Feb 02, 2026 9:29pm IST
India’s Big Four drought at the Grammys continues
Not since the 15th Grammys has an Indian artist made it to the Big Four of “music’s biggest night”. History was written in 1973 when sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, an integral part of George Harrison & Friends’ 'The Concert For Bangla Desh' was nominated for and won Album of the Year. At the 68th Grammys, with KATSEYE nominated in the Best New Artist category, hopes were running high because the Los Angeles-based girl group has an Indian-American member: Lara Raj. Olivia Dean’s win in the category means India’s Big Four dreams (even by association) to make it to the Top 4 must wait another day.
India’s sole win at this year’s Grammys comes courtesy Dalai Lama’s 'Meditations' with music by Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Kabir Sehgal, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash in the Best Audiobook, Narration, and Storytelling Recording category.
What is The Big Four?
The most prestigious awards at the Grammy Awards are Record Of The Year, Album Of The Year, Song Of The Year, and Best New Artist and are collectively called The Big Four. As the Academy’s official website notes, “winners are decided by the more than 11,000 members of the music community that make up The Recording Academy's voting body.”
For your consideration: India
There has been a great dearth of Indian musicians or singers in the Big Four. Except for the late Ravi Shankar’s win at the 15th Grammys, only one other Indian has ever been nominated in the same category, but didn’t win: conductor Zubin Mehta.
Shankar has been nominated a total of 10 times across categories and won only four times. Mehta was nominated a record 18 times with 0 wins, with Ravi Shankar’s daughter Anoushka trailing at 14 nominations and no wins.
For comparison, late tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain has won four of the nine times he was nominated, Composer Ricky Kej has won 3 Grammys with four noms to his name. A.R. Rahman has been nominated and has won twice, both the same year: 2010. The world fusion band Shakti has four nods so far with one win coming last year and one expected from the two nominations this year.
Norah Jones, daughter of the Late Pandit Ravi Shankar and American concert producer Sue Jones, did win a total of five Grammy Awards at the 45th Grammys for her 2002 album, ‘Come Away with Me’ bagging big laurels like Best New Artist, Record of the Year and Album of the Year and also was a featuring artist on Herbie Hancock's 'River: The Joni Letters' which won her an Album Of The Year win at the 50th Grammys. But when asked during a televised interview in 2007 if she considers herself 'part Indian', she said, "I feel very Texan, actually a New Yorker." So there's that.
With most talent rarely moving out of global music categories or genre-specific ones, the Indian presence (or even an Indian-origin one) has been largely absent in the Big Four. It might come as a shock to many, but Queen, fronted by the Zanzibar-born Freddie Mercury, who was of Indian origin (his parents were Indian Parsis and he spent his childhood in India) has been nominated four times but has NEVER won a Grammy. Queen was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
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Eye-to-eye with KATSEYE
KATSEYE is a six-piece global girl group and a project between Geffen Records and South Korea’s HYBE Entertainment. The group’s members have diversity at its core: the leader Sophia Laforteza is from the Philippines, main dancer Daniela Avanzini is an American “with Venezuelan and Cuban roots” all-rounder Megan Skiendiel is from Hawaii and has a Singaporean Chinese mother; Manon Bannerman is a Swiss Ghanaian and vocalist Lara Raj has Tamil parents while the youngest, Yoonchae is Korean.
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