Ravi Shankar

• 1. Introduction

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  Ravi Shankar was "horrified." At the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, he watched Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar on stage. "That was too much for me," he said. "In our culture, we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God." The man recoiling from the flames was a sitar virtuoso who had already become the world's best-known exponent of Indian classical music. He had given up dancing at 18 to study one instrument for seven years. He would father two daughters who became famous musicians on two continents. And he would teach a Beatle. How does a boy who learned French on a Paris dance tour end up shaping Western pop? Why would a man so devoted to musical instruments spend his life among rock crowds who broke into applause before he had played a single note?

• 2. A Dancer's Childhood

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  Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury was born on the 7th of April 1920 in Benares, then the capital of a princely state of the same name. He was the youngest of seven brothers in a Bengali Hindu family. His father, Shyam Shankar Chowdhury, was a Middle Temple barrister and scholar who served for several years as dewan, or Prime Minister, of Jhalawar State in Rajasthan. Shyam later worked as a lawyer in London and married a second time. He did not meet his son until the boy was eight years old, while Hemangini Devi raised the child in Benares.

  The boy shortened the Sanskrit version of his first name, Ravindra, to Ravi, meaning "sun." He attended the Bengalitola High School in Benares between 1927 and 1928. At the age of 10, after spending his first decade in Benares, Shankar went to Paris with the dance group of his brother, the choreographer Uday Shankar. By 13 he was a full member, accompanying the group on tour and learning to dance and play various Indian instruments.

  Uday's dance group travelled Europe and the United States in the early to mid-1930s. Shankar learned French, discovered Western classical music, jazz, and cinema, and grew acquainted with Western customs. In December 1934, at a music conference in Calcutta, he heard Allauddin Khan, the lead musician at the court of the princely state of Maihar. Khan offered Shankar training to become a serious musician, on one condition: that he abandon touring and come to Maihar.

• 3. Seven Years In Maihar

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  By 1938, Shankar's parents had died and touring the West had grown difficult amid the political conflicts that would lead to World War II. That year he left his dancing career to study Indian classical music under Khan in Maihar. He lived with Khan's family as part of the traditional gurukul system. Khan was a strict teacher.

  During his training Shankar learned the sitar and the surbahar. He studied ragas and styles including dhrupad, dhamar, and khyal, and received instruction on the rudra veena, rubab, and sursingar. He often studied alongside Khan's children, Ali Akbar Khan and Annapurna Devi. In December 1939, he made his public debut on the sitar, performing a jugalbandi, a duet, with Ali Akbar Khan, who played the sarod.

  Shankar completed his musical training in 1944. He moved to Mumbai and joined the Indian People's Theatre Association, composing music for ballets in 1945 and 1946, including Dharti Ke Lal. At the age of 25 he recomposed the music for the popular song "Sare Jahan Se Achcha." From February 1949 until January 1956 he worked as music director for All India Radio in New Delhi, where he founded the Indian National Orchestra and combined Western and classical Indian instrumentation. Beginning in the mid-1950s he composed the music for the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, which became internationally acclaimed.

• 4. Crossing The Ocean

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  V. K. Narayana Menon, director of All India Radio Delhi, introduced the Western violinist Yehudi Menuhin to Shankar during Menuhin's first visit to India in 1952. Three years later, Menuhin invited Shankar to perform in New York City for a demonstration of Indian classical music sponsored by the Ford Foundation. Shankar had already performed as part of a cultural delegation in the Soviet Union in 1954.

  In 1956, Shankar resigned from All India Radio to tour the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. He played for smaller audiences and taught them about Indian music, drawing in ragas from the South Indian Carnatic tradition. That same year he recorded his first LP album, Three Ragas, in London. In 1958 he took part in the 10th anniversary celebrations of the United Nations and a UNESCO music festival in Paris. From 1961 he toured Europe, the United States, and Australia, and became the first Indian to compose music for non-Indian films.

  Shankar founded the Kinnara School of Music in Mumbai in 1962 and opened a Western branch in Los Angeles in May 1967. He befriended Richard Bock, founder of World Pacific Records, and recorded most of his 1950s and 1960s albums for the label. His collaboration with Menuhin, West Meets East, won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance. In 1968 he published an autobiography, My Music, My Life, and composed the score for the film Charly.

• 5. The Harrison Effect

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  George Harrison was first introduced to Shankar's music by the American singers Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, themselves big fans. Olivia Harrison described the moment of recognition: "When George heard Indian music, that really was the trigger, it was like a bell that went off in his head. It not only awakened a desire to hear more music, but also to understand what was going on in Indian philosophy. It was a unique diversion."

