ANOUSHKA is no one's idea of a conventional Indian daughter. She prefers jeans to decorative saris and she's a bit of a female anomaly in the male-dominated world of classical sitar players.

She's hugely confident, knows what kind of qualities she wants in a man and she's been performing on international stages for six years. All that and she's just turned 20. It's not exactly ordinary.

But then again, she is Ravi Shankar's daughter, a man who isn't perhaps the most conventional Indian father to have.

"I've had a fairly unconventional upbringing," says Anoushka, who is performing at Stockon's Arc on Thursday as part of her first solo tour.

"I grew up in the States mostly and, while my parents are relatively strict compared to American parents, they are incredibly liberated compared to Indians parents," says Anoushka.

"I'm a very confident person and not really a girlie-girl, even though I like to dress up. I'm quite bossy and I'm normally the one girl in a crowd of boys!"

Having been raised in London, San Diego and New Delhi, Anoushka's had varying degrees of celebrity in each of the cities. She's very much a star in New Delhi where she is approached on the streets, while she feels more anonymous in London and San Diego.

While Anoushka grew up eating, breathing and sleeping around stars in her teen years in the States, she seems relatively untouched by the unreal world of rock and pop stardom and seems surprisingly level-headed about her father's legendary fame.

One of the reasons for this is that she actually spent her first seven years in London, living with her mother, Sukanya, 45, while Ravi taught his pupils in Delhi.

Ravi, 81, was involved in a previous marriage and it was only when she was a teenager that Anoushka found herself under the same roof as her dad as well as her mum in San Diego.

Ravi was known to invite pupils to stay with him to learn the sitar and Anoushka remembers seeing George Harrison and violinist Yehudi Menuhin, amongst others, waft in and out of the Shankar household on a regular basis.

She mixed in glitzy circles back in Bombay and she celebrated her 20th birthday with Sting and his wife Trudi Styler only a few days ago.

But just as her father's fame is ordinary life to Anoushka, so is the sitar.

"I grew up in a house full of music. My mother was a classical Indian dancer and singer and we listened to a lot of music. When we started living with my father, I was surrounded by sitar music but I never really thought about my father as a famous musician. To me, he was just my father."

Some may wonder why she decided to follow in the footsteps of a father who was so incredibly talented. How can she possibly hope to outshine a star as brilliant as Ravi?

Anoushka's response is no-nonsense. She says she plays the sitar to the best of her ability. The rest she leaves to the discerning ear. If people enjoy her work, they'll come back. She's not seeking to outdo her father.

"Yes, people may come to see me out of curiosity because I'm the daughter of Ravi Shankar but they won't come back if they don't like me. So it really makes me happy when I see the same people coming back to my concerts or following me around the country."

With parents who never put pressure on her to live up to the musical strain that ran through them, she had grown up wanting to be a professional piano player. But gradually, she found herself gravitating towards her father's sitar.

"I asked my father if he would teach me one day when I was eight and he said he was reluctant to teach me at first because he just didn't want me to feel pressured.

"Classical sitar music is passed down orally and he was a great teacher to learn from. I started off by assisting him and ended up playing solos in his concerts," she says.

In some ways, being the daughter of a sitar legend was a difficult position to be in. She didn't go out and seek the sitar like a father had. It was there at her doorstep.

And because it's such an awkward instrument to play - she has to sit in a cramped position for hours and the strings give her deep callouses - every passionate sitar player has that penance to pay.

"It's an incredibly difficult instrument to master and you go through life learning like my father has. So to succeed with an instrument like the sitar makes you feel incredible. Like all the effort is worth it."

With half-sister Norah Jones, 22, who has also taken up music professionally and recently been signed by Blue Note records in New York, you'd be forgiven for thinking there's more than sheer hard graft, callouses and sweat at work with the Shankars. Music runs in their blood.

Anoushka's solo UK tour ends on Saturday. She will play sitar pieces including those from her current album, Anourag, at Stockton's Arc on Thursday. For more information or to book tickets, call (01642) 666600