He made the sitar a sound the West could recognize - not by watering it down, but by playing it so well that George Harrison sat at his feet and orchestras rewrote their notation. For a generation that thought India meant incense and vague exoticism, Ravi Shankar was the first to show them the architecture.
Also inDeutsch
Photos 5
Listen
SpotifyAwards 21
In their orbit 5
Connected to Ravi 6
Satyajit RayAlso won Fellow of the Sangeet Natak Akademi
Evelyn GlennieAlso won Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance
Jaswant SinghAlso won Banga Bibhushan
Desmond TutuAlso won James Parks Morton Interfaith Award
Corazon AquinoAlso won Ramon Magsaysay Award
Mo YanAlso won Fukuoka Asian Culture PrizeAbout this person
Born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury in 1920, he spent his youth as a dancer in his brother Uday's troupe, touring Europe and India until he was 18. Then he stopped, turned to music, and studied sitar under court musician Allauddin Khan for seven years - an apprenticeship that left him technically untouchable. After 1944 he composed for Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy and ran All India Radio's music programming in New Delhi until 1956, when he began touring Europe and America in earnest. The 1960s opened him to the West through Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison, whose sitar lines on Beatles records bent pop music's grammar. Shankar kept performing and writing for orchestra into his eighties, served in India's Rajya Sabha from 1986 to 1992, won four Grammys (including Album of the Year for The Concert for Bangladesh), and received the Bharat Ratna in 1999. He died in December 2012, father to Norah Jones and sitarist Anoushka Shankar.
IndiaFame.am measures public visibility signals. It does not measure human value, talent, morality, or credibility.