Tabla exponent and a disciple of Ustad Allah Rakha and Ustad Zakir Hussain, Anuradha Pal, is back after the debut performance of Stree Shakti, her all-woman percussion ensemble, at WOMAD -- the World of Music and Dance festival in London. Stree Shakti also performed exclusively for a live BBC telecast during the festival last month.

"Percussion is one field in music which has always been male-dominated," says Pal, with a glint of anger in her eyes. And when you don't come from musicians' family, she says, it's all the more difficult. Add to it the `woman' tag and things get worse further. "I know it because I am both. My ensemble's ghatam player once told me that one mridangam accompaniment to a famousCarnatic vocalist refused to perform with a `woman'." All other members of her group have had similar experiences. So, in 1996, Pal founded the first ever all-woman percussion group called Stree Shakti -- Woman Power.

"Sometimes." It was more in the days when she had started performing at the age of 11. Even though she was marked as a `Zakira' in the making after she performed at the Swar Vilas festival at the age of 17, her career is marked with incidents where the sponsor refused to pay her as much as the male performer because she didn't have a family to take care of.

They do, in fact. "In Indian classical music there's this idea of hierarchical importance of percussion and that you can't fuse Hindustani and Carnatic styles of singing with vocal instruments and percussion." But Pal stuck to her guns and worked at it." In such projects one needs to work hard on themes, for it's difficultto visualise which instrument should come at what point. But my judges -- the audience -- received it well."

It is yet to be decided. But she is working on an experimental tabla-ghatam tarang where six pitches of tabla will be accompanied by six pitches of ghatam to perform raga Hindole using rare six-and-a-half beats. "For now, I am performing at Ideas and Images at the National Gallery of Modern Art -- today."

A week ago, she released her solo CD called Anu which means `special'. "I have used some rare taals in it." And then I have composed and performed the entire background track of M F Husain's Gajagamini, slated for a September 17 release.