Ravi Shankar was born to a Bengali family as Robindra Shankar Chowdhury on 7th April 1920 in Banaras, north India. The story of the Bengali is a story of displacement—not just the displacement that came from the partition of the state upon independence in 1947, but also cultural displacement and remaking. Shankar’s life and work is an exemplary product of this history. His father Shyam Shankar Chowdhury was a displaced Brahmin who was also a Middle Temple barrister and a man who, at the time of Shankar’s birth, had made his home outside Bengal, in Banaras. Ravi Shankar was what Bengalis would have called a prabashi Bangali—an “expatriate Bengali,” part of a colonial scattering that fed accidentally into the resurrection of classical traditions. Like much of world history in both the west and the east, Indian tradition as we know it today is a recent reinvention; and Shankar would be one of its great reinventors.
The name Robindra, which became “Ravi,” is quite possibly a homage to Rabindranath Tagore, whose experimentation not only with genres but also how to live as an Indian and as an artist was a precursor for Shankar. Tagore’s willingness to hit, miss or discover prefigures the unpredictable shifts in the sitar player’s life. The word robi or, in its Devanagari spelling, ravi, means “sun,” and its punning, life-giving force is referenced in the title of Oliver Craske’s compendious and immensely readable new biography, Indian Sun.
Ravi Shankar was the youngest of seven brothers, of whom the oldest was another experimenter, the dancer Uday. Uday never learnt any of the Indian classical dance forms. He chose to create his own unique style from a general sense of the traditions. He started his education in London as a student of fine arts. The painter William Rothenstein became, Craske quotes Uday as saying, “the first to open my eyes to the greatness and beauty of India and her arts.” Rothenstein was one of those minor English figures who became midwives in the fashioning, and facilitating, of the arts in India. Earlier, he had circulated Tagore’s translation of his Bengali songs, the Gitanjali, among friends who included WB Yeats, leading to Tagore’s Nobel Prize in 1913. Now we find Rothenstein, in 1920, nudging Uday towards an amorphous wonder called “India.” Uday Shankar was soon discovered by Anna Pavlova, and became famous after he danced with her at Covent Garden.
Ravi, at this point drawn to dance, became part of Uday’s worldwide tours. On a trip to Calcutta in 1934, 14-year-old Ravi went to what was, and still is, called a classical music “conference” of performances by leading musicians. Here he first heard his future music teacher, Ustad Allauddin Khan, present an orchestral ensemble—unusual in Indian classical music. Craske writes: “On the first day he presented the Maihar Band, an ensemble he had formed from local orphaned boys to entertain guests at the royal palace in Maihar, where he was the court musician. Between them, they played sitar, sarod, tabla, violin, cello, clarinet, harmonium, a homemade sitar-banjo hybrid, and a xylophone-like invention of Allauddin Khan’s called the naltarang, made by cutting down 24 old gun barrels belonging to the maharaja’s guard.”
The next day, Allauddin Khan did the more expected thing: he gave a solo exposition on the sarod that “moved” Ravi “deeply.” Craske tells us that besides Tagore himself, also present was the 13-year-old Satyajit Ray for whose first film, Pather Panchali, Shankar would later score the music.
The next year, Shankar’s largely absent father—who had grown estranged from his wife Hemangini and taken an English companion—died. With Hemangini’s support, Ravi became Allauddin Khan’s student in 1938 in Maihar: a mix of house guest, house help and disciple. This was a leap on both sides: a boy from an educated family stepping away from his domain; a traditional virtuoso allowing the boundary around him to be breached. It is prescient of a crossing of territories that would happen later, in places like California, when Americans inspired by Ravi Shankar would pick up sitars. Shankar recalls his guru was demanding, but not punitive.
Allauddin Khan was, as Shankar put it in a typically acute throwaway remark, a great “impurist,” an artist who explored different styles of classical music, as well as the folk music of Bengal. If there’s one thing this book reveals, it is that there’s no static thing called “tradition.” What TS Eliot wrote in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is as true of Allauddin Khan as it is for Shankar: “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered.” And this is particularly pertinent to Shankar: tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”
Shankar practised throughout the day. “It was unusual for someone as old as Robu to be starting formal training,” writes Craske, “but he had the zeal of a convert.” An apt word, because the modern Indian arts—and the sitar is as much an emblem of modernity as the past—were often created by outsiders, rather than “natural” inheritors, with a quasi-religious fervour. I say “quasi” because it’s important to understand that the tradition—whatever its spiritual and philosophical moorings—is a secular one. It was called “classical” music to distinguish it from temple or scriptural music.
