Ravi Shankar

Pandit Ravi Shankar (; born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury, sometimes spelled as Ravindra Shankar Chowdhury; and influenced many musicians in India and throughout the world. Shankar was awarded India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999. He is also the father of American singer Norah Jones and British-American musician and sitar player Anoushka Shankar.

Shankar was born to a Bengali family in India, and spent his youth as a dancer touring India and Europe with the dance group of his brother Uday Shankar. At age 18, he gave up dancing to pursue a career in music, studying the sitar for seven years under court musician Allauddin Khan. After finishing his studies in 1944, Shankar worked as a composer, creating the music for the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, and was music director of All India Radio, New Delhi, from 1949 to 1956.

In 1956, Shankar began to tour Europe and America, playing Indian classical music. He increased its popularity there in the 1960s through teaching, performance, and his association with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and Beatles guitarist George Harrison. His influence on Harrison helped popularize the use of Indian instruments in Western pop music in the latter half of the 1960s. Shankar engaged Western music by writing compositions for sitar and orchestra and touring the world in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1986 to 1992, he served as a nominated member of Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Parliament of India. He continued to perform until the end of his life. He was a recipient of numerous prestigious musical accolades, including a Polar Music Prize and four Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year for The Concert for Bangladesh in 1973, as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score for scoring the blockbuster Gandhi (1982).

Early life Shankar was born on 7 April 1920 in Benares (now Varanasi), then the capital of the princely state of the same name, in a Bengali Hindu family, as the youngest of seven brothers. His father, Shyam Shankar Chowdhury, was a Middle Temple barrister and scholar who was from Narail district of modern-day Bangladesh (then Jessore district in Bengal, British India). A statesman, lawyer, and politician, he served for several years as dewan (Prime Minister) of Jhalawar State, Rajasthan, and used the Sanskrit spelling of the family name and removed its last part. Shyam was married to Hemangini Devi, who hailed from a small village named Nasrathpur in Mardah block of Ghazipur district, near Benares and her father was a prosperous landlord. Shyam later worked as a lawyer in London, England,

At the age of 10, after spending his first decade in Benares, Shankar went to Paris with the dance group of his brother, choreographer Uday Shankar. By the age of 13 he had become a member of the group, accompanied its members on tour and learned to dance, and play various Indian instruments. Shankar heard Allauddin Khan – the lead musician at the court of the princely state of Maihar – play at a music conference in December 1934 in Calcutta, and Uday persuaded the Maharaja of Maihar H.H. Maharaja Brijnath Singh Judev in 1935 to allow Khan to become his group's soloist for a tour of Europe. In 1938, Shankar decided to leave his dancing career to study Indian classical music under the tutelage of Khan in Maihar. He lived with Khan’s family as part of the traditional gurukul system. He often studied with Khan's children Ali Akbar Khan and Annapurna Devi.

Shankar completed his musical training in 1944. Shankar recomposed the music for the popular song "Sare Jahan Se Achcha" at the age of 25. He began to record music for His Master's Voice and worked as a music director for All India Radio (AIR), New Delhi, from February 1949 until January 1956. Beginning in the mid-1950s he composed the music for the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, which became internationally acclaimed. He was music director for several Hindi movies including Godaan and Anuradha.

1956–1969 International performances

V. K. Narayana Menon, director of AIR Delhi, introduced the Western violinist Yehudi Menuhin to Shankar during Menuhin's first visit to India in 1952. Shankar had performed as part of a cultural delegation in the Soviet Union in 1954 and Menuhin invited Shankar in 1955 to perform in New York City for a demonstration of Indian classical music, sponsored by the Ford Foundation.

Shankar heard about the positive response Khan received and resigned from AIR in 1956 to tour the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. He played for smaller audiences and educated them about Indian music, incorporating ragas from the South Indian Carnatic music in his performances, and recorded his first LP album Three Ragas in London, released in 1956.

