Ravi Shankar

It is the afternoon of 1 August 1971, and Madison Square Garden in New York is packed to its 20,000-seat roof. Almost everyone has come because a Beatle asked them to: George Harrison has summoned half the aristocracy of rock — Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, a rumour (true, it turns out) of Bob Dylan — for a concert in aid of refugees from a war most of the audience could not place on a map. But before any of that, four Indian musicians walk out and settle cross-legged on a carpeted riser: a compact, precise man of fifty-one with a sitar, the long-necked, gourd-bellied lute of North India; beside him a sarod player, a tabla player, and a woman holding the drone-lute called the tamboura.

The man with the sitar begins to check his tuning. The sarod answers. The tabla pats out a phrase. It goes on for a minute or two — small, exploratory sounds.

And the Garden erupts. Twenty thousand people, primed for transcendence, give the tuning a thunderous ovation.

The sitarist does not wince, does not lecture. He leans towards the microphone and says, with the timing of a man who has spent fifteen years gently correcting the largest audiences on earth: thank you — and if you have appreciated the tuning so much, he hopes you will enjoy the playing more.

The laughter that follows is warm, and it is laughing at itself. Then he names the piece — a dhun, a light melody, built on a folk tune of Bengal, because today is about Bengal — and for the next three-quarters of an hour the hall that came for rock and roll sits inside Indian classical music, properly played, nothing simplified, and does not fidget.

You have seen this collision — enthusiasm arriving before understanding: an audience clapping in the wrong place, a thing you love going viral for the wrong reason. Most people, offered adoration on those terms, take the adoration. The man on the riser spent his life doing something much harder: taking the world's wrong-footed love and patiently, concert by concert, turning it into the real thing.

He was born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury, in Benares, in 1920. The world came to know him as Ravi Shankar — and this chapter is about how a boy dancer from the holiest city in India became the man who could correct twenty thousand people with one sentence, and why he felt he had to.

The Life

Benares (Varanasi), 7 April 1920. The house is Bengali — a brahmin family whose roots lay east, in Jessore district of East Bengal, a fact that will matter enormously fifty-one years later. The father, Shyam Shankar Chowdhury, is a barrister and scholar who had served as dewan — chief minister — of the princely state of Jhalawar, and who is almost never home — years abroad, lecturing and practising law in London, a second family — and whom his youngest son would later reckon he met only a handful of times in childhood. The mother, Hemangini, raises seven sons in genteel near-poverty in the lanes of Benares. Robindro — "Robu" — is the youngest.

The eldest brother changed everything. Uday Shankar, twenty years older, had gone to London to study painting and stumbled into dance: in 1923 he partnered Anna Pavlova, the most famous ballerina alive, in duets on Indian themes. By 1930 Uday was assembling his own company in Paris to bring Indian dance to the West — and he sent for the family. So at ten years old, Robu left Benares for Paris, and spent the 1930s inside one of the strangest childhoods any Indian artist has had: a boy dancer and general apprentice in his brother's troupe, touring Europe and America, learning French, learning stagecraft, learning the West from the inside. Most Indian classical musicians of his generation met the West late, as bewildered guests. Ravi Shankar grew up in it. The polish came first; the depth came later. That inversion explains almost everything about his career.

The depth had a name: Allauddin Khan. In December 1934, at a music conference in Calcutta, the teenager heard the man musicians called Baba — "father" — a legendarily fierce, legendarily devout multi-instrumentalist who served as court musician at Maihar, a small princely state in central India. When Baba joined Uday's troupe as featured soloist for a European tour in 1935, he watched the gifted, scattered boy — dancing a little, playing several instruments a little — and delivered a verdict that stung for the rest of Shankar's life: he had talent, and he was wasting it, flitting like a butterfly. Real music would cost everything. Choose.

