Imagine a classical concert without the bounds of rigid rules and structures, with nobody telling you to hush, or sit a certain way, or perform your understanding of the music. At Upstairs, the idea is quite simple. Open doors to lots of kinds of people: from those who are enjoyers of classical music, to those who are listening to it for the first time. The range of audiences at Upstairs flourishes to present a format of listening and performing as something more democratic, intimate and welcoming.
By opening up baithak concerts, encouraging conversation, and prioritising fair pay for artists, Upstairs is reshaping the culture of classical music today. A few weeks ago, I wanted to witness the magic of this baithak myself, and made my way to an Upstairs concert with Debasmita Bhattacharya on the sarod and Zuheb Ahmed Khan on the tabla. The way it unfolded was everything I expected: with a short conversation on everyone’s backgrounds and relationship with classical music, some chai, and lots of anticipation for the performance of the evening. Although I trained in Carnatic music for over six years, the intricacies, or as I like to call it, the rumbles and tumbles of Hindustani music was unfamiliar terrain for me. Irrespective of that lack of exposure, one of the most noteworthy and heartening aspects of Upstairs, is how many young people were in the room: both as the audience, and as members of the organising team.
As the concert began, I let myself close my eyes and let the music wash over me. For me, so much of the experience was moulded by the fact that I could see the faces of other members of the audience, observe the moments at which they ‘Aha!-ed in joy, or when the taal on their fingers danced along their knees.
We’re in conversation with Sukanya Banerjee, the heart, brain and soul behind the entire movement. We delved into making classical music more accessible to younger and newer audiences, the importance of shining much needed light on instrumentalists, and giving artists what they deserve.
Can you take me back to the beginning of Upstairs and how it started?
I come from a family of musicians. My mother, my grandmother, they're all trained classical vocalists and practitioners, meaning that they are both performers and teachers of classical music. So, baithak culture is a very ordinary part of a classical musician's life, except that these baithaks are generally reserved for people that one knows, right?
It is very common for artists to be performing at each other's homes for each other's guests, or for once in a while for them to be called to a baithak by somebody influential. Perhaps that happens to be in your circle of acquaintance, and then from there to get some exposure, which leads to career moves. Like getting a big concert or a big press interview, or something of that sort.
These are things that I have grown up seeing and I've been very familiar with. On the other hand, my husband Tejas did not listen to classical music until we started dating. So, his introduction to classical music was through me, and he would keep saying to me ‘Had I not known you as somebody who could get me an invite into these rooms, I never would have been able to have access to this culture or get to understand classical music the way that I did because I knew someone.’
And that was one of our main motivators for starting something where we were doing baithaks that were open to strangers, where strangers could walk in, where people we don't have any connections to could be exposed to them. And also, it's a way of stepping out of your own echo chamber. As classical musicians, you're meeting the same people, you're performing for the same people. It's a very insular circle. You don't invite new people in it and then you complain about how classical music doesn't have enough exposure. The only way to break that double bind is to invite people that you don't know, and invite people who don't know classical music into the fold, and let them experience it, and hopefully come back for more. These were our motivators for starting it.
When Tejas and I got married in 2017 and we had our first home, we said that ‘Okay, I mean we're not rich enough to be able to pay fairly, and call artists of our own income. But we do have a home, we have a living room that we can host in, we have a kitchen that we can cook out of. We'll do what we can and we will crowdsource the rest.’ We decided that we'll do ticketed baithaks, which was an unheard of concept at the time. And in fact, from within the circle, we got a lot of flack saying that we’re taking something that is meant to be done by benefactors, that is meant to be done gracefully and bringing business into it.
We heard a lot of that from classical musicians initially and there was a lot of reservation. But because of the audience that we have been able to bring in, and also the kind of exposure and pay that then we have been able to give the artists over time, this has eventually brought us a lot of trust from the music community as well.
How did paying and valuing artists become a core part of your project?
I think it's really, it's very self-serving, it's very convenient that this doesn't get talked about, because as long as you're not talking about it, no one knows that people aren't getting fairly paid and therefore, no one needs to get fairly paid. And I think that we're coming off of a long legacy, and I'm not talking here of decades, but rather centuries of culture where musicians were only supposed to be musicians. It was the patron's job to support them, and the musician did not have to canvas for the patron's support. It was something that the fabric of the society allowed for and made space for.
But in the post-colonial, liberalised world where patronage does not exist in the same form as it used to for classical music, as it did when we had princely states and those social hierarchies, you know, where they used to be held by used to be held by zamindars. These were things that the landed gentry did to hold their community together and these were things that were invested in.
I think that post-Independence for a very long time we tried to think of the Government as the benefactor in place of the princely states that used to exist earlier. The Government will give grants and the Government will pay, and in fact the 90s were such a vibrant cultural scene, where one was attending phenomenal classical music concerts which were being supported by the Sangeet Natak Academy, or by either directly the Government or by organisations large enough to be able to call themselves Mini-Governments of their own.
You have your BHEL and GAIL, and the railways, which are actually either public entities or entities like Tata and HCL. We heard concerts being organised by these guys very frequently, and concerts organised by the AIR, where my mother worked for 25 years. Again I saw her not just performing on stage, but at the back end, at the helm of these things, managing recordings, managing payments for artists after recordings, all those things. So I've seen the processes from the back end.
