PanditPandit Ravi Shankar

Before Indian classical music had any real global audience, it had Ravi Shankar — and to a remarkable degree the first fact is explained by the second. More than any other musician, he carried the ancient tradition of the North Indian raga out of the concert halls of the subcontinent and into the ears of the world, and he did it with such artistry and such showmanship that for millions of Westerners the sound of the sitar simply was Ravi Shankar.

The dancer's beginning

He was born Robindra Shankar Chowdhury in Varanasi in 1920, into a Bengali Brahmin family, the youngest of several brothers. His entry into art came not through the sitar but through dance: as a boy he joined the celebrated troupe of his elder brother, the dancer Uday Shankar, and spent his early years touring the capitals of Europe and America as a performer, absorbing the glamour and the discipline of the international stage. It was a cosmopolitan, itinerant childhood, and it gave him, unusually for an Indian classical musician of his generation, an instinctive understanding of Western audiences.

Seven years in Maihar

Then, at eighteen, he gave it all up. He renounced the touring life to become the disciple of the great and severe master Allauddin Khan, and moved to the small princely town of Maihar to undergo the traditional, gruelling apprenticeship of Indian classical music — years of austere, single-minded practice under a demanding guru. He emerged, after roughly seven years, a master of the sitar and an initiate of a deep musical lineage, having traded the applause of European theatres for the discipline of the raga.

India's musical ambassador

In independent India, Shankar became the nation's foremost musical ambassador almost by construction. He served as music director of All India Radio, founded an orchestra, and composed the haunting scores for Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy, the films that carried Indian cinema to the world. He began touring the West seriously in the 1950s, playing for still-small but devoted audiences and slowly building a reputation among Western musicians as the pre-eminent living exponent of his tradition.

The Beatle and the breakthrough

The transformation from respected classicist to global phenomenon came through a pupil. In 1966, George Harrison of the Beatles — then the most famous band on Earth — sought Shankar out, studied the sitar at his feet, and became his devoted student and friend, later calling him "the godfather of world music." Suddenly the largest youth audience in history was pointing at a Bengali classical musician, and the West looked. Shankar played the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and Woodstock in 1969, though he was ambivalent about the psychedelic drug culture that surrounded those stages and worried that his sacred tradition was being misheard as mere exotic backing music.

The Concert for Bangladesh

In 1971 he conceived, with Harrison, the Concert for Bangladesh — a pair of benefit shows at Madison Square Garden to raise money and awareness for the refugees of the war that created Bangladesh. It was the template for every charity mega-concert that followed, from Live Aid onward, and Shankar opened it. It marked, too, the moment his art became bound up with humanitarian purpose on a global scale.

A lifetime of honours

Shankar's later career spanned every register: collaborations with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the composer Philip Glass, concertos he wrote for sitar and Western orchestra, and a stint as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha, India's upper house of parliament. He won Grammy Awards across five decades — the last of them awarded after his death — and India conferred on him its highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999. He continued to perform into his nineties.

The inheritance

His legacy runs on in his daughters, who between them embody the two directions of his life's work: Anoushka Shankar, trained by him on the sitar and now a celebrated performer and composer in her own right, carrying the classical tradition forward; and Norah Jones, the American singer-songwriter and multiple Grammy winner, carrying his blood into the heart of Western popular music. Between them they mark the whole span of what he achieved — the deep tradition, and the world it went out to conquer.

Why the Roll remembers him

Ravi Shankar died in San Diego, California, in December 2012, at the age of ninety-two, still touring. He belongs on this Roll as the single figure most responsible for making Indian classical music a part of the world's musical vocabulary — the artist who took an ancient, demanding, deeply spiritual tradition and, without cheapening it, made it audible and beloved far beyond the subcontinent. He was the diaspora's great cultural ambassador before the word "diaspora" was fashionable, and the bridge across which a whole tradition travelled from Maihar to the world.

The classical master

For all his fame in the West, Shankar was, first and last, a titan of the Hindustani classical tradition — a virtuoso of the sitar who expanded its technique, composed new ragas, wrote concertos that placed the sitar in dialogue with the Western symphony orchestra, and trained a lineage of disciples. Purists sometimes charged that his crossover work simplified or diluted a sacred art for foreign audiences, and Shankar took the criticism seriously, insisting always that the raga was a spiritual discipline and not mere exotic entertainment. His first wife, Annapurna Devi, was herself a formidable musician, the daughter of his own guru Allauddin Khan; his later marriage to Sukanya Rajan anchored his final decades.

The friendship, and the inheritance

His bond with George Harrison deepened into one of the most productive cross-cultural friendships in music, yielding the Chants of India album and years of collaboration and mutual devotion until Harrison's death. Shankar set down his life in the memoir Raga Mala. And his legacy runs on, remarkably, through two daughters who between them span his whole achievement: Anoushka Shankar, whom he trained on the sitar and who carries the classical tradition into the present as a Grammy-nominated performer and composer, and Norah Jones, the American singer-songwriter and multiple Grammy winner who carries his blood into the heart of Western pop. His final concert, in 2012, was performed alongside Anoushka; weeks after his death he was awarded a Grammy for lifetime achievement, and another for his last album. He died in California in December 2012, aged ninety-two, still performing — the single figure most responsible for making the sound of Indian classical music a permanent part of the world's ear.