For three years the boy did not choose. Then in 1938, at eighteen, he did — and the choice still astonishes. He walked away from the touring life, the Paris hotels, the applause and the silk shirts, shaved off the dandyism, and went to Maihar: a dusty town, a spartan house, a teacher who screamed and, by every account including affectionate ones, occasionally threw things. What followed was a sādhana — the old word for spiritual discipline through practice — of almost monastic severity: living simply near the guru's household, practising as much as fourteen hours a day, beginning again from nothing. He stayed nearly seven years. In December 1939 he made his public debut in a jugalbandi — a duet of equals — with Baba's son Ali Akbar Khan, already on his way to becoming the greatest sarod player of the century. In 1941 he married Baba's daughter, Annapurna Devi; their son Shubhendra — Shubho — was born in 1942. By 1944, Baba pronounced the training complete, and Ravi Shankar left Maihar a master.

The marriage deserves its honest paragraph. Annapurna Devi was, by the testimony of nearly every musician who heard her, a genius in her own right — a peerless player of the surbahar, the deep bass sitar, trained by her father as rigorously as any son. The marriage failed; they separated in 1962 and later divorced. Around her withdrawal from public performance a contested legend has grown: one widely repeated telling holds that audiences' rapture at her playing strained the marriage, and that she vowed to stop performing to save it; others close to the family dispute parts of this, and Shankar's own accounts differ. What is beyond dispute is the outcome: she never pursued a public career, lived for decades as a near-recluse in Bombay (Mumbai), taught a handful of superb disciples, received the Padma Bhushan in 1977, and died in 2018 having left almost no recordings. Whether that silence was sacrifice, choice, temperament or injury is argued to this day; this book will not pretend to know. It is one of Indian music's most haunting stories.

The 1940s and 50s built the Indian half of his career, the half foreigners rarely know. In Bombay he wrote for the Indian People's Theatre Association, the leftist cultural movement — including, in 1945, the brisk marching tune in which India still sings Iqbal's (chapter 200) "Sāre Jahāṁ se Acchā" — still an official quick march of the armed forces. From February 1949 to January 1956 he was music director of All India Radio in Delhi, where he founded the Vadya Vrinda, the national chamber orchestra, and learned to compose for massed Indian instruments. And in 1955 a gaunt young Bengali director with an unfinished film and no money asked him for a score: Ravi Shankar composed and recorded the music for Pather Panchali in a single marathon sitting — around eleven hours, by the standard telling — between concert engagements. The film conquered the world; Shankar scored the rest of the Apu Trilogy too, and later Hindi cinema (Anuradha, 1960) and, later still, Hollywood.

In 1956 he resigned from AIR and went west as a soloist — Ali Akbar Khan had preceded him the year before, at Yehudi Menuhin's invitation — and the story most people know began: the tours, the famous students, the festivals, the fame, all told properly in the next section. The personal life ran less tidily; it is stated here plainly, as public record. His companion from the late 1940s until 1981 was Kamala Shastri (Chakravarty), the dancer who sat onstage at Madison Square Garden holding the tamboura. A relationship with the New York concert producer Sue Jones brought a daughter in 1979 — Norah Jones, who grew up mostly apart from him after 1986, estranged for years before reconciling as an adult, and a world-famous singer entirely on her own terms. And with Sukanya Rajan, whom he married in 1989, came his youngest child, Anoushka, born 1981 — the daughter he trained himself, from age nine, as his musical heir. Shubho, his first son, who had performed with him, died in 1992. He carried the tangle of it without much self-forgiveness; his autobiography is candid that the people around him often paid for his freedoms.

Honours arrived in every register: Padma Vibhushan in 1981, a nominated seat in the Rajya Sabha — India's upper house — from 1986 to 1992, the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1992, and in 1999 the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour. He never stopped playing. On 4 November 2012, aged ninety-two and on supplemental oxygen, he gave his last concert, with Anoushka beside him, at Long Beach, California. On 11 December 2012 he died in San Diego after heart-valve surgery. Two months later the Grammys he could not attend gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award — and, that same week, a fourth competitive Grammy, for an album recorded in his living room.

