“‘Ah, music,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘A magic beyond all we do here!’”
Sruti Sarathy is a leading Carnatic musician known for her soulful sound and imaginative approach to the Indian violin.
Carnatic training
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Sruti began her musical training as a prodigious three-year old under Guru Anuradha Sridhar, a sixth-generation violinist from the eminent Lalgudi lineage of musicians.
Sruti regularly accompanies leading Carnatic musicians including Flute Shashank, TM Krishna, Sikkil Gurucharan, Sudha Raghunathan, and many others. She has received awards from the Music Academy three years in a row for her performances. She is also a Fulbright Scholar, and has trained in Hindustani music under violin maestro Kala Ramnath.
Some of her other accolades include the Mysore T Chowdiah Memorial Award for outstanding violinist from the Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana in 2023, and the Rukmini Rajagopalan Memorial Award from Shruti Swara Laya in 2024.
Sruti co-leads Unfretted, an Indian strings duet concept with chitravina player, Vishaal Sapuram. Sruti is the creator & lead composer of the project Songs for Many Lives, which tells stories of the South Asian diaspora through new Carnatic compositions.
Collaborations & crossover projects
Sruti often takes the role of composer-performer for dance and theater works. She has composed several original scores for Bay Area Drama Company. Sruti regularly collaborates with musicians from diverse traditions. Past collaborators include Jeronimo Maya (flamenco guitar), Alysha Brilla, Oliver Rajamani (Romani gypsy music), Shayok Misha Chowdhury (theater), Roopa Mahadevan (Carnatic/crossover), Aditya Prakash (Carnatic/crossover), Rajna Swaminathan (Indian/jazz percussion), Bruce Mui Ghent (Taiko), among others.
She has been featured in the San Francisco and Chicago World Music Festivals, the San Francisco World Percussion Arts Festival, the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, and the Drive East Festival in New York City. She has performed at major venues throughout India, including the Music Academy (Chennai), Shanmukhananda Sabha (Mumbai), and the Indira Gandhi National Center for Performing Arts (Delhi).
She received a Fulbright Scholarship in 2016 from the US Department of State to study cross-genre approaches in Carnatic violin. She is also the recipient of grants from the Alliance for California Traditional Arts (2007) and the Creative Work Fund (2021).
She has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, OneBeat, and most recently, Montalvo Arts Center and Emory University.
Sruti is a graduate of Stanford University, where she studied French literature.
