Born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury on the 7th of April 1920, the boy who would become Ravi Shankar was the youngest of seven brothers in a Bengali Hindu family in Benares, now known as Varanasi. His father, Shyam Shankar Chowdhury, was a distinguished barrister and statesman who served as the Prime Minister of Jhalawar State, yet the family life was fractured by the time Ravi was eight years old. His father had traveled to London to work as a lawyer and remarried, leaving young Ravi behind in Benares to be raised by his mother, Hemangini Devi, until they reunited years later. This early separation instilled a sense of rootlessness that would eventually drive him to seek a deeper connection to his heritage, but first, the boy was swept into a whirlwind of movement and performance. At the age of ten, he left his quiet life in Benares to join the dance troupe of his older brother, Uday Shankar, a renowned choreographer. For the next decade, Ravi traveled across Europe and the United States, not as a musician, but as a dancer and a companion to the troupe. He learned to play various Indian instruments, picked up the French language, and absorbed the rhythms of Western jazz and cinema, all while touring the world as a child. It was during these travels that he first heard the legendary court musician Allauddin Khan perform at a music conference in Calcutta in December 1934, a moment that would alter the trajectory of his life forever. The encounter was so profound that Uday persuaded the Maharaja of Maihar to hire Khan as the group's soloist, allowing the young Ravi to receive sporadic training on the road. By the time he was eighteen, the dancing had lost its allure, and the pull of the sitar became undeniable. He made the radical decision to abandon his touring career and the safety of his family to study under Khan in the remote town of Maihar, entering the traditional gurukul system where he lived with his teacher's family and dedicated seven years to mastering the instrument.
The Silent Teacher And The Golden Voice
The seven years Ravi Shankar spent under the tutelage of Allauddin Khan in Maihar were defined by strict discipline and an immersion into the deepest traditions of Indian classical music. Khan was a formidable figure, a court musician who demanded absolute devotion from his students, and Shankar lived with Khan's family, learning not just the sitar and surbahar, but also the rudra veena, rubab, and sursingar. He studied the ancient dhrupad and dhamar styles alongside the more fluid khyal, and often practiced alongside Khan's own children, Ali Akbar Khan and Annapurna Devi. This rigorous training culminated in his public debut in December 1939, a jugalbandi duet with Ali Akbar Khan playing the sarod, marking the end of his apprenticeship and the beginning of his professional life. After completing his studies in 1944, Shankar moved to Mumbai and joined the Indian People's Theatre Association, composing music for ballets and recomposing the popular song Sare Jahan Se Achcha at the age of twenty-five. His career took a significant turn when he became the music director for All India Radio in New Delhi, a position he held from February 1949 until January 1956. During this period, he founded the Indian National Orchestra, blending Western and classical Indian instrumentation in his compositions. It was also during these years that he began composing the music for Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy, a series of films that would become internationally acclaimed and cement his reputation as a composer of immense depth. In 1941, he married Annapurna Devi, the daughter of his teacher Allauddin Khan, and their son, Shubhendra Shankar, was born in 1942. The marriage, however, was fraught with complexity, and by 1962, Shankar had separated from Devi, though he continued a relationship with the dancer Kamala Shastri that had begun in the late 1940s. The death of his parents and the political conflicts leading to World War II had made touring the West difficult, but the seeds of his future international fame were already sown in the quiet studios of All India Radio and the film sets of Mumbai.
