Pandit Ravi Shankar: The Tansen Of Our Times

Pandit Ravi Shankar with Allah Rakha (left) at the Monterey Pop Festival in California, in June 1967; Photo: Don Nelson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

By the time Ravi Shankar was eighteen, however, he realized two things: the first was that he must learn the Indian classical music systematically with Ustad Allauddin Khan; and second, that he must make the West ac­cept Indian classical music as a high art. He knew, perhaps instinctively, that he had a greater tryst in life than to amuse the well meaning orientalists of the pre-Second World War Europe. He could not but have been con­scious of the fact that platitudes apart, the West was loath to accept any art but their own as entirely significant. To get past that ceiling, he would have to delve the depths of his own tradition and lift it to greater heights instead of merely re-packaging its more super­ficial attractions.

By the time he returned to India in 1938, both his parents had died. His largely missing father Shyam Shankar Chow­dhury, had been murdered in London in 1936 and his long-suffering mother Hemangini Devi died in India two years lat­er. Ravi Shankar shaved off his hair in ritual mourning, packed a few simple cotton kurta pyjamas in a tin trunk and made his way to the tiny principality of Maihar in what is now Madhya Pradesh. He now formally sought the discipleship of the temperamentally mercu­rial master Baba Allauddin Khan, who was the court musician of Raja Brijnath Singh, the ruler of Maihar State. They had met two years earlier when Baba had toured Europe with Uday Shankar’s troupe as a soloist in 1936. Though the master was very affection­ate, he had made it clear that young Robi, as he was then called, was too much of a dandy and a dilettante. If he was serious about learn­ing classical music, it would have to be on the master’s terms and on his turf. “After the life of luxury and glamour in the cities of Europe and America, rural Maihar was tough,” Ravi Shankar admits. His small, rented room was spartan: “The doors and windows creaked with passing wind and scorpions and cock­roaches abounded. Snakes were not rare and jackals howled all night.” Of course, there was no electricity or running water.

As Baba’s pupil, in the traditional guru-shishya [master-disciple] system, Ravi Shan­kar was trained on the sitar and the surbahar. He was taught many traditional ragas and musical compositions in forms such as dhru­pad, dhammar and khyal, and the techniques of nearly obsolete instruments such as rudra veena, rabaab and sursringar. His training co­incided with that of Baba’s own children: Ali Akbar ”“ the master sarod player with whom he played duets for many memorable years and who died last year inAmerica ”“ andAn­napurna ”“ to whom he was married in 1941 and had a son by. [They separated around 1956. Annapurna Devi has, since the early 1960s, led the life of a complete recluse in her flat in Mumbai, though she has taught many famous musicians including Nikhil Bannerjee and Hari Prasad Chaurasia.] “Baba was very strict and rigorous as a teacher but was also very loving and emotional like a parent to­wards me,” he fondly remembers.

Among India’s most respected musicians, Baba Allauddin Khan was himself an extreme­ly enigmatic person. He played the sarod with his left hand and the violin with his right. He could play virtually every musical instrument including the piano and all sorts of drums. A devout Muslim from what is now Bangladesh, he read the namaaz five times a day and had performed the pilgrimage of Haj. Yet, he was also a devotee of Shaarda Maa, the local Hin­du diety of Maihar, to whose temple he went every day. He named his daughter Annapur­na, which is another name of the devi. His room was [and has been kept like that till to­day] plastered with calendar pictures of Hin­du gods and goddesses. He was famous for his outbursts of fury and foul speech, but also for his deep humility and a guileless generosity of spirit. During his long and eventful life Baba trained and taught scores of pupils, many of whom made their mark on the Indian musical scene. After the Second World War, he virtu­ally adopted the children of soldiers of Indian Army who had died in the War and trained them in a variety of instruments [including some self-crafted ones like a xylophone made of gun barrels] and formed the Maihar Band. The band is still playing, though with second and third generation successors.

It is a paradoxical combination of tradi­tional native conservatism and flamboyant western showbiz lifestyle that has shaped Ravi Shankar’s life and success. He moved to Bombayin 1944 to join the Indian People’s Theatre Association [IPTA] a radical cultural outfit that the Communist Part of India had floated. The popular tune for the song ”˜Saare Jahaan Se Achhaa’ by Sir Mohammed Iqbal was composed by him during that stint. In 1946, he gave music for two critically ac­claimed films; Khwaja Ahmed Abbas’ directo­rial debut Dharti ke Lal and Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar. But he soon tired of his ”˜pro­gressive’ fellow travellers and set out to strike his own path.

Ravi Shankar now founded his own cul­tural organisation, Indian Renaissance Art­ists, with some members of Uday Shankar’s troupe which had been disbanded for lack money and patronage in the post-War years. His ambitious venture was to make a musical ballet out of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India. The project was a financial disaster and by some accounts, even “Pandit Nehru, who came to see the show fell asleep in his chair.” To pay off the debts that had mounted, Ravi Shankar had to literally go and beg friends and acquaintances to arrange paid concerts for him but in the eve of partition and all the po­litical turmoil that ushered it, music concerts were not easy to get. His wife Annapurna Devi’s biographer writes that she had to sell off some of her jewellery to help keep the fires burning. Ravi Shankar was so depressed that he seriously contemplated suicide. However, a chance encounter with a god-man called Tat-Baba [so named because he only wore hessian sacks as clothing] uplifted his spirits and changed his mind. Ravi Shankar has al­ways been quite pious and has sought spiri­tual guidance from several gurus and saints throughout his life.

After independence, came the move to Delhi with a “stable” government job as the di­rector of All India Radio’s [AIR] External Ser­vices Division and the newly formed National Orchestra. This gave him further chances to hone his compositional skills that he was to put to great use a little later in the film score of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali in 1955. Both the film and the sound track were to make cin­ematic history ”“ The Guardian listed it among the “50 greatest soundtracks ever recorded.”