Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar was born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury on April 7, 1920, in Varanasi, the ancient city on the Ganges in northern India, then part of the British Raj ^[1]. He was the youngest of several sons in a Bengali Brahmin family. His father, Shyam Shankar Chowdhury, was a lawyer and scholar who spent long periods abroad, and the boy grew up largely in the care of his mother, Hemangini Devi, in circumstances that were often financially strained despite the family's learned background ^[1].

The decisive influence of his childhood was his eldest brother, Uday Shankar, a dancer who had built an international reputation by fusing Indian classical dance with Western theatrical presentation. In 1930 the family moved to Paris to join Uday's touring dance troupe, and young Ravi spent his adolescence performing as a dancer and musician on stages in Europe and the United States ^[2]. By his early teens he had seen more of the world than most Indian musicians saw in a lifetime, an experience that later shaped his ease with Western audiences.

Touring life exposed him to both applause and temptation, and by his mid teens he faced a choice between a glamorous career as a dancer and the harder discipline of music. The turning point came through Allauddin Khan, the formidable court musician of Maihar state, who joined the Shankar troupe as a soloist in 1935. Khan saw talent in the boy but demanded total commitment before he would teach him ^[2].

In 1938 Shankar abandoned the stage life of Paris, shaved off his fashionable hair, and moved to the small town of Maihar in central India to live as a traditional disciple in Allauddin Khan's household ^[1]. For roughly six years he followed the old system of guru shishya parampara, practicing the sitar for many hours a day under a teacher famous for both his musical genius and his volcanic temper. Fellow students included Khan's son, the sarod master Ali Akbar Khan, and Khan's daughter Annapurna Devi, a gifted surbahar player whom Shankar married in 1941 ^[3].

He completed his training in 1944 and moved to Bombay, where he worked with the Indian People's Theatre Association and began composing. One early work reached an enormous audience: he wrote a new melody for the patriotic song "Sare Jahan Se Achha", a setting that became the standard version sung across India ^[3]. From 1949 to 1956 he served as music director of All India Radio in New Delhi, where he founded and led the Indian National Orchestra and experimented with combining Indian instruments in ensemble textures ^[1].

Film work broadened his reputation further. Shankar composed the scores for Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy, beginning with Pather Panchali in 1955, music that critics have long counted among the finest ever written for Indian cinema ^[4]. By the mid 1950s he was established at home as a leading sitarist and composer, and he began to look outward, resigning his radio post to tour the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States as a soloist.

Shankar's Western concerts in 1956 and 1957 introduced serious Hindustani classical performance to listeners who had rarely heard a full raga. He was a patient explainer, prefacing performances with short talks on the structure of the music, and his recordings for labels such as World Pacific found a growing audience ^[2]. His friendship with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin produced the 1966 album West Meets East, which won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance in 1967, the first Grammy given to an Indian musician ^[5].

The association that transformed his fame arrived the same year. George Harrison of the Beatles, who had used a sitar on the 1965 song "Norwegian Wood", sought out Shankar as a teacher, studying with him in London and in India ^[2]. The connection made Shankar an unlikely celebrity of the counterculture. He performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, at Woodstock in 1969, and at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, the pioneering benefit event he initiated with Harrison to aid refugees of the Bangladesh Liberation War ^[5]. The live album of that concert earned him another Grammy.

He remained ambivalent about pop stardom. Shankar often said he was troubled by audiences who associated his music with drug culture, and he insisted on the sitar's identity as a classical instrument demanding decades of study rather than a psychedelic novelty ^[2]. Any account of Ravi Shankar achievements has to hold both facts together: he reached millions through rock festivals while never diluting the classical forms he played.

The scale of Shankar's output sets him apart. He composed two concertos for sitar and orchestra, the first premiered with the London Symphony Orchestra under André Previn in 1971, along with pieces for violin and sitar, works for Japanese instruments, and ballet scores ^[3]. His film music included not only the Ray trilogy but the score for Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), which brought him an Academy Award nomination shared with George Fenton ^[4]. In 1990 he collaborated with the American composer Philip Glass on the album Passages, a meeting of minimalism and raga that both men counted among their significant works ^[5].

