Viram Jasani came to the UK with his family in 1949 at the age of four. They were possibly the first Gujarati family to settle in London. Brought up and educated in the UK, it is all the more remarkable that he was able to develop a deep interest in his traditional Indian music culture and became a leading authority in the UK in that subject. He uniquely managed to combine his “Englishness” with his “Indian-ness” and involvement with the Vedanta as a result of his mother’s Hindu faith and her devotion at home and his father’s approach to engage with the wider world whilst maintaining deep Hindu spiritual values through his love of traditional Indian music. His ‘Englishness’ evolved out of his education in school and university and his close circle of English friends, his deliberate experience of the English working class environment.
The conflicts and dilemmas of living in two cultures were resolved through his deep involvement with Indian classical music.
Viram has made a huge contribution to Indian music culture in the UK and has been the key figure in creating awareness of this music all around the UK but especially in the formal government funding bodies. Sitting on the music advisory panels of the Greater London Arts Association 1979 – 1981 and the Arts Council of Great Britain 1981 – 1987 he was the only powerful advocate for a subject he was passionate about. Against strong opposition, he instigated and sat on a national enquiry into Indian music culture in the UK whose report was accepted by Arts Council of Great Britain in 1985-8 and which included getting much better recognition for Indian music culture nationally, engaging with and employing more people from the ethnic community in the Arts Council and providing a decent sustained level of funding from a position of zero funding, and principally by establishing a national company - the Asian Music Circuit - to represent this important area of music making in the UK.
The Arts Council of Great Britain appointed Viram as the first Chairman and CEO of the Asian Music Circuit Ltd in 1990 and he ran this as a registered charity until 2019 when he retired.
Using his experience in business as well as music he developed the AMC into one of the most significant companies in Europe promoting the beautiful music of Asia through concerts and education events, producing on average one hundred events per year. He created from conception to realisation the AMC’s innovative interactive multi-media Museum of Asian Music – a first of its kind in Europe, and HRH The Prince of Wales visited the centre in July 2008. The Asian Music Circuit promoted the music of Asia – from Central Asia to Indonesia though Viram’s primary passion was for the music of India. His sense of aesthetics, his deep knowledge of the music and his contacts have all contributed to the AMC having one of the most innovative, varied, high quality and expertly curated artistic programmes in this field. He is highly respected by all the major artists in India and has had a material impact on perceptions about Asian music all over the UK over the last 50 years or so. The citation for his honorary doctorate stated that the teaching and study of Indian music in colleges in the UK would hardly have got going without Viram’s pioneering efforts.
Viram produced Indian music concerts for the BBC Proms festival over several years, curated many broadcasts for the BBC on Indian Music, took the BBC to India to make documentary radio programmes on various aspects of the beautiful traditional music culture of that country. He has worked with all the major artists from Indian music including Bollywood (notably Asha Bhosle) to classical (notably Pandit Ravi Shankar, Shivkumar Sharma, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Rajan Sajan Mishra and many many other famous musicians) and folk music – the wonderful Langa and Manganiyar musicians of Rajasthan, the Bauls from Bengal, folk music of Gujarat, the wonderful Sanskrit scholars’ recitation of the Vedas and Upanishads, fusion music with Zakir Hussain and John McLaughlin in Remember Shakti, rock music with Shankar Ehsan Loy and Trilok Gurtu and produced exhibitions and music theatre productions ( Umrao Jaan Ada). There have been many more also from China, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, Afghanistan. He is widely respected by major venues such as the Royal Albert Hall where he has produced events over many years. He sat on various advisory committees of the Arts Council of England, The Royal Opera House and the Institute of Advanced Studies, London University representing traditional Indian music culture.
In between running his own successful commodity trading business, from which he is long retired, Viram lectured extensively on Indian music at The Guildhall School of Music, Kings College, London University and City University and continues to be invited to talk about the subject; and has appeared on discussion panels on the BBC radio. However, Viram’s passion for Indian classical music Indian classical music from an early age took him to practicing the SITAR and he was long considered the leading sitar player in the UK and one of the major players outside India. He gave his first solo public recital in 1971 at the South Bank Centre’s Purcell Room and since performed at major festivals and in many concert tours in UK and the Continent as well as in India. While his primary love is for Indian classical music, he was one of the early players of “ fusion” in the UK, having been the lead sitar player for a while in the Indo-Jazz Fusions Band; he appeared with Jimmy Page of Led Zepellin on their first LP release , Osibisa, and SKY on their recordings produced by George Martin; performed in duet with jazz stars Stan Tracy and Mike Garrick , composed for radio and TV shows and films – notably with Johnny Dankworth for Joseph Losey’s film “Boom” with Elizabeth Taylor Richard Burton and Noel Coward and with Mikis Theodarakis in the Kakoyanis directed film “ Trojan Women”.
Viram has broadcast frequently on BBC Radio 3 music in concert, in interviews and discussions; performed on Channel 4, Central TV and HTV where he was the subject of a short documentary.
Through his work over the last 50 years, Viram has been one of the most influential persons in the UK not only on Government funding policies but also on the perceptions, understanding and performance and teaching in the UK of Indian music.
1967 graduated in Economics, Politics and Philosophy, University of St Andrews
1969 post graduate majoring in Indian Music, SOAS The School of Oriental and African Studies, London University
1992 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society for The Arts (FRSA)
2003 Received the Asian Voice Asian Achievers Award in the Arts and Culture category.
2003 Received on behalf of the Asian Music Circuit the “HSBC INDO-BRITISH AWARD” for promoting good relations and understanding between the UK
and India.
2007 Awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of York (DUniv)