The Great Work

First, learn what a rāga actually is. The word is usually translated "melody" or "scale," and it is neither. A rāga is closer to a melodic personality, defined by law: a selected set of notes; rules for how you may ascend and descend through them; signature phrases that identify it as a gait identifies a friend; one or two notes it leans on and returns to; a prescribed time of day or season; and an emotional colour — the rāga Bhimpalāsī, which Shankar chose for a California afternoon in 1967, belongs to the late afternoon and carries longing in it. Within the rāga's laws the performance is improvised — composed in real time, never twice the same. A full recital has an architecture. It opens with the ālāp — the slow, unmetered unfolding, no drum, no beat, the musician introducing the rāga's notes one by one, sometimes for an hour, an act closer to meditation than to entertainment. A pulse steals in (joṛ), quickens to the shimmering climax of fast strumming called jhālā; then comes the gat, a fixed composition, and with it the tabla — the paired hand-drums — locking player and drummer into a tāla, a rhythmic cycle of sixteen or ten or seven beats, within which they improvise, spar, and land together on the cycle's first beat. Grammar below, freedom above: that paradox is the whole art. And here is what Ravi Shankar specifically did: he refused to abridge it. Where a lesser ambassador would have served foreigners the fireworks and cut the meditation, Shankar walked onto stages in Paris, New York and London and played the full architecture — extended ālāp included — trusting strangers to sit still for seriousness. They did. Critics who came to condescend stayed to rave. It was a bet that audiences rise to what you expect of them, and he won it on five continents.

The violinist and the Beatle. His two most famous students could not have been less alike, and together they map his method. Yehudi Menuhin, the great American violinist, met Shankar in Delhi in 1952 and approached Indian music the way one master approaches another's tradition — on his knees, technically speaking. Their 1966 collaboration West Meets East — Menuhin, at fifty, learning to play compositions in rāga form on his violin beside Shankar's sitar — won the 1967 Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance: the first Grammy ever awarded to an Indian musician. The other student arrived by accident. In October 1965, George Harrison had picked up a sitar — bought on Oxford Street — and plinked out the riff of "Norwegian Wood" before he had ever met an Indian master; the two men met only in June 1966, at a London dinner party, where the most famous musician on the planet asked, in effect, to start from zero. Shankar, who had barely heard of the Beatles, set his condition: properly or not at all. That autumn Harrison spent six weeks in India — Bombay, then a houseboat in Srinagar — learning to hold the sitar correctly, taught, to his evident relief, as a beginner rather than a Beatle. The friendship became the deepest of both their lives. The consequence became a circus. "Norwegian Wood" plus the Harrison connection detonated the great sitar boom of 1966–68: sitars whined across pop radio, "raga-rock" became a marketing word, and boutiques sold the instrument as furniture for the psychedelic lifestyle. Shankar found his concerts suddenly full of eighteen-year-olds — which delighted him — who thought his music was drug paraphernalia — which appalled him.

Worship, not psychedelia. Here is the tension the rest of his fame sits on. Shankar took the counterculture's stages: Monterey Pop in June 1967, where the festival gave him a slot to himself on Sunday afternoon and he played, to a flower-strewn, rain-washed field, one of the sets of his life — and then watched, from the wings that evening, as Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar. He was appalled, and said so for the rest of his days: in his culture, he explained, instruments are venerated — treated as sacred, almost as part of God — and burning one was close to blasphemy. At Woodstock in August 1969 he played through a downpour, with his lifelong tabla partner Alla Rakha beside him, and hated nearly everything about it; he later compared the vast stoned crowd in the mud to water buffaloes wallowing in an Indian village pond, and said the music felt incidental to the party. He never played that circuit again. In the clubs and halls of the late sixties he did something almost no performer dares: he policed his audience. When the sweet smoke drifted up, he would stop playing, say quietly that this music required a clear mind — that to its makers it was worship, a path to God, not an enhancement for a high — and wait, or walk. Purists sneered that he was a showman courting hippies; hippies grumbled that he was a scold. He absorbed both charges and kept the line: everyone was welcome, the music would not be bent. Note what he was defending — not his image, but his art's meaning, against its most enthusiastic market.