Honors accumulated across two hemispheres. India awarded him its highest civilian decoration, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999, after earlier conferring the Padma Vibhushan and multiple Sangeet Natak Akademi honors ^[1]. He received honorary doctorates, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and an honorary knighthood (KBE) from Queen Elizabeth II in 2001. He won five Grammy Awards in total, the last of them awarded posthumously in 2013 for The Living Room Sessions Part 1, along with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award ^[5].

Among the more unusual Ravi Shankar facts is his political service. He was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's parliament, and served as a member from 1986 to 1992, a recognition of his standing as a national cultural figure ^[1]. He also founded teaching institutions, including Kinnara schools of music in Bombay and Los Angeles in the 1960s and later the Ravi Shankar Institute for Music and Performing Arts, with the Ravi Shankar Foundation in California preserving his archive ^[6].

Shankar's private life was complicated and, by his own account in his autobiography Raga Mala, often unsettled ^[3]. His marriage to Annapurna Devi produced a son, Shubhendra Shankar, who performed alongside his father before dying in 1992. The marriage broke down and the couple eventually divorced. For many years his partner was the dancer Kamala Shastri, and he later had relationships that produced two daughters who both became celebrated musicians.

His daughter Norah Jones, born in 1979 to the New York concert producer Sue Jones, grew up largely apart from her father and rose to fame as a jazz and pop singer, winning multiple Grammy Awards herself ^[7]. His daughter Anoushka Shankar, born in 1981 to Sukanya Rajan, whom Shankar married in 1989, trained under her father from childhood and became a leading sitarist and composer in her own right, frequently performing at his side in his final decades ^[7].

From the 1990s Shankar lived mainly in Encinitas, near San Diego in southern California, with Sukanya, while keeping close ties to India and a home in Delhi. Friends and students described a man of discipline at the instrument and warmth away from it, devoted to his guru's memory and to the spiritual dimension he heard in the raga tradition ^[3].

Age barely slowed his performing schedule. Into his eighties and nineties Shankar continued to tour, often presenting concerts jointly with Anoushka, adapting his playing to reduced physical strength while retaining his command of melodic development ^[7]. He underwent heart surgery and other treatments in his later years yet kept accepting engagements, telling interviewers that performing remained his life's purpose.

His last public concert took place on November 4, 2012, in Long Beach, California, where he appeared with Anoushka despite needing supplemental oxygen ^[7]. Five weeks later, after heart valve replacement surgery, he died on December 11, 2012, at a hospital in the San Diego area at the age of 92 ^[8]. Tributes came from the Indian government, which declared national mourning gestures, and from musicians across classical, rock, and jazz traditions.

Weeks after his death, the Recording Academy honored him twice at the 2013 Grammy ceremony, where Anoushka was also a nominee in the same world music category ^[5]. The coincidence of father and daughter competing for the same award captured how completely his musical line continued.

Shankar changed what a global audience for Indian classical music could be. Before his tours, Hindustani performance outside South Asia was a scholarly curiosity; after him, ragas appeared in concert halls, film scores, and university curricula worldwide, and the sitar became one of the most recognized instruments on earth ^[2]. Yehudi Menuhin compared his artistry to that of Mozart, and George Harrison called him the godfather of world music, a label that stuck ^[5].

His influence runs through several streams: the classical students he trained in India and America, the Western composers and rock musicians who absorbed Indian ideas of rhythm and improvisation through him, and the fusion genres that his collaborations helped legitimize ^[6]. Institutions preserve the work. The Ravi Shankar Foundation maintains his recordings and manuscripts, and his centenary in 2020 brought retrospectives, reissues, and concerts on several continents ^[6].

Any Ravi Shankar biography ultimately returns to a single achievement: he proved that a strictly classical artist, refusing to simplify his tradition, could still speak to the widest possible public. Nine decades after his birth in Varanasi, his recordings remain the standard introduction to the sitar, and his family, students, and listeners carry the tradition he served forward ^[8].