AND THE SITAR GENTLY WEEPS... Born In The East, Died In The West, Ravi Shankar Wowed The World

AND THE SITAR GENTLY WEEPS...

Born In The East, Died In The West, Ravi Shankar Wowed The World

Namita Devidayal TNN

    To say it is a sad day for India would diminish a man whose music comes alive every time a child sings ‘Saare jahaan se achha’ or a film-buff watches Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali or a connoisseur tunes into one of his many recordings—both solo or with other musical greats. As another maestro Zakir Hussain said about ‘Ravi uncle’, “Beings like him don’t die. They just go back to heaven to take their rightful place amongst Gods.”
    The sitar maestro passed away in the Scripps Memorial Hospital in San Diego, California, where he had been admitted for surgery last week. He was 92. He is survived by his wife Sukanya and daughters Anoushka Shankar, and Norah Jones-—from an earlier relationship. His son Shubhendra from his first wife Annapurna passed away in 1992.
    A life as sparkling as a ragamala started in India’s most musical city, Varanasi, where he was born Rabindra Shankar Chowdhury in 1920 to Hemangini and Shyam Shankar Chowdhury, a learned scholar and barrister, originally from Bangladesh. He remained very close to his mother, but his father left the family and moved on to Kolkata and London, and got remarried to an Englishwoman, Miss Morrell. Ravi Shankar’s mother was left to raise her four sons with the help of a pension from the Maharaja of Jhalawar, in whose court his father had served as the diwan. His earliest memories are imbued with the sound of shahnai that used to be played in the temples and palaces that dotted the ghats of Varanasi.
    At the age of ten, his life took a dramatic turn when his eldest brother Uday Shankar threw him into the salons and stages of glamorous Paris where he had already established himself as an accomplished dancer about whom James Joyce said, “He moves on the stage like a semidivine being. Believe me, there are still some beautiful things left in this world.” These years were perhaps deeply formative in shaping India’s most extraordinary global ambassador of music, who eventually attracted artistes such as George Harrison, Yehudi Menuhin, Zubin Mehta and Philip Glass, to collaborate with him.