Ravi Shankar
1920 – 2012 · India
Known for: Indian sitar virtuoso who made Indian classical music known across the world
“He opened the world's ear to the ragas of India.”
Biography
Ravi Shankar was born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury on 7 April 1920 in Benares, now Varanasi, the youngest of seven brothers in a Bengali Hindu family. His father, a barrister and scholar, worked in London and did not meet his son until the boy was eight. At ten he joined the dance troupe of his eldest brother, the choreographer Uday Shankar, in Paris, and by thirteen was a member of the company, touring Europe and the United States, learning to dance and to play several Indian instruments and discovering Western classical music, jazz and the cinema. In 1934 he heard the court musician Allauddin Khan play in Calcutta. Khan offered to train him seriously on one condition, that he give up touring and come to Maihar, and in 1938 Shankar did exactly that.
The training took seven years. He lived in Khan's household under the old gurukul system, studied sitar and surbahar, the ragas and the styles of dhrupad and khyal, and made his sitar debut in December 1939 in a jugalbandi with Khan's son Ali Akbar Khan. A decade of work in India followed: ballets for the Indian People's Theatre Association in Bombay, the post of music director at All India Radio in New Delhi from 1949 to 1956, where he founded the Indian National Orchestra and set Indian and Western instruments side by side, and the scores for Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy. In 1956 he left the radio to play for Western listeners, at first small audiences whom he taught as much as he entertained, and recorded his first LP, Three Ragas, in London. Yehudi Menuhin became his friend and partner; in the 1960s George Harrison became his pupil, and a raga could suddenly be heard behind a pop song. He played at Monterey in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969, wrote concertos for sitar and orchestra, and insisted always on the discipline behind the sound.
He toured the world through the 1970s and 1980s and served as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament, from 1986 to 1992. He received four Grammy Awards, among them Album of the Year in 1973 for The Concert for Bangladesh, an Academy Award nomination for the score of Gandhi, and in 1999 the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour. He taught his daughter Anoushka Shankar the sitar and lived to see another daughter, Norah Jones, become a singer of an entirely different kind. He performed almost to the end and died on 11 December 2012 in San Diego, aged ninety two, after surgery to replace a heart valve.