Ramana Balachandran is the Young Veena Virtuoso Who Made the Old Masters Take Notice

There is something quietly extraordinary about Ramana Balachandran. Born into a household where Carnatic music was a way of life, the Bengaluru-raised veena virtuoso was identifying ragas and spotting nuances before most children had settled on a favourite cartoon. Both his parents are musicians; his mother, Sharanya, a veena player and vocalist, was his first guru. By nine, he was navigating complex phrases on the instrument. When he corrected a mistake in his mother’s playing one afternoon, it was not insolence; it was the beginning of a calling. 

We talked to the now-astoundingly viral Veena player before his much-anticipated performance at the prestigious SBKK Shriram Shankarlal Music Festival 2026, on 6 March 2026. The festival is to be held from 6-8 March 2026, at the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra Open Air Arena, New Delhi.

De-schooled at ten, the family relocated from the wired buzz of Bengaluru to the quieter, spiritually charged town of Tiruvannamalai. There, Ramana trained under Vidushi B Nagalakshmi, granddaughter of the legendary Karaikudi Sri Subbarama Iyer, whilst simultaneously absorbing mridangam and vocal music, exploiting the neural plasticity of youth across multiple disciplines. “Learning multiple forms while trying to find where one’s calling lies, and homing in on that while keeping in touch with other forms, is crucial,” he reflects. “There is a lot of beautiful cross-form influence that happens both consciously and subconsciously.”

The Records That Arrived Young

The milestones came early and they came fast. At fourteen, Ramana was invited to perform at Rashtrapathi Bhavan in the presence of President Pranab Mukherjee, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Indian Cabinet, and African Heads of State. At sixteen, the Madras Music Academy, one of the most venerated institutions in Carnatic music, waived its age requirements to include him in its annual concert series. That same year, All India Radio awarded him a direct A grade after his audition, an honour previously bestowed upon Mandolin U Shrinivas and granted to vanishingly few musicians in AIR’s seventy-five-year history. A 24-concert spring tour of the United States followed in 2018. Awards from Narada Gana Sabha, Sri Krishna Gana Sabha, and Shanmukhananda Sabha Mumbai followed in close succession, and Deccan Herald named him one of twenty change-makers for 2020.

None of it, he maintains, altered his sense of self. “I never thought of myself as a prodigy,” he says plainly. “The praise and adulation that follows any concert is something which is hard for kids to handle alone at a young age, and that’s where the culture inculcated at home comes into play. I have a lot of gratitude for my parents for always being there to keep me on track.”

The Discipline Behind the Mastery

What Ramana brings to the veena is far more than precocity. His bani, his individual musical style, is now widely acknowledged as a distinctive adaptation of his own: exceptional phrasal clarity informed by a percussionist’s rhythmic instinct and a vocalist’s sensitivity to nuance. His Ragam Tanam Pallavi presentations are celebrated for the seamless interplay of melody and rhythm; his alapanas traverse a range of moods with precision and spontaneity in equal measure. He has performed nearly four hundred solo concerts across India and internationally, and his thillana compositions are sought after by musicians and dancers alike.

Yet he is unsentimental about where the real work lies. “As artists, we are constantly being vulnerable at some level, we receive irrational love and hate. One has to really work on stabilising one’s inner ground to stay on track,” he says. He speaks too of the concerts that hurt the most: “There have been performances where I realised mid-performance that I needed to have worked more on something before presenting it on stage. Those are humbling. Concerts where you clearly see where you stand musically after things go south, those are very necessary.” It is an unusual frankness from a musician so young, and so acclaimed.

Classical Music in the Age of the Reel

Ramana is not naïve about the world his music now inhabits. Reels, short-form videos, and algorithm-driven feeds have fundamentally transformed how audiences encounter Carnatic music, and he meets that reality with both openness and measured conviction. “Short-form content for classical music is fine, when it’s not the only format,” he says. “Core ideas in classical music need time to fruit.” He wants audiences not merely to recognise a composition, but to feel it, to develop what he calls recognition-based appreciation rather than passive reception. “The more things an audience grasps or even notices in a concert, the more satisfying it is for both the musician and the listener.”

But he does not dismiss the viral moment or the algorithm’s reach. “I see short-form content as a gateway or invitation to the core,” he says. For Ramana Balachandran, the core is everything, a lifetime of practice, vulnerability, and devotion to an ancient instrument that, in his hands, feels startlingly, urgently alive.