The concert that invented the benefit. In the spring of 1971, Pakistan's army launched its crackdown in East Bengal, and the refugees began walking into India — nearly ten million of them by that winter, into cholera-ravaged camps in a delta still reeling from the previous November's cyclone. Shankar, whose own family came from Jessore in that very delta, was sick with helplessness, and he took his anguish to his most famous friend: could they do something — a concert, perhaps, something bigger than the few thousand dollars his own recitals could raise? George Harrison went far beyond anything he had imagined: within weeks he had written and released a single named for the country ("Bangla Desh"), booked Madison Square Garden, and called in Dylan, Clapton, Ringo Starr, Leon Russell and Billy Preston. On 1 August 1971, two shows — afternoon and evening, forty thousand seats — opened not with the stars but with Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty playing "Bangla Dhun," Bengal's folk melody raised into the classical idiom: India's grief, stated in India's language, before the rock and roll began. The tuning ovation, and Shankar's immortal one-liner, happened here. The receipts tell both halves of the story. Ticket sales delivered roughly a quarter of a million dollars to UNICEF within days — and then the album (which won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1973) and the concert film kept earning for decades, some twelve million dollars for Bangladesh by the mid-1980s and far more since — though a painful lesson rode along: nobody had registered the project for tax exemption in advance, and millions sat frozen in escrow for years. Good intentions, it turned out, need paperwork. But the template was set — the model that Live Aid's organizers openly acknowledged in 1985, and that every all-star fundraiser since has copied: celebrity converted into logistics for the suffering of strangers. It is worth saying plainly, because the credit usually goes elsewhere: the modern benefit concert began as an Indian musician's idea, born of grief for Bengal, brought to a friend who happened to be a Beatle.

The composer, and the argument with the purists. Performing was half his output. The AIR years had taught him to write for ensembles, and he never stopped: scores for Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy and for Anuradha; decades later, Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), written with George Fenton, which brought an Academy Award nomination. He composed two concertos for sitar and orchestra — the first commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra and premiered in 1971 under André Previn, the second, Rāga-Mālā, with the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta in 1981 — and late in life, with Harrison producing, the serene 1997 album Chants of India, Vedic and devotional texts set for voices and instruments. He also enlarged the tradition from inside, introducing over thirty new rāgas — Tilak Shyam, Nat Bhairav, Parameshwari among them — a prerogative only the greatest claim. All of this fed the longest-running argument about him: to conservative critics at home, the Grammys and film stars and orchestras proved him a populariser who had sold the tradition to the West. The evidence mostly refuses the charge. His concert platform remained, for sixty years, uncompromised rāga performance — the experiments lived in clearly-labelled side projects, and even his sternest critics conceded that when he sat down with the sitar, no note was dumbed down for anyone. The concertos are the genuinely arguable case — rāga material fitted, some say fatally, into Western symphonic form — and honest listeners still disagree about them. He would have accepted the argument cheerfully. Bridges, he insisted, are built from a bank: his was Maihar, and he never left it.

Before & After

Backward, this chapter pays a debt planted two hundred pages ago. Tānsen (chapter 133), Akbar's court singer, left a musical dynasty — the house of Sen, the Senia tradition — through his daughter Sarasvatī and her husband Naubat Khān, the line of bīnkārs, masters of the ancient stick-zither bīn. As the tradition traces it, that line ran down the centuries to Wazir Khan of Rampur (1860–1926), the aristocratic keeper of the Senia inheritance — and Wazir Khan's disciple was a poor, ferociously determined Bengali named Allauddin Khan, who carried the treasure to Maihar and poured it into his son Ali Akbar, his daughter Annapurna, and his son-in-law Ravi Shankar. When Shankar played the long ālāp at Monterey, the grammar in his hands descended, teacher by teacher, from the man who sang for Akbar. Behind Tānsen stand the book's older musical pillars — Amīr Khusrau (chapter 108), around whom legend gathered the sitar's very invention, and Purandara Dāsa (chapter 129) in the south. The world Shankar was born into was Tagore's (chapter 188): the Bengali renaissance's confidence that India's arts belonged on the world's stage — Uday's troupe rode exactly the circuit that confidence opened. And his precise contemporary M. S. Subbulakshmi (chapter 230) makes the perfect pairing: within three years, the two musicians India sent to the world — she singing to the United Nations in 1966, he playing to the mud-soaked half-million at Woodstock in 1969 — sanctity's two very different stages.

