(November 16, 2022) Wearing a pink dress, a tikka glittering on her forehead, surrounded by Bharatnatyam dancers and backed by Australian rock band Icehouse, 13-year-old Janaki Easwar won a million hearts at the closing ceremony of the T20 World Cup at the Melbourne Stadium.
As cricket-crazy Indians mourned the team’s loss to England in the semi-finals, India made its presence felt, through the Indian-Australian teen sensation with the strikingly deep voice. Titled “We Can Get Together,” Janaki’s multicultural performance was a nod to India’s growing soft power. “I believe the way I represented my culture on national television also helped as the performance at the World Cup final is going to be a great representation of multicultural Australia,” the Global Indian told the Indian Express before her performance.
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Finding stardom
The performance at Melbourne Stadium isn’t Janaki’s first brush with the spotlight. Back in 2021, at the age of 12, Janaki Easwar, paying tribute to Kerala as she wore a kasava mundu, floored the four celebrity judges on The Voice, with her cover of Billie Eilish’s Lovely. “My mum loves to try fusion attire on me,” she told The Week. “My mum came up with the idea of blending (a) kasavu shawl with a black top and a skirt made from set-mundu,” she told The Week.
The song brought in over five million views on YouTube. The judges, who gave her a four-chair turn, asked her to sing ‘something Indian’, too. Janaki obliged quite sportingly with a piece of Carnatic music. The Indian singer is the youngest contestant in the show’s history and made it to the top 20.
Staying tied to her roots through Carnatic music
Janaki Easwar
Born in 2009, Janaki has been performing on stage since she was eight years old. The Melbourne-based teen started early, with violin lessons when she was five. Her parents noticed that she had talent when they heard her singing around the house, and, in order to help her connect with her Indian roots, sent her for Carnatic music lessons. She is deeply tied now to her native culture and is fluent in Malayalam, which her parents made sure she learned as a child. Both her parents are from Kozhikode and moved to Australia some 15 years ago. Her father, Shobha Sekhar, is also a trained Carnatic musician, and his daughter’s first teacher.
At the age of eight, she discovered an interest in western music and began training under David Jaanz, at the Jaanz International Music Academy one year later. She continues to learn Carnatic music as well, at the Kalakruthi School of Music in Melbourne.
The singer-songwriter
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In April 2020, when Australia began a four-month lockdown, Janaki tried her hand at more serious songwriting. At the time, she was also releasing covers of popular songs, like Enaadi Mayavi, which garnered quite a bit of attention among Indian audiences back home. For the next year and a half, she wrote songs, composed with her guitar and recorded demos, using her phone and her home studio. It resulted in her debut single, Clown, which she released in July 2021, followed by Bittersweet.
It’s fairly easy to forget that Janaki Easwar is only 13 years old, as she strives to make it in a competitive and often cut-throat industry. Her voice and demeanor carry a gravity that is far beyond her years. When she’s at home, though, Janaki makes time to simply be a kid. Like other teens, she hangs out with her friends and spends time trying on makeup. She’s also interested in fashion and in dance, which she learns as a form of exercise.
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