What Rothenstein had been to Tagore, George Harrison became to Shankar. But Harrison was more than a conduit; he was one of a group of artists in various genres of western music—Philip Glass, John Coltrane, Yehudi Menuhin, David Crosby—who learnt a new way of thinking about music from Shankar, while spreading his renown. (Coltrane and his wife Alice even called their son Ravi.) Shankar played across the major western venues, and appeared at the Monterey Festival and on The Dick Cavett Show with his perennial companion on the tabla, Alla Rakha. If you listen to these performances now, you find no dilution. You find an artist playing—despite having to accelerate like a high-speed train to showcase his art in a sometimes five-minute turn—with complete absorption and mastery, and executing rhythmic improvisations of such beauty that training is needed to grasp their full depth.
Craske tells us there was a sharp drop-off in his western listeners after Harrison and John Lennon disowned the Maharishi. (What did a godman have to do with the sitar?) By this time, Shankar was already concerned that Indian classical music had become conflated with psychedelia, drugs and rock, just as he’d resisted the comparisons made between Indian classical elaboration and jazz improvisation. Shankar was a populariser; but he was always a thinking musician—that’s where both his engagement with and his reservations about the west came from. At some point, the hippie mind had married the music to gods, yoga and incense sticks. The “sitar explosion” of the 1960s is a typical Indian boom-and-bust story, like that of Tagore, a modern poet mistaken in the west for a sage.
Two other sitar players should be mentioned. The first is Allauddin Khan’s daughter Annapurna Devi. She was Shankar’s first wife—a match made by his guru. The marriage festered in a few years before later ending, notwithstanding the birth of a son, Shubho. It has always been surrounded by speculation, gossip and judgment—mainly to do with whether Annapurna’s gifts as a musician threatened Ravi, and whether he frowned upon her playing in public. There were also, as Craske tells us, Annapurna’s own insecurities about Ravi’s faithfulness. Whatever the truth—and, as with every marriage, there’s maybe no single truth here—it’s worth remembering that husband and wife were extraordinary musicians with, despite having learnt from the same teacher, very different styles and temperaments. One was world conquering and sociable; the other reclusive. But a few private recordings of Annapurna’s playing can be found on YouTube: in comparison to Ravi’s liquid notes, hers are deep, and occasionally aggressive. Ravi may well have felt humbled listening to his wife, but it’s difficult to believe that a man of his generosity wouldn’t have been stirred. It’s also hard to believe that Annapurna would have underrated her husband’s incredible dexterity.
Then there’s Ustad Vilayat Khan, Shankar’s younger contemporary: the other great sitar player of the time. The term “the other” is problematic but inescapable, given Shankar’s worldwide fame. But it explains Khan’s chafing at Shankar, despite the respect they had for each other as musicians. Khan, like other critics, charged the increasingly famous Shankar of diluting classical music to please western audiences. There was also Khan’s influential playing technique: the extremely difficult but exquisite gayaki ang, or “singing style.” The human voice in north Indian classical music moves from note to note, sometimes serenely, sometimes with unbelievable intricacy, via the meend or glissando. In a string instrument like the sitar or guitar, the meend is a bent note, produced by a string being pulled sideways. Where a blues guitarist generally generates one bent note at once, Vilayat Khan, in an effort to emulate the human voice, found a way of producing four of five bent notes at a time. When someone asked Shankar if he ever played the gayaki ang, he received the irritable response: “No, I play the bhaisa ang,” or “buffalo style,” Shankar taking advantage of the homonymic closeness of the word gayaki to gaiki, or “of the cow.”
I watched Shankar play live twice, in the early and in the mid-1980s, the second time in a jugalbandi (or improvisational duet) with his brother-in-law Ali Akbar Khan. I went to listen to them with my mother, a great singer of the Tagore song, when I myself was deep into practising Hindustani classical music also with the “zeal of a convert” (a phrase I used in my 2009 novel about music, The Immortals). We noticed how much in form Shankar was, though both he and Ali Akbar Khan were in their sixties by then. To play with mastery at that age requires good health and sustained commitment—a passion independent of fame or reward.
The custodians of Indian classical music needn’t have worried: in Shankar, it had a propagator of not only immense gifts but great seriousness. Though I would later write the libretto for the opera Shankar conceived of as Sukanya—--his final project, based on a mythic character who shared his second wife’s name—I never met him: he died in 2012 before I could get to California, where he had moved 20 years earlier.
Shankar’s impact—and, through him, Indian music’s—on western rock, jazz and classical music has been profound. Craske’s biography is a reminder that we’re only now beginning to understand the cultural interfaces preceding Shankar and succeeding him, which shaped the sounds we’ve been hearing for over a century. In Shankar and his contemporaries we have a new type who still challenges our pervasive notions of west and east, the antique and the modern.
