Rishab Rikhiram Sharma
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YEAR-WISE DEVELOPMENTS
As of 2026
Mohua.Das, May 3, 2026: The Times of India
The sitar with its 20 strings has been around for five centuries. Rishab Rikhiram Sharma’s sitar has 640 LED bulbs and looks, in his words, “like a lightsaber”. He opens concerts by guiding audiences through a pranayam while digital waves and clouds swirl above him, his diamond-studded teeth catching the light because, as he sees it, “why should only rappers have all the fun?”
The 27-year-old has just wrapped up an 11city India tour with sold-out arenas where three generations sit and sway. His finale at Delhi’s DDA Ground in Dwarka last month had the sweep of an international gig, Coldplay if you will, with pyrotechnics, vast backdrops and radio-controlled LED wristbands across the audience lighting up in sync. So, has Sharma given the sitar a second wind, or simply a clever new shine? Possibly both. “If 20,000 people are turning up for a sitar concert, we have officially entered the pop space,” he tells you unapologetically. “What is pop music? It’s popular music,” he explains. “If classical becomes pop, it’s a huge achievement for me.”
Musically, Sharma moves through ragas the way a DJ plays a set — short, familiar phrases and then moving briskly to the next, before attention dips. At one point, he jumps off stage and walks into the crowd, brushing hands with fans and prompting chants that ripple through the crowd, before returning to play his glowing “next-gen sitara” like a guitar, sliding into ‘Kal Ho Naa Ho’ and other Bollywood staples. Gen Z gave us the phrase ‘aura-farming’, and this may be it.
BEFORE THE SPECTACLE
Sharma, fourth generation of Delhi’s Rikhiram family — one of India’s most storied instrument-makers — picked up the guitar first because “it was cool”. His father, having watched guitars flung about and played with unwashed hands, was adamant. “He was like, ‘you’re not touching a sitar at all’,” recalls Sharma. The embargo lifted when a 10-year-old Rishab picked up a broken sitar his father had repaired and instinctively played the scales. By his early teens, he was performing publicly.
That early promise acquired a far grander lineage, not without some debate. Sharma maintains he was a disciple of Ravi Shankar, a claim contested by his daughter Anoushka Shankar. Sharma attempts to address the controversy. “See, a relationship between a guru and disciple is very personal. And a guru himself decides when a disciple is ready. I’ll just leave it at that.”
RAGA AS THERAPY
The jump from a luthier workshop to the White House and Burning Man — and to perhaps India’s most Instagrammable classical musician — ran through several detours.
There was New York for a dual degree in music and economics, a deadmau5 concert at Sunburn Delhi that rewired him — “I was blown away by how the LED mouse head he wore was synced to music” — and then a Clubhouse rabbit hole during the pandemic, where he played his sitar at all hours for strangers who couldn’t sleep or leave their rooms. Neither could he.
After his grandfather passed away during the lockdown, Sharma stopped eating, sleeping or playing. “I was in my room with my laptop, not coming out.” What pulled him out was therapy, then the sitar. “And I was like, wow, where were you?”
That recovery — playing for an audience who didn’t know Raga Lalit from a ringtone but found themselves sitting with alaaps and jhalas at odd hours “because something in them needed to” — birthed ‘Sitar for Mental Health’, something of a musical refuge. Now in its sixth year, it has a global following across the US, Canada, and West Asia. But he is careful to draw a line. “I don’t claim to be a therapist or a healer. I just pass on what I like. My shows are not a therapy session.”
CLASSICAL IS COOL
He insists the sitar itself is not lacking even as he brandishes his EDM stagecraft-inspired sitar and blends ragas with trap and hip hop. “The sitar is more than enough…I just like to do cool experiments. We don’t have to go to the moon, but it’s cool to go to the moon, right?”
That is also what unsettles classical purists and charms everyone else. Unfazed by those who call his craft “an overhyped spectacle”, Sharma quotes Kishori Amonkar and fashion designer Virgil Abloh in the same breath. “There have been so many invasions in our music,” he recalls Amonkar saying, after she was accused of stepping beyond her gharana. Then turns to Abloh: “A broken candle in a garage is just a broken candle, but if you keep it in the middle of a museum, it’s an art piece.… You have to create that mahaul.”
For a Gen Z-coded sitarist, he is refreshingly free of cultivated cool-guy detachment. Asked what he listens to off the sitar, he pulls up a playlist that hops from Kanye West and Daniel Caesar to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, amused by his own range. That ease comes from his circle of ustads and pandits, who he insists are supportive. “They’ve seen me as a kid…. I’d choreograph my dances, always dressed a certain way…they find what I do to be a very Rishab thing to do.” They do remind him to return to riyaaz. “Which is obvious. I’ve just started.”
Outside that, there have been questions on whether this is wellness, classical, or a dilution of both, turning raga into something like an essential oil. And yet, it attracts listeners who would never sit through a two-hour classical recital.
“I don’t believe an art form will survive if we only say, ‘Our music is dying, please support it’.” He is impatient with the old martyrdom. “Asceticism is good, but at the end of the day, you need money in your bank.… You have to re-innovate that asceticism.”
SWAG, SHRINGAR AND ‘SHO-SHA’
He speaks the language of therapy, then appears in military jackets, mehndi and statement jewellery — looking like someone you’d spot in a Bollywood period drama or a fashion week. For Delhi, he wore a golden armour. “My next project is going to be called ‘Weapons of Mass Peace’…so even my outfits are going to speak the same design language.”
The aesthetic, or what he calls “shringar”, is not incidental. “I’ve always loved dressing up.… I had style but didn’t have money to support my fashion choices,” he says. “The only time men dress up is at their weddings. Now, every show feels like I’m getting married. I wonder what I’ll wear at my wedding,” he laughs.
There is method to his flourish. “It makes me feel I’ll put in my best performance. It might be a placebo, but I believe in that.” He studied how maharajas dressed and started sketching. Sketches he admits are “terrible” but travel through designers before arriving on stage.
“Our concerts are like festivals. People dress up, put on mehndi. It’s almost like a wonderful cult,” he says. Cult is perhaps too strong a word. A community, certainly, built on the idea that if you cannot bring the audience to the baithak, you take the baithak to wherever they already are. Which is why his show, wardrobe and social feed matter as much as a dash of Hogwarts or Game of Thrones on sitar strings.
He performs for the room and for the phone in the room, candid that the ‘sho-sha’ some bristle at is also what keeps them hooked. His 4.6 million Instagram following is no accident. Nor are the ‘Swag’-titled album, magazine covers, or the occasional glimpse of a private jet he neither flaunts nor hides. “The only way to empower is to show.… And I don’t mean it in a braggy way,” he explains. “So, a kid or their parents can see that classical music can take you places.”
