Sakuntala Narasimhan

Sakuntala Narasimhan (born 1939) is an Indian journalist, consumer rights activist, and classical vocalist from the Rampur-Sahaswan gharana of Hindustani classical music. She was a disciple of Hafeez Ahmed Khan and is the only vocalist in India to have performed in the National Programme of Music organized by Doordarshan and All India Radio in both Carnatic and Hindustani styles. She was trained in Carnatic classical music by vocalists Musiri Subramania Iyer and Thanjavur Brinda. She is also the only artiste doing a “self-jugalbandi” juxtaposing the two styles.
Early life and education.
Sakuntala holds a MA degree in Economics and postgraduate degrees in classical music. She has two doctorates – one in women's studies and another in musicology. She lived in Delhi during 1947 when India became independent, then moved to Mumbai and currently lives in Bengaluru. Her doctoral thesis in musicology was on a comparative study of the Carnatic and Hindustani styles. Sakuntala started performing at an early age for All India Radio and has been a performing artist for the past 60 years for SPIC MACAY and several other organizers.
Career.
As a journalist, Sakuntala worked for 7 years with The Times of India group at Mumbai. She reported on the U.N. Global Conference on Women in China, for the Deccan Herald in 1995, and on the 23rd UN General Assembly session at New York in 2000. She was also one of four Indian journalists selected to attend and write about the World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa in 2002. Her columns ran in the Deccan Herald for 27 years till 2009 and she currently writes for The Wire, Citizen Matters, and Moneylife.
Sakuntala taught music at the Bombay University and has taught journalism, women's studies, and economics at the Bangalore University at the postgraduate level. She has also taught in the United States on a Fulbright fellowship. She has presented papers at international conferences on media, music and feminist studies, in the United States, Britain, Norway, Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda, the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, and Australia.
Works.
She has published around 4,000 articles for various news outlets and journals and authored 11 books, on consumer rights, music and feminist issues. Her writings have been translated into Russian, German, Swedish, Japanese, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu. Below are some of her selected writings and books: