As an icon of India, Ravi Shankar ranks not far below Gandhi or the Taj Mahal. He was one of the twentieth century's most important musicians and India's greatest cultural ambassador. The maestro of the sitar filled the world's leading concert halls, festival stages and airwaves with Indian classical music at a time when it was little known outside its homeland.
A sensation at Monterey Pop, the Woodstock Festival and the Concert for Bangladesh, he also helped reshape jazz, minimalism and electronic music, pioneered the sitar concerto, and wrote many film scores, including Pather Panchali and Gandhi. He charted the map for countless global musicians who followed in his wake. The breadth of his impact is reflected in his disciples, who included George Harrison, John Coltrane, Philip Glass and Yehudi Menuhin.
For this first biography of Ravi Shankar, Oliver Craske has carried out more than 130 new interviews and enjoyed unprecedented access to the Shankar family archives. He presents the first full portrait of the man and the artist, painting a vivid picture of the public and private faces of a captivating, restless workaholic who lived an intense and extraordinary life across ninety-two years. He investigates Shankar's childhood traumas and youthful stardom as a dancer, his intensive study of the sitar and his leading role in the revival of Indian classical music in his homeland, and the subsequent international career that ultimately made his name synonymous with India.
Oliver Craske is a writer and editor from London. Alongside a career as a book publisher, he has had a longstanding interest in Indian music. He first met Ravi Shankar in 1994, worked with him on his autobiography (Raga Mala, 1997) and was encouraged by him to write his full story after his death.
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 fore- most 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.
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