Remembering Pt Ravi Shankar

Known fondly today as the "godfather of world music," Shankar was born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury in Benares, Uttar Pradesh, on April 7 1920 and raised by his mother in a Bengali brahmin community. His father, Pandit Dr Shyam Shankar Chowdhury, a wealthy landowner and minister in a maharaja’s court, left his family in poverty and went to Calcutta and then London to practise law. The youngest of five surviving brothers (two other children had died, at birth and in early childhood), Shankar was nicknamed Ravi, meaning “the sun”. He met his father for the first time when he was eight years old.

When Shankar was 10, his father and brother (Uday Shankar) left India to live in Europe. In 1930 he moved to Paris to be part of his brother's musical troupe and moved back to India eight years later to begin his formal training. He apprenticed himself to Ustad Allauddin Khan, affectionately known as Baba, and spent a number of years learning the sitar under his tutelage.

Ten years after meeting Khan and six years after beginning his music studies, Shankar's sitar training ended. Thereafter, he went to Mumbai, where he worked for the Indian People's Theatre Association, composing music for ballets until 1946. In 1949 he moved to Delhi to become a music director of All In India Radio. During his time at AIR, Shankar composed pieces for orchestra that mixed sitar and other Indian instruments with classical Western instrumentation. Also during this period, he began performing and writing music with American-born violinist Yehudi Menuhin, with whom he would later record three albums: the Grammy Award–winning West Meets East (1967), West Meets East, Vol. 2 (1968) and Improvisations: West Meets East (1976). All the while, the name Ravi Shankar was becoming more and more recognized internationally. In 1954, Shankar gave a recital in the Soviet Union. In 1956, he debuted in the United States and Western Europe. Also helping his star rise was the score he wrote for famous Indian film director Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy. The first of these films, Pather Panchali, won the Grand Prix—now known as the Golden Palm or Palme d'Or—at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955. The prize is awarded to the best film of the festival.

Already an ambassador of Indian music to the Western world, Shankar embraced this role even more fully in the 1960s. That decade saw Shankar's performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, as well as his set at Woodstock in 1969. Additionally, in 1966, George Harrison began studying sitar with Shankar and even played the instrument on the Beatles' track "Norwegian Wood."

From the 1970s to the early 21st century, Shankar's fame, recognition and achievement continued to grow steadily. Shankar won many awards and honors throughout his career, including 14 honorary degrees, three Grammy Awards (he received two posthumous Grammys as well) and a membership to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Shankar's eldest daughter and protégé Anoushka is now a respected sitarist in her own right. His other daughter, the jazz pianist and singer-songwriter Norah Jones, was born in 1979 as a result of a clandestine affair Shankar had with the New York concert producer Sue Jones.

Shankar died on December 11, 2012, in San Diego, California, at the age of 92.