From the Introduction to Indian Sun

An Unending Quest

Why are you writing about me now? You should wait until I’m gone, otherwise how can you possibly write a fair and unbiased story? – Ravi Shankar

In an old Indian parable, a group of blind men who have never before encountered an elephant inspect one using their hands. Each touches a different part of the animal: the man who feels the trunk believes the object is a huge snake; the one who grabs the tail thinks it is a rope; the one who touches a leg thinks it is a tree. In 1966, at the height of what he called ‘the sitar explosion’, Ravi Shankar related this story to a London press conference. It was, he explained, the same with Indian classical music: in whichever country it was played, the locals saw resemblances to their own music. Americans said it was like jazz; Japanese compared it to their folk music. ‘But the similarities are very superficial,’ he said. ‘Beyond that, there is something very deep that is yet to be appreciated by Westerners.’

Ravi Shankar made it his life’s mission to spread understanding and love of Indian classical music. When he took it up himself in the 1920s and 1930s, it was an elite art form that was struggling to survive on the waning patronage of maharajas and rich landowners. First he played a leading role in its revival in India as a national classical art form; then, from the mid-1950s onwards, he took it abroad to the world’s foremost concert halls, festival stages and airwaves. He had a rare gift for making new audiences thrill to a previously alien music. It was as if the incense sticks that smouldered during his concerts were slow-burning fuses setting off chain reactions across the worlds of rock, pop, jazz, folk and Western classical music.

By the end of 1967, it was clear that he was having a global effect. He was Billboard’s Artist of the Year, the guru to a Beatle, and – alongside his legendary tabla accompanist Alla Rakha – the show-stealing sensation of the Monterey Pop Festival. He was in the middle of a six-month run at the top of the classical album charts, and had just performed a duet with Yehudi Menuhin in the United Nations General Assembly, East meeting West in a symbolic encounter. Hollywood had commissioned him to write a film score, and a feature documentary was being made about him. John Coltrane had named his son Ravi, the Doors were attending his music school, and Marc Bolan had been inspired to remodel himself. Demand was so high that a dozen Ravi Shankar albums were released that year alone in America. ‘Due to the influence of Shankar, the music of the East is no longer strange to the occidental ears,’ proclaimed Billboard.

If the mid-1960s passion for all things Indian was only temporary, Ravi Shankar’s impact outlasted the craze. Over time he became a one-man representative of not only a system of music, but an entire culture. As an icon of India, he ranks not far below Gandhi or the Taj Mahal. At one stage there were three Indian restaurants named after him on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue alone (none with his endorsement).

He also lived one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary lives. He had an uncanny habit of being an eyewitness to historic events all around the world. He was born in India when the nation was struggling to evict the British, toured Weimar Germany as a child star just as Hitler was rising to power, danced at Carnegie Hall and partied at the Cotton Club, met Clark Gable and Joan Crawford in Hollywood, sang for Gandhi and was blessed by India’s great poet Rabindranath Tagore – all before he was eighteen. Only then did he switch his focus from dance to music. He came to national recognition at the time of India’s independence, toured the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, was invited to America in 1956 thanks to the CIA, and moved to California just in time for the Summer of Love. He shone a spotlight on Bangladesh’s liberation struggle, played inside the Kremlin in the midst of glasnost, and served as a member of India’s parliament.

Ravi obviously liked the parable of the blind men and the elephant. In 1974 he deployed it as a metaphor again, this time in a book on India, when he wanted to portray the extraordinary diversity of the country – from the Himalayan glaciers to the tropical backwaters of Kerala, from the turbaned desert nomads of Rajasthan to the tribal hill peoples of the north-east. But the metaphor is equally apt for describing public conceptions of Ravi Shankar himself: the sitar maestro, the musical missionary, the counterculture hero, the orchestral pioneer, the traditionalist, the innovator, the soundtrack composer of the Apu Trilogy, the ‘Godfather of World Music’, as George Harrison labelled him, or the ‘part-sadhu, part-playboy’, as India Today once called him. He was so multi-faceted and long-lived that everyone knows a different part of him, and most have struggled to understand the whole person.

This book, the first biography of Ravi Shankar (apart from his own), takes on that challenge. I first met and worked with him in 1994, when he was seventy-four. Over the eighteen years he had yet to live, I came to know him well and we met on many different occasions. At first I was his editor, but he subtly encouraged me into the role of future biographer, happy to update me regularly on the latest developments in his life. It was easy to like him; he had a rare ability to connect with people of all backgrounds, and I was awestruck by his prodigious musicality. Yet he understood the need for his life story to be told objectively. When Richard Attenborough went to see India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru about making a film on Gandhi – the film that, with a soundtrack by Ravi, would triumph at the Oscars two decades later – Nehru’s advice was that it would be wrong to deify the Mahatma: ‘He was too great a man for that.’ Ravi Shankar deserves the same approach.

Top: Ravi Shankar conducting a recording session for Uday Utsav with musicians including Shubhendra Rao, Deepak Choudhury and Lakshmi Shankar, 1983. Photo by Alan Kozlowski.