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Pandit Ravi Shankar: The Tansen Of Our Times

We relook at his tempestuous life and lasting legacy.

Dec 12, 2012

Ravi Shankar with George Harrison in September 1970 Photo: Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty images

On the home front, however, trouble was brewing. His marriage with Annapurna had collapsed causing much bitterness on both sides, though they did not separate till a couple of years later. “It was never my wish to marry my guru’s daughter,” he once told me, adding that “It was the handiwork of my sister-in-law Krishna who was convinced that as we were both musicians it would be a perfect match.” Their son Shubendra, who was born in 1942, had a tragic life torn between his extrovert celebrity father and a puritanical introvert mother. He died in America of depression and bronchial pneumonia in 1992.

From the mid-1950s Ravi Shan­kar had began touring the West again, this time on his own as a solo sitar player. He freed himself from both his wife Annapurna [although she did not agree to a divorce till ’82 when she chose to marry her pupil Rooshi Pandya] and his job with the AIR. He now started an “open live-in partnership” with Kamala Chakravarti, the younger sister of his brother Rajendra’s wife Lakshmi Shankar. In those early years, Yehudi Menhuin the great Western classical violinist became an ardent supporter of Ravi Shankar as was Dr VK Narayana Menon, a keen promoter of clas­sical dance and music in the UK, who later returned to India to become the Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademy.

It took another decade of steady rise in the international music scene and the coming of the Beatles to Indiain 1966 for Ravi Shankar to become the global superstar of sitar. George Harrison, in particular, became a devoted pu­pil and the rest, as they say, is history. Ravi Shankar played at the Monterey Pop Festival in ’67 and at Woodstock in ’69 to become, as one American writer put it, “the most famous Indian musician on the planet.” By then, he had already penned his first autobiography, My Music My Life, which was an instant best-seller. His more serious interventions on the Western music scene were through the impact he made on the minimalist composer Phillip Glass whom he met in Paris in 1965 while giv­ing music for Conrad Rook’s film Chappaqua, and the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane whom he had met a year earlier in ’64. Ravi Shankar’s mark on the Western music scene is by now so well acknowledged that musicologists have written tomes on the subject, the latest being the unabashedly adoring Bhairavi: the Global Impact of Indian Music [Harper Collins, 2009], by Peter Lavezzoli. Whether or not the Pandit was a bit reckless in all those “experi­ments” is a moot question. What is certain is that virtually all Western musical genres from jazz to fusion and from the experimental to the minimal, would definitely have been the poorer had they not benefitted from him and his music.

But it would be both naive and unjust to suggest that Ravi Shankar’s credit rests on his conquest of West alone. Ravi Shankar’s im­pact on the Indian music scene is no less semi­nal. Undoubtedly, he did raise Hindustani instrumental music by a quantum leap, to its present level of structural sophistication, mu­sical expression and public appeal. And in a convention bound society, ruled by decadent feudal interests ”“ be it on the part of the pa­tron or the performer ”“ change was not easily effected. The one point that keeps recurring in Annapura Devi’s authorised biography is the mention of their constant tussle over his perception of the need to modernize not only the content and the presentation of classical music on the concert platform but also the need to review the patron-performer relation­ship fundamentally.

In an imagined and dramatized dialogue, Annapurna Devi’s biographer puts words to Ravi Shankar’s thoughts: “Winds of change are blowing, if we do not keep up with these we will be left behind”¦ we have to bring some modern touches to our music”¦ we cannot go on playing like this. Artists should create the tastes of the audience. Just as in literature the poet or the novelist strives to change the tastes of the reading public by introducing a new idiom or style. If we cling to the old, it will not do. We are not in the age of the maharajas when life was slow and idle. Life is now fast and complicat­ed. This is the age of the sitar and not the surbahar.” The surbahar is a much bigger sitar-like instrument which basically plays the slow introductory [aalaap] part of the raga in the lower and middle octaves. It was Annapurna’s chosen instrument, though Ravi Shankar also played it for about a decade before giving it up. What Ravi Shan­kar did was even cleverer. He integrated the thick bass brass string of the surbahar to his sitar, so that he may have the full range of both the surbahar and the sitar in one instrument.