In 1956, Ravi Shankar resigned from his secure position at All India Radio to embark on a tour of the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States, a decision that would change the landscape of global music. He played for smaller audiences, educating them about Indian music and incorporating ragas from the South Indian Carnatic tradition into his performances. His first LP album, Three Ragas, was released in London in 1956, and he soon became the first Indian to compose music for non-Indian films. A pivotal moment in his international career occurred when he was introduced to the Western violinist Yehudi Menuhin by V. K. Narayana Menon, the director of AIR Delhi, during Menuhin's first visit to India in 1952. Menuhin invited Shankar to perform in New York City in 1955 for a demonstration of Indian classical music sponsored by the Ford Foundation, and the two musicians went on to collaborate on the album West Meets East, which won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance. Shankar's influence grew steadily, and he founded the Kinnara School of Music in Mumbai in 1962, later opening a Western branch in Los Angeles in May 1967. He befriended Richard Bock, the founder of World Pacific Records, and recorded most of his albums in the 1950s and 1960s for Bock's label. The Byrds, who recorded at the same studio, heard Shankar's music and incorporated its elements into their own, introducing the genre to their friend George Harrison of the Beatles. This connection would prove to be the catalyst for a global phenomenon. Shankar performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, where he was horrified to see Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar, a moment that highlighted the cultural clash between the reverence Shankar held for instruments and the rebellious spirit of the rock era. Despite this, his live album from Monterey peaked at number 43 on Billboard's pop LPs chart, the highest placing he ever achieved on that chart, and he continued to tour Europe, the United States, and Australia, becoming the first Indian to compose music for non-Indian films.
The Beatles And The Raga Rock Revolution
The relationship between Ravi Shankar and George Harrison began in 1966 when Harrison, already a fan of Shankar's music through the Byrds, met him in London and traveled to India later that year to study sitar under Shankar in Srinagar. Harrison's fascination with Indian classical music led him to purchase a sitar and use it to record the song Norwegian Wood, a track that introduced the instrument to millions of listeners and sparked the raga rock trend. The influence of Shankar's music spread to other groups such as the Rolling Stones, the Animals, and the Byrds, and even to blues musicians like Michael Bloomfield, who created the raga-influenced improvisation East-West for the Butterfield Blues Band in 1966. Harrison's dedication to Shankar's teaching was so profound that a documentary film about Shankar, named Raga, was shot by Howard Worth and released in 1971, capturing their lessons and the deep bond they formed. Shankar's association with Harrison greatly increased his popularity, and by 1966, he had become the most famous Indian musician on the planet. The collaboration extended beyond music; Harrison organized the charity Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971, in which Shankar participated, and the live album from the concert became one of the best-selling recordings to feature the genre, winning Shankar a second Grammy Award. In the 1970s, Shankar and Harrison worked together again, recording Shankar Family & Friends in 1973 and touring North America the following year to a mixed response. Shankar wrote a second autobiography, Raga Mala, with Harrison as editor, and the two men remained close friends until Harrison's death in 2001. Shankar's influence on Harrison helped popularize the use of Indian instruments in Western pop music in the latter half of the 1960s, and his legacy was cemented by the fact that he had introduced the atmospheric hum of the sitar to audiences worldwide.
The Conductor Of The East And West
Ravi Shankar's career was not limited to the world of rock and roll; he was a prolific composer who bridged the gap between Indian classical music and Western orchestral traditions. In late 1970, the London Symphony Orchestra invited Shankar to compose a concerto with sitar, which was performed with André Previn as conductor and Shankar playing the sitar. He later released his second concerto, Raga Mala, conducted by Zubin Mehta, in 1981, and in 1988, he performed in Moscow with 140 musicians, including the Russian Folk Ensemble and members of the Moscow Philharmonic. His liberal views on musical cooperation led him to contemporary composer Philip Glass, with whom he released an album, Passages, in 1990, in a project initiated by Peter Baumann of the band Tangerine Dream. Shankar's influence extended to the political sphere as well; from 1986 to 1992, he served as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Parliament of India, after being nominated by Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. He composed the dance drama Ghanashyam in 1989 and continued to perform between 25 and 40 concerts every year during the late 1990s. In 1997, he became a Regents' Professor at the University of California, San Diego, and taught his daughter Anoushka Shankar to play the sitar. The 2000s saw him win a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album for Full Circle: Carnegie Hall 2000, and he toured with Anoushka, who released a book about her father, Bapi: Love of My Life, in 2002. After George Harrison's death in 2001, Shankar performed at the Concert for George, a celebration of Harrison's music staged at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2002. In June 2008, he played what was billed as his last European concert, but his 2011 tour included dates in the United Kingdom, and on the 1st of July 2010, at the Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall, Anoushka Shankar performed with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by David Murphy, which was billed the first Symphony by Ravi Shankar.