Our reality, our socio-economic reality has completely changed. Given that it has completely changed, I think it's time for us to redefine what we mean by patronage and how that comes to be paid to the artists because the language has not changed to keep up with it. Because the language is still that artists will do service, they will do the seva and they should not care about money, or success, or popularity, because that's not what decides the quality of the music. Of course, that's what the reality was in a princely state governed patronage that looked over the classical music scene.
But that is not the truth of the life of a classical musician anymore at all. I mean the more we are stepping into this late stage capitalism phase, especially post-pandemic, the more it changes. It's very easy to continue to oppress the performer by saying,’ why are you asking for money?’ And that's what happens. These conversations need to be out in the open, and we need to start talking about these things, because until we do, we will all live in our own understanding of fairness without actually examining what fair means objectively, and that subjectivity is very convenient for oppression.
How does your format reimagine classical music for new listeners?
I think there are two things here. One, that the prevalent understanding of engaging with music is that you will listen to music. But you need to also think about music, you need to also talk about music, you need to also analyse music. There's a lot to be said, and a lot to be done, beyond just listening to music over and over.
Active listening cannot come without education. And I think the reason that we think this way is because Tejas and I are both educators. We're very passionate educators, and we've both got almost a decade long career in education behind us at this point. I was teaching English at a school for eight years, and quit last year. I'm very passionate about pedagogy and teaching in general. Tejas on the other hand, has been a fitness educator. All the course material that exists for Indian trainers in the market, all of the examinations that they're giving, all of the courses that they're doing were all devised by him or taught by him.
We come from very different professional backgrounds, but we're both very passionate educators. And as educators, we saw this huge gap that if you just keep pummeling the audience with concert after concert, you're not really helping active listening happen. You're not contributing to any real discourse. If someone has not had the opportunity to think about things more deeply, then they are missing out on the most gratifying parts of classical music. The second reason is again, education. For anyone who is interested in classical music, the only kind of education that exists at the moment is orientated towards performers.
So it's like, ‘Oh, you're interested in classical music? Chalo, start learning Sa Re Ga Ma.’ It's a huge logical fallacy. That's like saying that if you want to watch the India-Pakistan cricket match, you have to first go and play cricket yourself. Only then, will you be allowed to watch the cricket match. Learning classical music from the ground up, is at least a decade long process before you reach the point of comprehension. Out of interest, if I want to listen to classical music today, and you say ‘Okay let's see you in 10 years’, it's unfair. And it's not the audience that is losing out. It's the culture that is losing out ultimately.
These were our two reasons for doing The Upstairs Immersive, that we started doing in December. We did not want to spend the majority of our time listening to performances. We wanted to spend the majority of our time decoding things, talking about things. We wanted to design a fest that was orientated towards listeners. Not towards performers.
How do you curate the artists you bring for your baithaks?
There are a few biases that I'm trying to correct through my curation. Let me begin by saying that the process of curation is a subjective process. A lot of times artists will reach out to me and say I am so and so, I have this degree, I am awarded the top grade award from All India Radio. Why wouldn't you have me? It can sometimes get quite heated, quite confrontational.
So, let me start by saying that it is subjective. And as the person who's hosting the baithak at home, or who is curating wherever I'm curating, I have the privilege of being able to curate a person whose performance I would enjoy listening to. Everybody that I have curated so far, I have curated after having heard three to four hours of their recordings, at least sometimes maybe even more, just because I had been following their work for a very long time. Even absolute strangers who reached out to me, I've asked them for recordings and I've gone through multiple hours long recordings to curate the people that I'm getting.
I would like to be able to stand by each example that I'm presenting to the audience and say look, ‘I want you to listen to this person, because I think they're culturally significant to the genre.’ Because of whatever reason, because of their creativity, because of the instrument, because of the kind of music they're making. There is a bar that I would like to set. And I would like for people to experience, especially if they're seeing classical music for the first time, I would like for the representation to be accurate and faithful.
The second thing is just that ‘I am a classical musician’ cannot be the criteria. And I think that alone is a big bias that happens. The misrepresentation that happens of classical music happens because there is no skew in favour of good quality, which there should be. There should be a skew in favour of good quality. For that to happen, the curator would have to have that level of understanding of classical music themselves, which most of the time the organisers or curators don’t have.
What are you working on right now and what’s next for Upstairs?
One, I'm working on curating more Carnatic representation. I think at the Immersive, we've been able to do more of a fair job with that, because in the last Immersive we had one day of Hindustani, one day of Carnatic. This time we couldn't make it happen but, we've already planned it such that the next fest is going to be more towards a swing in the other direction, so that we can again bring things back to an equilibrium.
Two, at Upstairs our work is very consciously focused on intimacy at scale, meaning that I would be much keener on increasing the frequency than I am on increasing the size, because there's something very potent about a room where everyone feels familiar and can speak to each other freely. It's only then that questions can happen, that new ideas can be had or you can take the intellectual risk of trying something you've never tried before.
I'm very invested in that but that also immediately makes things financially very challenging. It's very easy to throw something massive together, and then make a massive amount of money out of it as well, but it's much harder to say no to money on the table and stick to your understanding of an intimate way of doing things. For me, figuring out what is that sweet spot between financial viability and doing what we are doing is something to be figured out. Honestly, my dream this year is that by the end of the year Tejas and I should be able to draw salaries. We haven't done that in a year. This year I'd like to!
For more details on how to attend an Upstairs event, browse their website here.
Words Neeraja Srinivasan
Date 13.3.2026
Photo Credits Arnav Jindal, Sakshi Mishra