In the post-second world war era, with the rapid growth of technology, industry, air travel and media, it was Ravi Shankar who radically expanded for Indian classical music not only its market and applications, but also its concert repertoire and performance practice. In this he has been truly ingenious. With all due re­spect for masters past and present, perhaps it is finally now time to again assert that the structural format for any instrumental con­cert of Indian classical music has been hugely re-edited and refined by Ravi Shankar. No old master ever played a raga as we are used to hearing it from their inheritors today. To lapse into Hindustani musical jargon, a few introductory strokes of aalaap, a random use of main strings and chikari in the name of jor and absolutely chaotic and often crude gattodas were the order of the day. No wonder si­tar and sarod players had to concede the place of honour to vocalists in that generation. “Uttam gaana ”“ maddham bajana ”“ neecha naachna” went the popular Hindi adage. Translated, it means: “vocal music is the high­est form of art, instrument playing is medium and the lowest is dance.” It was only with the coming of Ravi Shankar that the situation was finally democratized if not completely reversed.

In the midst of this entire creative mael­strom, his personal life, too, kept the same pace. In his two later autobiographies, the excellent Raag-Anuraag in Bengali and Raga Mala in English, he is disarmingly frank about his deep need for the love of women and his “unfaithfulness” to Kamala. While he contin­ued to tour with Kamala in India and she ran his establishment in Benaras for him in the mid and late 1970s, when in America he loved and lived with Sue Jones, a dancer turned music producer in New York. When the news of the birth of Norah Jones in ’79 reached Kamala, she finally stepped out of his life and retired to Chennai. Simultaneously, he was conduct­ing an affair with Sukanya Rajan in London who gave birth to Anoushka in ’81. Between 1986 and 1992, Ravi Shankar was nominated to the Rajya Sabha and was based in a colonial bungalow allotted to him in Delhi by the Gov­ernment of India. He was in his seventies now, his home was run by a third generation of his pupils and health was increasingly becoming an issue. As was guilt, he readily admits. He married Sukanya in a simple private ceremony in Hyderabad in 1989. Of course, it made world news instantly. Sue Jones, who had borne the situation silently till then, cut him off from her life and went underground taking Norah with her. It was only when Norah turned 18 that she took the initiative to trace her father’s phone number and re-established contact.

It is to Sukanya’s great credit that she has navigated the whole complex and messy situation so well and prudently that Norah is back in their lives now at least privately if not professionally and publicly. So has Kamala reconciled to some extent. “I have always told aunty Kamala that she will always be a part of our family and there is always a place for her in our home,” Sukanya told me some years ago. And yes, I have met both Kamala and Norah in their Delhi home when they have visited Ravi Shankar here. Meanwhile, both Norah and Anoushka have blossomed out in their in­dividual ways and are now the best of friends. Norah’s debut album Come Away With Me won a phenomenal eight Grammies in 2003 and made Ravi Shankar immensely proud. And one has only to see how the nonagenar­ian maestro’s eyes light up when he looks at Anoushka to realize that if there is anything that drives him on now, perhaps even more than music, it is her.

Undoubtedly, like Tansen and Beethoven, Ravi Shankar’s will be a legendary legacy. And, perhaps in keeping with his internation­alism, it could well be more universal.

 

Shankar, with his wife Sukanya and a portrait of daughter Anoushka hanging behind him Photo: Anay Mann

 

Pandit Ravi Shankar and his wife Sukanya speak about his new label, ”˜Saare Jahaan Se Achhaa,’ the strange new world of YouTube and blogs, and his daughters. 

Panditji, what keeps you busy these days?

Ravi Shankar: Well, doing less than what I did all these years”¦ I have the mental energy but to do things physically is very much a struggle, believe me. Right now, I am very involved in setting up a music company, East Meets West Music. It will not only be publish­ing my own recordings or those of my students but of musicians from all over whose music I hap­pen to like. I will be curating the label, as it were.

So how did this come about?

Ravi Shankar: Over all these years I have been exploited so much by music companies, in India mostly. It is not only a matter of royalties ”“ which, of course, is an issue ”“ but they keep on releasing new editions and new compilations of my old record­ings; presenting them and pack­aging them in any manner they choose. Some are now clubbing my music with yoga, health and spiri­tuality”¦ with no context whatso­ever. So I decided that something had to be done to counter it.

