Person · sitarist and composer
Ravi Shankar
/ˈrobi ˈʃɔŋkor/
Also known as Pandit Ravi Shankar, Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury, Ravindra Shankar Chowdhury, Ravi Śaṅkar
Ravi Shankar (1920–2012) was the sitarist who played a major role in bringing Hindustani classical music to Western audiences. Born in Benares, he toured Europe as a boy dancer in his brother Uday Shankar's troupe, then spent the years 1938 to 1944 in Maihar studying under Allauddin Khan. He scored Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy, directed music at All India Radio, and from 1956 toured the West, working with Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison. He received the Bharat Ratna in 1999.
- Date
- 1920 – 2012
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
At the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh in New York the rock audience applauded the musicians tuning up, and Shankar replied that if they liked the tuning so much, he hoped they would enjoy the playing more.
Connections (5)
- Teaching lineageAllauddin Khan
Ravi Shankar first heard Allauddin Khan, lead musician of the Maihar court, at a Calcutta music conference in December 1934, and Uday Shankar persuaded the Maharaja of Maihar to lend Khan to his dance troupe as soloist for a European tour in 1935. Khan offered serious training only if the boy gave up touring. In 1938 Shankar moved to Maihar, lived in Khan's household in the gurukul manner, and studied with him until 1944.
- Teaching lineageMaihar gharana
At Maihar Shankar learned the whole of the school's curriculum, not only the sitar and surbahar: dhrupad, dhamar and khyal, and instruction on the rudra veena, rubab and sursingar, studying beside Allauddin Khan's children Ali Akbar Khan and Annapurna Devi. He made his public debut in December 1939 in a jugalbandi with Ali Akbar Khan on sarod, and married Annapurna Devi in 1941, binding him to the gharana by family as well as training.
- BirthplaceKashi / Varanasi / Banaras
Ravi Shankar was born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury on 7 April 1920 in Benares, then the capital of the princely state of the same name, the youngest of seven brothers in a Bengali Hindu family. His mother raised him in the city while his father worked as a lawyer in London, and he attended the Bengalitola High School in 1927–28. At ten he left Benares for Paris with his brother Uday Shankar's dance troupe.
- Associated withMuhammad Iqbal
Muhammad Iqbal wrote the patriotic Urdu poem Saare Jahan se Accha in the early phase of his work, before he left for England in 1905, and it was collected in Bang-e-Dara in 1924. Ravi Shankar, at about twenty-five and newly finished with his Maihar training, recomposed the music for this popular song in the same years that he moved to Bombay and wrote ballet music for the Indian People's Theatre Association.
- Associated withSatyajit Ray
Ravi Shankar, then early in his career, composed the score for Pather Panchali (1955) and went on to the rest of the Apu Trilogy. According to Andrew Robinson he saw only about half the film in rough cut, hummed Ray a folk-based tune that became the film's bamboo-flute theme, and wrote most of the score in one night session of about eleven hours, with solo sitar pieces on the ragas Desh and Todi.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Ravi Shankar"; "Pather Panchali"; "Muhammad Iqbal". Ravi Shankar, My Music, My Life (1968); Peter Lavezzoli, The Dawn of Indian Music in the West (2006).
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