Shankar befriended Richard Bock, founder of World Pacific Records, on his first American tour and recorded most of his albums in the 1950s and 1960s for Bock's label. In 1967, Shankar performed a well-received set at the Monterey Pop Festival. While complimentary of the talents of several of the rock artists at the festival, he said he was "horrified" to see Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar on stage: "That was too much for me. In our culture, we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God." Shankar's live album from Monterey peaked at number 43 on Billboards pop LPs chart in the US, which remains the highest placing he achieved on that chart.

Shankar won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance for West Meets East, a collaboration with Yehudi Menuhin. He opened a Western branch of the Kinnara School of Music in Los Angeles, in May 1967, and published an autobiography, My Music, My Life, in 1968. He explained during an interview:

1970–2012: International performances In October 1970, Shankar became chair of the Department of Indian Music of the California Institute of the Arts after previously teaching at the City College of New York, the University of California, Los Angeles, and being guest lecturer at other colleges and universities, including the Ali Akbar College of Music. Shankar performed at the Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971, held at Madison Square Garden in New York. After the musicians had tuned up on stage for over a minute, the crowd of rock-music fans broke into applause, to which the amused Shankar responded, "If you like our tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more." which confused the audience. Still, the audience well received the subsequent performance. Although interest in Indian music had decreased in the early 1970s, the live album from the concert became one of the best-selling recordings to feature the genre and won Shankar a second Grammy Award.

In November and December 1974, Shankar co-headlined a North American tour with George Harrison. The demanding schedule weakened his health, and he suffered a heart attack in Chicago, causing him to miss a portion of the tour. Harrison, Shankar and members of the touring band visited the White House on invitation of John Gardner Ford, son of US president Gerald Ford. Shankar was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Music Score for his work on the 1982 movie Gandhi.

He performed in Moscow in 1988, with 140 musicians, including the Russian Folk Ensemble and members of the Moscow Philharmonic, along with his own group of Indian musicians. Shankar composed the dance drama Ghanashyam in 1989. He performed between 25 and 40 concerts every year during the late 1990s.

He performed with Anoushka for the BBC in 1997 at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham, England. In the 2000s, he won a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album for Full Circle: Carnegie Hall 2000 and 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, Shankar played what was billed as his last European concert,

On 1 July 2010, at the Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall, London, England, Anoushka Shankar, on sitar, performed with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by David Murphy, which was billed the first Symphony by Ravi Shankar.

Collaboration with George Harrison

The Beatles' guitarist George Harrison, who was first introduced to Shankar's music by the American singers Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, themselves big fans of Shankar, became influenced by Shankar's music. Harrison went on to help popularize Shankar and the use of Indian instruments in pop music throughout the 1960s. Olivia Harrison explains: 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. In 1968, he went to India to take lessons from Shankar, some of which were captured on film. This led to Indian music being used by other musicians and popularised the raga rock trend. The influence even extended to blues musicians such as Michael Bloomfield, who created a raga-influenced improvisation number, "East-West" (Bloomfield scholars have cited its working title as "The Raga" when Bloomfield and his collaborator Nick Gravenites began to develop the idea) for the Butterfield Blues Band in 1966.

I think Ravi was rather taken aback, because he was a classical musician, and rock and roll was really out of his sphere. He thought it rather amusing that George took to him so much, but he and George really bonded. Ravi realised that it wasn't just a fashion for George, that he had dedication. Ravi had such integrity, and was someone to be respected, and at the same time huge fun. George hadn't really met anyone like that, and he really encouraged his interest. — Patti Boyd During the visit, a documentary film about Shankar named Raga was shot by Howard Worth and released in 1971. Shankar's association with Harrison greatly increased Shankar's popularity, and decades later Ken Hunt of AllMusic wrote that Shankar had become "the most famous Indian musician on the planet" by 1966. During 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 after Shankar had toured Europe with the Harrison-sponsored Music Festival from India. Shankar wrote a second autobiography, Raga Mala, with Harrison as editor.

Style and contributions

Shankar developed a style distinct from that of his contemporaries and incorporated influences from rhythm practices of Carnatic music. Hans Neuhoff of Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart has argued that Shankar's playing style was not widely adopted and that he was surpassed by other sitar players in the performance of melodic passages. Ahir Lalit, Rasiya, Yaman Manjh, Gunji Kanhara, Janasanmodini, Tilak Shyam, Bairagi, In 2011, at a concert recorded and released in 2012 as Tenth Decade in Concert: Ravi Shankar Live in Escondido, Shankar introduced a new percussive sitar technique called Goonga Sitar, whereby the strings are muffled with a cloth.

