarver, a gospel quartet, a guitarist, and two Lumbee traditional artisans. Representing the Triad is Winston-Salem’s Gaurang Doshi, a North Indian classical musician and educator. 

The Heritage Award comes from the North Carolina Arts Council and the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. To be considered for the award, it’s nomination-only, with a lead sponsor and a chorus of supportive letters from community members. 

The judges look for well-established artists with a lifetime of dedication to their craft or tradition. Authenticity, overall excellence, and passing along their knowledge to a new generation are all major considerations. In addition to a certificate and recognition from the state, each awardee receives a $10,000 grant.

The Martin Marietta Center lobby was buzzing with anticipation for the awards presentation, the result of a full year’s work by organizers: documenting each artist’s contributions, collecting oral histories, and creating short profile films that are screened during the ceremony. Following each screening, the artist takes the stage for demonstrations, Q & As, and performances.

Gaurang Doshi performed a late morning raga — a traditional collection of notes, like a musical scale that sets the mood for a piece of Indian classical music — on his instrument, the sarod. It's a large 25-stringed instrument similar to the sitar, but shorter, with a shiny metal neck and no frets. The lack of frets plus the high tension of its strings make the sarod extremely challenging to play. 

Mastering the instrument has been a lifelong endeavor for Doshi. But North Carolina Arts Council Folklife Director Zoe van Buren says his commitment goes far beyond musical technique.

"Indian classical music is so rich and complex and layered and endless in how deeply you can explore its possibilities that for him, that's what it is," says van Buren. "It's really both a creative act but also a spiritual experience."

Van Buren says Doshi feels the responsibility of holding a tradition.

"Everything about him, just to me, embodies why traditional arts are really a distinct thing from many other creative practices," she says. "You know, that sense of being part of a lineage, of having a responsibility to your teachers, to not only carry on the tradition in the right way, but to pass it on to another generation, a real sense that traditional art is to be shared and taught and spread and handled with a lot of care. I mean, he just completely lives that mindset."

Gaurang Doshi’s daughter, Anusha, is a part of this lineage. During the awards ceremony, she performed a call and response with her father on stage. She began studying sitar with her grandfather, Guru Pandit Laxmikant Doshi, and, after his death in 2013, continued learning from her father.

She calls her dad one of the most disciplined human beings she's ever met.

"His discipline comes from his music," she says. "The thal, and learning to compose music and staying kind of within a rhythm, and taking liberties amongst that, but staying kind of bound by the beat itself. You know him, having grown up in a home with music, spending so much of his life learning and teaching and all of that, it's woven into the fabric of who he is. And it's very much present when he teaches as well. And I think it's what makes him such an excellent guru, and it's what makes his students respect the art and respect the need to also then pass it on."

Passing it on is a big part of why University of North Carolina at Greensboro ethnomusicologist Gavin Douglas nominated Gaurang Doshi for the Heritage Award. He says Doshi has been instrumental in helping him diversify his department’s offerings and provide new ways of thinking about non-Western music, tradition and community.

"What the students, I think, get out of working with Gaurang is obviously some skills on the sitar or the sarod or the tabla or whatnot, and some insights into how the music is put together," he says. "But also, you know, pretty quickly, the students are learning about, you know, how the guru-shisha relationship between a teacher and a student actually operates. And pretty soon they realize that they're invited to his home for dinner and eating Indian food, and meeting the rest of the Indian community, and going to all of these events that are where the music is embedded in the first place."

Jim Richardson drove from his home in Virginia to attend the ceremony and show his support. He has studied the sarod with Gaurang Doshi for roughly a dozen years, and says he treats all of his students, himself included, like family.

Richardson plays several stringed instruments, and he says the sarod is by far the most challenging, but not in the hands of his guru.

"I always marvel at his technical ability, but the heart that goes into it as well," says Richardson. "He is not just playing notes which he has memorized over time. He is playing, you know, a raga has a time of day, it has an emotion. It has a feeling to it, and his job is to bring out those feelings and those emotions so that the rest of us can also feel them. And I'm always amazed at how well he does that."

Doshi says he grew up in India with music all around him. He jokes that he sometimes wonders if he chose to play the sarod or the sarod chose him. But he does know where his attraction to music began. 

"My father was my inspiration, and what music meant to him," says Doshi. "Also in our traditions, and for me and my guru, it is a mark to moksha, which is coming out of unending cycles of births and rebirths, as per the Hindu philosophy, that's the path to it. And the inspiration which I got from my father, it was not just for the performance part, but the passing it on part also. And he taught me till the last moment in the hospital bed, also he taught me. So that made it very special."

Doshi is a humble man who is quick to deflect attention and accolades to those around him. When asked about receiving his Heritage Award, Doshi first credits his guru, then his karana, or lineage, the other artists on stage and the event organizers. But when pressed on sharing his personal response to the honor, he eventually relents.

"Above all, it was the recognition of Indian classical music in the ever-changing musical landscape of North Carolina," he says. "It was just beyond words, you know. It means a lot to me. And it will always remain with me as one of the finest memories in my life."