  Harrison bought a sitar and used it to record "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)." He met Shankar in London in June 1966 and visited India later that year for six weeks to study sitar under Shankar in Srinagar. In 1968 he returned to India for further lessons, some captured on film. This popularised the raga rock trend, and groups such as the Rolling Stones, the Animals, and the Byrds began using the sitar in their songs. The influence reached blues musicians too: Michael Bloomfield created a raga-influenced number, "East-West," for the Butterfield Blues Band in 1966.

  A documentary film about Shankar named Raga was shot by Howard Worth during the 1966 visit and released in 1971. Ken Hunt of AllMusic later wrote that Shankar had become "the most famous Indian musician on the planet" by 1966. The two worked together repeatedly, recording Shankar Family & Friends in 1973, and Harrison served as editor of Shankar's second autobiography, Raga Mala.

• 6. Concertos And Crowds

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  In August 1969, Shankar performed at the Woodstock Festival and found he disliked the venue. He had already begun distancing himself from the hippie movement and drug culture. "It makes me feel rather hurt when I see the association of drugs with our music," he said. "The music to us is religion. The quickest way to reach godliness is through music."

  In October 1970, Shankar became chair of the Department of Indian Music of the California Institute of the Arts, having previously taught at the City College of New York and the University of California, Los Angeles. Late that year the London Symphony Orchestra invited him to compose a concerto with sitar; his Concerto for Sitar & Orchestra was performed with André Previn conducting. At the Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971 at Madison Square Garden, the crowd applauded after the musicians had merely tuned up for over a minute. The amused Shankar replied, "If you like our tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more," which confused the audience.

  In November and December 1974, Shankar co-headlined a North American tour with Harrison. The demanding schedule weakened his health and he suffered a heart attack in Chicago, missing part of the tour. He released a second concerto, Raga Mala, conducted by Zubin Mehta, in 1981. In 1988 he performed in Moscow with 140 musicians, including the Russian Folk Ensemble and members of the Moscow Philharmonic. From the 12th of May 1986 to the 11th of May 1992, he served as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Parliament of India.

• 7. The Sound Of A Master

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  Shankar popularised performing on the bass octave of the sitar for the alap section. His performances began with solo alap, jor, and jhala, drawn from the slow and serious dhrupad genre, followed by a section with tabla accompaniment in the prevalent khyal style. He often closed with a piece inspired by the light-classical thumri genre.

  Narayana Menon of The New Grove Dictionary noted Shankar's fondness for rhythmic novelties, among them unconventional rhythmic cycles. His interplay with Alla Rakha improved appreciation for tabla playing in Hindustani classical music. Not every assessment was glowing. Hans Neuhoff of Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart argued that Shankar's playing style was not widely adopted and that other sitar players surpassed him in melodic passages.

  Shankar introduced at least 31 new ragas, among them Nat Bhairav, Ahir Lalit, Tilak Shyam, Mohan Kauns, and Natacharuka, the last created for his daughter Anoushka. In 2011, at a concert later released as Tenth Decade in Concert: Ravi Shankar Live in Escondido, he introduced a new percussive sitar technique called Goonga Sitar, in which the strings are muffled with a cloth.

• 8. Daughters, Devotion, And A Last Concert

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  In 1941, Shankar married Annapurna Devi, daughter of his teacher Allauddin Khan. Their son, Shubhendra "Shubho" Shankar, was born in 1942 and often accompanied his father on tours; he could play the sitar and surbahar but chose not to pursue a solo career, and he died of pneumonia in 1992. An affair with Sue Jones, a New York concert producer, led to the birth of Norah Jones in 1979. An affair with the tanpura player Sukanya Rajan led to the birth of Anoushka Shankar in 1981, and in 1989 Shankar married Rajan at Chilkur Temple in Hyderabad.

  Shankar was a Hindu and a devotee of the god Hanuman, as well as an ardent devotee of the Bengali saint Sri Anandamayi Ma. He wrote of his hometown: "Varanasi is the eternal abode of Lord Shiva and one of my favorite temples is that of Lord Hanuman." Writing from Encinitas in Southern California at the age of 88, he added, "But Varanasi seems to be etched in my heart!" He was a vegetarian and wore a large diamond ring he said was manifested by Sathya Sai Baba.

  Honours gathered across his life. He received India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999, along with the Padma Vibhushan, the Polar Music Prize, and four Grammy Awards. The American jazz saxophonist John Coltrane named his son Ravi Coltrane after him. He performed his final concert with Anoushka on the 4th of November 2012 at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California. He died on the 11th of December 2012 at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, at age 92, after heart valve replacement surgery. In January 2013, the Swara Samrat festival was dedicated to him and to Ali Akbar Khan, the boy with whom he had once made his public debut.