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Ravi Shankar
is one of the giants of twentieth century music. A musician in the public
eye since 1930 who developed into a classical artist of the highest
rank, he led the worldwide growth in Indian music, and is acknowledged
by many from divergent domains as the key influence on their lives and
careers.
For Yehudi Menuhin, meeting Ravi Shankar precipitated a life-changing
interest in Indian music and culture. Fourteen years later, George Harrison
was similarly inspired, Shankar again the guide who became a lifelong
friend. John Coltrane was so impressed that he named his own son Ravi.
According to Philip Glass, who considers Shankar one of his two principal
teachers (along with Nadia Boulanger), Westerners’ Eurocentric
view of the world has been transformed in the second half of the twentieth
century, due in part to Shankar, who he describes as ‘without any
doubt the most important cultural ambassador for India’. Shankar
uncovered a new audience outside India for himself and also for hundreds
of other Indian musicians who followed in his footsteps; and even, one
could argue, for the whole field of World Music.
How far must one go back to uncover the roots of his colossal influence?
There remains a perception among some in the West that he was a phenomenon
that emerged in the Sixties. His name is forever linked to the Monterey
and Woodstock festivals, to George Harrison and The Beatles, to the
fascination with India that flowered then. Though he was ambivalent
about how his music came to be portrayed by some, the period brought
him worldwide fame, which he relished, and a long-term mass audience,
for which he is ever grateful.
Yet even this view tells but one chapter of the story. For even before
the meeting with Harrison in 1966 which precipitated his global surge,
he was already the leading international emissary for Indian music.
Menuhin, Glass and Coltrane, among many others, had already fallen under
the spell of his music. He first performed as a solo artist in the USSR
in 1954, in Europe and North America in 1956, and Japan in 1958. Moreover,
in the decades since the craziest years of his superstardom his artistic
stock has risen even higher, and he is now venerated as an elder statesman
in his field.
The roots of the artist’s success go deeper, though. During the
Forties and Fifties he had already become a household name in India.
First and foremost he was a scintillating performer on sitar, but his
accomplishments went beyond that. He was Director of Music at the Indian
People’s Theatre Association, and later held the same position
at All India Radio. He began composing new ragas (which number over
thirty to date), and wrote a new melody for Mohammed Iqbal’s patriotic
poem ‘Sare Jahan Se Accha’ — which to this day remains
a ubiquitous national song (although Shankar’s melody is often
wrongly attributed as ‘traditional’). He also mounted ambitious
theatrical productions and provided award-winning cinema scores; India’s
greatest director, Satyajit Ray, invited Shankar to compose the scores
for four of his films, including the ground-breaking Apu Trilogy.
Going back still further, the details of his childhood are scarcely
credible: born a Brahmin in India’s holiest city, Varanasi, he
spent his first ten years in relative poverty before the family moved
wholesale to Paris in 1930. Over the next eight years he enjoyed the
limelight as a dancer and musician in the celebrated troupe led by his
legendary brother Uday Shankar, which toured the world introducing Europeans,
Americans and many Indians to Indian classical and folk dance, in a
foreshadowing of Ravi’s own pioneering of Indian music in the West
two decades later.
Pitched into the glamour and tumult of the Paris and New York highlife,
he remembers meeting Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, Andres Segovia, Clark
Gable and Joan Crawford. He saw Shalyapin at the Paris Opera, Stravinsky,
Toscanini, Heifetz and Kreisler, Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club, Louis
Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, W. C. Fields and more. As a
twelve-year-old dancer, he was acclaimed in the New York Times. He even
featured on sitar and esraj on the West’s first album of Indian
classical music, recorded by Uday’s troupe in New York in 1937.
All invaluable groundwork for a life spent bridging two worlds.
He was likewise blessed with a enviable introduction to India’s
arts. His father was a learned statesman, lawyer, philosopher, writer
and amateur musician; a neglected Ravi was nearly eight before he first
met him, but came to appreciate his father’s greatness and restless
spirit, which he undoubtedly inherited. Uday, twenty years older than
his youngest brother, was a huge artistic influence, instilling a talent
for stagecraft and a reverence for India’s heritage. The latter
was strengthened by an inspirational meeting at thirteen with India’s
greatest cultural figure of the century, the writer, composer and artist
Rabindranath Tagore.
Yet all this was only preparation for the decisive influence on his
life. In 1938, aged eighteen, Shankar began seven years of intensive
training with his music guru, Ustad Allauddin Khan. According to guru-shishya
principles, the guru is revered as the source of all knowledge; the
relationship was a close and highly spiritual one, and fundamental to
his emergence as a peerless musician in the classical tradition.
From these origins emerged a charismatic artist who has synthesised
the contradictions in himself: one who encapsulates both East and West;
sophisticated, but able to feel and convey powerful spirituality; an
innovative composer yet highly traditional as a performer; a teacher
of hundreds of disciples who is always creatively open; a tireless spirit
who nevertheless thinks he could have worked harder in life; at home
with all breeds of musicians and all peoples of the world, one who fulfils
Kipling’s criterion of being able to ‘walk with kings nor
lose the common touch’. Somewhere in here we might begin to understand
how he has touched so many so deeply.
Buy
Ravi Shankar In Portrait DVD from Amazon.co.uk
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