85th anniversary tour
Ravi SHANKAR (Sitar)
Anoushka SHANKAR (Sitar)
TANMOY BOSE tabla
Classical Hindustani music

Ravi SHANKAR Photo: John Van Hasselt / Corbis

RenKnown all over the world as the pioneer of Indian music in the West, as an instrumentalist, composer and teacher, Ravi Shankar has been India’s best musical ambassador for more than half a century. He is a legend for millions of music lovers.

Shankar was born the youngest child of a Bengali family in 1920 in Varanasi (Benares), that holiest of Indian cities. At the age of ten, he accompanied his elder brother, Uday Shankar, and his troop of dancers and musicians to Paris. He spent several years in the West where he learned various musical forms, before returning to India in 1938 to begin his career.

A disciple in the ancient Indian tradition of the maestro and teacher Ustad Allauhdin Khan, Shankar worked for many long years to master the complex art of the raga of classical Hindustani music (northern India).

He became a master of the sitar, the stringed instrument which he has made his own and which for generations of music lovers and travellers in quest of a meaning symbolises the spiritual and musical universe of India.

Shankar did public performances along with his career at All India Radio (1949-1956) where he founded the National Chamber Orchestra. As word of his virtuosity spread throughout India, then into Europe, Asia and the United States, Ravi Shankar embarked on one of the most extraordinary careers in the history of contemporary music.

In the 50s and 60s Shankar became the Indian musician who facilitated the discovery and popularity of classical Hindustani music amongst peoples as varied as the recently liberated western youth, at the mythical Woodstock concert, to the more classical publics such as the one of violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

He travelled the world accompanied by his percussionist and favourite tabla player Ustad Alla Rakkah, crossing paths with the no less legendary Beatles, for whom he was an inspiration.

Ravi Shankar is a prolific composer and, in addition to his numerous ragas (modes) and talas (rhythmic cycles), he has written for both western and eastern musicians such as Yehudi Menuhin, Jean-Pierre Rampal and Japanese artists.

Shankar’s melody "Sare Jahan Se Achcha", the most well-known song in India after the national anthem, was composed in 1945.

He has also composed a new raga, "Jayantl", which contains fifty matras (beats), to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of India.

His works also include two Concertos for Sitar and Orchestra, the first ordered by the London Symphony Orchestra and created by André Prévin. In 1980, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta, ordered the composition Raga Mala (Garland of Ragas), his second concerto for sitar.

He has also composed for numerous ballets and films, including The World of Apu, the famous trilogy of Satyajit Ray, as well as for Sir Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, which earned him both an Oscar and a Grammy Award nomination.

Ravi Shankar has received numerous honours and awards, including the Presidential Padma Vibhushan Award (1980) as well as the Deshikottam Award, which was granted to him in 1982 by the late Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India. In 1986, he became a member of the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of the Indian Parliament

Shankar is a member of the Sangeet Natak Academy and also founding president of the Research Institute for Music and the Performing Arts.

The "Polar Music Prize", by which the Nobel Prize for Music is sometimes known, was awarded to Shankar by the King of Sweden. He has also received the Bharat Ratma, ‘The Jewel of India’, the highest civil distinction, awarded by the Indian President. He is also a Commander of the Legion d’honneur. In 2001, he was given an Honorary Knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II.

He continues to make tours every year, dividing his time between India and the United States, with regular visits to Europe and the Far East. He is the author of two books, Music, My Life (translated into French) and Rag Anurag (in Bengali). His autobiography, Raga Mala, was published by Genesis Publications. On the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, EMI Angel and Dark Horse Records published a collection of four CDs, Ravi, In Celebration. More recently, his CD Songs of India, produced by George Harrison, makes use of ancient verses allied to some of his own compositions, which speak to the heart of the listener. His latest recording (2001), Ravi Shankar: Live from Carnegie Hall, earned him a third Grammy Award.

Nourished by the science of sound from the time of the Vedas, classical Hindustani music developed in the courts of the Maharajas and Nawabs of ancient India. It contains within it the ability to touch our deepest senses and opens in us the ability to absorb an art form both sensual and metaphysical.

Ravi et Anoushka Shankar Photo : Caroline Greyshock

Anoushka Shankar

From the age of nine, Anoushka Shankar began to study the sitar, supervised by her father. The maestro was proud of his pupil and presented her on stage for the first time in New Delhi when she was thirteen, on the occasion of a concert celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday. That same year, he had her participate in the recording of the collection Celebration.

Anoushka Shankar began her solo career in 2000, with a series of tours to the United States, Japan, Malaysia and India, as well as to Spain, France, Italy and the United Kingdom.

She has also recorded several CDs and continues to work with her father’s ensemble, whose Concerto No. 1 for Sitar and Orchestra she presented in public with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta. Recently she participated in the creation of Arpan, a work by her father for forty three musicians playing both oriental and western instruments