Awards

Indian government honours Bharat Ratna (1999) Padma Vibhushan (1981) Padma Bhushan (1967) Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship (1975) Kalidas Samman from the Government of Madhya Pradesh for 1987–88

Other governmental and academic honours Ramon Magsaysay Award (1992) Commander of the Legion of Honour of France (2000) Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for "services to music" (2001) Honorary degrees from universities in India and the United States.

Arts awards 1964 fellowship from the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund Silver Bear Extraordinary Prize of the Jury at the 1957 Berlin International Film Festival (for composing the music for the movie Kabuliwala). UNESCO International Music Council (1975) Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize (1991) Praemium Imperiale for music from the Japan Art Association (1997) Four Grammy Awards 1967: Best Chamber Music Performance – West Meets East (with Yehudi Menuhin) 2002: Best World Music Album – Full Circle: Carnegie Hall 2000 2013: Best World Music Album – The Living Room Sessions Pt. 1 Lifetime Achievement Award received at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score, along with George Fenton, for Gandhi. First recipient of the Tagore Award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to cultural harmony and universal values (2013; posthumous)

Other honours and tributes 1997 James Parks Morton Interfaith Award American jazz saxophonist John Coltrane named his son Ravi Coltrane after Shankar. On 7 April 2016 (his 96th birthday), Google published a Google Doodle to honour his work. Google commented: "Shankar evangelized the use of Indian instruments in Western music, introducing the atmospheric hum of the sitar to audiences worldwide. Shankar's music popularized the fundamentals of Indian music, including raga, a melodic form and widely influenced popular music in the 1960s and 70s.". In September 2014, a postage stamp featuring Shankar was released by India Post commemorating his contributions.

Personal life and family In 1941, Shankar married Annapurna Devi (Roshanara Khan), daughter of musician Allauddin Khan. Their son, Shubhendra "Shubho" Shankar, was born in 1942.

An affair with Sue Jones, a New York concert producer, led to the birth of Norah Jones in 1979.

Shankar's son, Shubhendra, often accompanied him on tours. He could play the sitar and surbahar but elected not to pursue a solo career. Shubhendra died of pneumonia in 1992. and overall ten Grammy Awards as of 2025.

His daughter Anoushka Shankar was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album in 2003.

Shankar was a Hindu, and a devotee of the Hindu god Hanuman. He was also an "ardent devotee" of the Bengali Hindu saint, Sri Anandamayi Ma. Shankar used to visit Anandamayi Ma frequently and performed for her on various occasions. Shankar wrote of his hometown, Benares (Varanasi) and his initial encounter with "Ma": Varanasi is the eternal abode of Lord Shiva and one of my favorite temples is that of Lord Hanuman. The city is also where one of the miracles that have happened in my life took place: I met Ma Anandamayi, a great spiritual soul. Seeing the beauty of her face and mind, I became her ardent devotee. Sitting at home now in Encinitas in Southern California at the age of 88, surrounded by the beautiful greens, multi-colored flowers, blue sky, clean air and the Pacific Ocean, I often reminisce about all the wonderful places I have seen in the world. I cherish the memories of Paris, New York and a few other places. But Varanasi seems to be etched in my heart! Shankar was a vegetarian. He wore a large diamond ring that he said was manifested by Sathya Sai Baba. He lived with Sukanya in Encinitas, California.

Shankar performed his final concert with daughter Anoushka on 4 November 2012 at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California. Last Concert

Illness and death On 9 December 2012, Shankar was admitted to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, San Diego, California, after having complained of breathing difficulties. He died on 11 December 2012 at around 16:30 PST at age 92 after undergoing heart valve replacement surgery.

The Swara Samrat festival, organized on 5–6 January 2013 and dedicated to Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, included performances by such musicians as Shivkumar Sharma, Birju Maharaj, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Zakir Hussain, and Girija Devi.

Discography

Books