And where will East Meets West Music be based?

Ravi Shankar: It is officially registered in New York, but we will market it here in India as well. Besides, we will also be sourcing music from here. The issue of copyright is being discussed widely in India these days. There have been some controversies between film-makers and authors recently. Musicians, too, get exploited by producers regularly.

What are your thoughts on this subject?

Ravi Shankar: Let me give you just one in­stance. Take my music for the film Pather Panchali. The late Satyajit Ray was not only a great film direc­tor, but also a very close personal friend from even before the time he started making films. We were both young then and when Ray be­gan shooting for Pather Panchali, of course, there was very little money for the whole project and I did the musical score for practically nothing. Then after Ray’s death, the rights changed hands and they are now bringing out the sound track as a record under some label and selling it all over the world but I get nothing out of it. Tell me, is it fair? And this is just one instance; there have been far, far too many such violations.

Your tune for ”˜Saare Jahaan Se Achhaa’ is even being used in ad­vertisement jingles these days”¦

Sukanya Shankar: Just think of what would he would be feeling every time we hear that on televi­sion.

Ravi Shankar: Yes, that is another one. People do not even know that I composed it! It has become so popular that they think it is a traditional tune. So when lyricist Javed Akhtar came to meet me some days ago as a member of a government committee dealing with this issue, I was very happy that at last something might get sorted out in our country regard­ing this matter.

However, the flip side is that the recording industry worldwide is in a crisis. It has becomes so easy to record, copy, cut and paste, blog and uplink that people do not need to pay for their music anymore.

 

So how do you see this situation?

Ravi Shankar: Yes, the whole industry is in a crisis today. It is amazing, when I give a public performance and return home I am told that it has already been uplinked on YouTube!

Sukanya Shankar: Recently we saw that his perfor­mance for the Festival of India in an Eastern European country has been put online, without our knowledge and we are unable to trace the cul­prit. Someone must have sat near the speakers and recorded it live. That is another reason why we de­cided to launch our own label and plead with the public to buy only bonafide recordings directly from the East Meets West Music label.

 

So when exactly are you launch­ing the label and what is the first album going to be?

Sukanya Shankar: We are launching it worldwide on his 90th birthday on April 7. The first offering is his rendering of the raga Gangeshwari, which is his own creation.

Ravi Shankar: I played this piece at a temple on the banks of the Ganges, near Allahabad, in 1968. Also, because it was recorded on the banks of the Ganga, the sound quality is not that of a studio. But we thought people might like the atmosphere, so we have kept it as it was.

 

And what are your plans for your legacy in India?

Ravi Shankar: Well, unfortunately, my health is becoming a hurdle in the way of my plans for the Ravi Shankar Cen­tre here inDelhi. I can only spend around three months here. But we have a chalked out a programme of activities and we do run a limited master class for my disciples here. I wish we had more support, though. There is very little philanthropic support for the arts in India. The infrastructure for the performing arts in India is still very poor. I am not blaming the government here. The state in India has done much more to promote our arts than in many other developed countries. But the rich people, the industrial­ists and businessmen should come forward to support classical music and dance. All the high profile billionaires we now have spend so much money on fashion and fusion but ignore classical music completely. Do they not realize that ours is a unique heritage, which we may well lose because of lack of patronage? All over the West, opera, ballet and symphony or­chestras are supported by private philanthropy. I tried to cultivate a generation of industrialists here when I was young and did manage to get a few of interested. But sadly, it did not continue as a trend. We need our own Rockefell­ers, Fords and Guggenheims. Our classical music will survive, but our elite needs to be more culturally responsible.

The success of both your daugh­ters Norah and Anoushka must gladden your heart.

Ravi Shankar: That is such a boon, I feel. It is a blessing really. Both have blossomed out in their own ways. Norah, the elder, was never into Indian music, so was not under my tutelage. Anoushka, who has learnt from me, is so multi-talent­ed and is doing great work. I feel so fulfilled.

 

This article appeared in the April 2010 issue of  ROLLING STONE INDIA.

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