Forward, the threads fan out. Satyajit Ray (chapter 239), whose first masterpiece carries Shankar's overnight score, is four chapters away. Lata Mangeshkar (chapter 248) ruled the film-song world his concert world ran beside. Watch, above all, the tabla player at his side at Monterey, Woodstock and Madison Square Garden: Alla Rakha, whose son — the Bombay boy into whose ear he whispered rhythms instead of prayers at birth — will take the tabla itself around the world as Ustad Zakir Hussain (chapter 269). And when A. R. Rahman (chapter 295) collects Grammys and Oscars for carrying India's sound abroad, he walks a road with Shankar's name on the paving. The global rhyme is the 1960s itself, when the non-Western world's classical arts first claimed the West's biggest stages — and Shankar stands out for doing it without exoticizing himself: no incense marketing, no mystic act, just the art at full strength, patiently explained.

Why It Still Matters

Start with the obvious: every Indian musician who fills a hall in London, New York or Tokyo — every "world music" category, every festival stage that assumes a rāga deserves the same silence as a string quartet — is downstream of the audiences Ravi Shankar trained, one tuning joke at a time. He did not just export performances; he exported the standards for hearing them.

Then the invention nobody names after him: the benefit concert. From Live Aid to post-disaster telethons to streamed fundraisers, the machinery of turning fame into aid — and even its cautionary fine print about accounting and escrow — was prototyped on 1 August 1971, at his initiative, for Bengali refugees. It is one of modern India's quietest exports: the idea that a musician's grief can be operationalized.

But the live wire, the reason his story feels more current every year, is the tension he refused to resolve comfortably. India's culture is now a global commodity on a scale he never saw — yoga flattened into athleisure, meditation into an app store category, turmeric into a latte. The standing temptation, for any culture whose treasures go viral, is to sell the vibe and let the substance go. Shankar is the great counter-example: he took the biggest, least comprehending market in history — took its stages, its students, its record deals — and never once let it redefine the product. He corrected his customers, walked out on his own fans — and the serious audience he insisted on building outlasted the fad by half a century. Anyone who stewards anything precious — a craft, a tradition, a firm's integrity — will eventually face Shankar's choice between being loved for the wrong reasons and understood for the right ones; he showed that, with enough patience, you can refuse the first and still win the second.

And there is the quieter lesson of Maihar: that the glamorous decade of his childhood only became greatness after seven years of obscurity under a hard master. In a culture of shortcuts, his life argues the old Indian case — sādhana first, stages later — and every young musician in India who disappears into practice is retracing his road.

Over to You

The sitar boom brought millions to his concerts for the wrong reasons, and he spent years converting or ejecting them. Is mass misunderstanding an acceptable entry price for an art form's global reach — or does it damage the art in ways no later correction can repair?

Annapurna Devi may have been his equal or better, and the world got her silence while it got his fame. What do we owe the brilliant people who withdraw — and can we ever fairly judge a marriage of two geniuses from the outside?

His stage repertoire stayed uncompromised, but the concertos poured rāga into Western symphonic moulds. Where exactly is the line between translating an art and flattening it — and who gets to draw that line: the tradition, the artist, or the audience?

He corrected, scolded and occasionally abandoned his own audiences — and they loved him more for it. In an age when creators are told the audience is always right, was that authority a product of his era, or would it still work today?

Where to Go Next

Start with the source: The Sounds of India (Columbia, 1958) — a studio album in which Shankar himself speaks before each piece, explaining rāga, tāla and the ālāp to a newcomer, then demonstrates; it is the gentlest possible door, taught by the master's own voice. His autobiography Rāga Mālā (1997), edited by George Harrison, is candid, gossipy and generous.

A modern way in: Oliver Craske's Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar (2020), the full authorized biography — thorough, unsparing on the personal life, superb on the music. Pair it with the restored documentary Raga (1971), which films him with Baba at Maihar, with Menuhin, and with Harrison, in his prime.

The thread forward: The next chapter stays in the birth-year 1920 and reverses the compass. While one man born that spring carried India's oldest art westward, another spent those same decades building, at home, the newest one — wind tunnels, launch vehicles, and a culture of taking blame. Chapter 236: Satish Dhawan, the quiet engineer who taught India's space programme how to fail in public and succeed in private.