It is true that the significance of seeing someone on stage can hit-home before they play a note. For a young musician, it might be the moment an ambition becomes easier to picture: there's someone doing this, and perhaps there could be a place for me too.
When Roopa Panesar returns to Liverpool’s Tung Auditorium on Friday 27 November, that possibility will accompany a career built through years of study, performance and teaching. The sitar player appears with tabla artist Kousic Sen in the finale to Milap’s autumn season, bringing an established musical partnership to the city.
Panesar was born in London and raised in Leicester. She began learning with Ustad Dharambir Singh at seven, entering a teaching relationship that has remained central to her development. Singh was himself a disciple of Ustad Vilayat Khan: a connection that places her work within a lineage of musical knowledge passed between generations.
Her subsequent career has included appearances at Darbar Festival and WOMAD, collaboration with Talvin Singh, and performances reaching across Indian classical music, jazz and Western classical settings. Those different encounters suggest an artist interested in what her instrument can say in more than one musical company.
There is a temptation, when discussing women working in fields where they remain less visible, to let the story of representation consume the work itself. Panesar deserves to be heard as a musician with her own artistic authority. Her place among the relatively small number of women pursuing full-time performing and teaching careers on sitar also gives that authority a wider significance.
For a girl considering the instrument, a professional life made visible can be crucial. It gives substance to an otherwise abstract encouragement to follow an interest. Here is the work, the commitment and the possibility of a future.
That's a reason to make room for the music as well as the conversation around it.
Sen’s presence brings another important dimension to the Liverpool performance. Milap’s artist in residence, he is a tabla player whose work is closely woven into the organisation’s programme. His partnership with Panesar reaches back to her debut album, Khoj, produced by Milap in 2011 and featuring his accompaniment.
Fifteen years later, their appearance together gives audiences a chance to encounter that continuing relationship. The interest lies in hearing two musicians with a shared history make music in the present.
It also says something about the organisation bringing them to Liverpool. Established in 1985 with a vision of bringing people across the North West together through Indian arts, Milap has worked across performance and education for more than four decades. Its current activity includes an arts school, youth orchestra, professional ensemble and national choir.
The lineage and breadth speak for themselves. A concert gives an audience an evening to remember; teaching and ensembles create further opportunities to learn, practise and return. Together, they help make an art form part of the continuing cultural life of a place.
This autumn’s programme has already included Tarang’s contemporary Indian music at the Tung and Sonia Sabri Dance Company’s NIDA at Unity Theatre. Still ahead, Sandip Chatterjee performs on santoor with Sen at Liverpool Philharmonic’s Music Room on 30 October. The hundred-stringed hammered instrument offers another point of entry before Panesar’s November appearance.
For listeners discovering these artists, there's no obligation to arrive with a complete musical vocabulary. Curiosity is a reasonable beginning. Familiarity can develop through the simple opportunity to hear more, more often.
That opportunity deserves space in the North’s cultural coverage. The artists, teachers and organisations sustaining Indian music here belong within the account of what our region makes possible.
On 27 November, the immediate invitation is to listen. For someone in the audience, it might also be an invitation to begin.
Roopa Panesar and Kousic Sen perform at The Tung Auditorium, 60 Oxford Street, Liverpool, on Friday 27 November 2026 at 7.30pm.
Tickets: £10, £15 and £20; a 9% booking fee applies to online and telephone purchases.
The concert is expected to last approximately two hours, including an interval. Promoted by Milap in association with Asian Arts Agency.
Concert information and booking HERE
Milap’s autumn programme, including Sandip Chatterjee with Kousic Sen on 30 October HERE
