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The South
Asian Life & Times - SALT |
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Contents Cover Story
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‘While My ‘Sitar’ Gently Weeps’
A SALT Tribute to Ravi Shankar
Pandit Ravi Shankar, the sitar
virtuoso and composer, whose career in music spanned close to 80 years, left
this world as a global icon. Generations of fans across the world loved him
not just for his music, but also for the global movements he had inspired.
He was India’s unofficial ambassador for music, having generated a
passion among Western audiences for classical Indian music.
Pandit Ravi Shankar passed away on
December 11, 2012 at age 92 in San Diego, California. His final performance
was a concert with his daughter, Anoushka Shankar, on Nov. 4 in Long Beach,
California. He was also the father of the singer Norah Jones. Pandit Ji’s music and face were known globally.
Though he began touring the West as part of his brother’s dance troupe in
the 30s and later for his own sitar performances, Ravi Shankar truly became
global when the Beatles embraced his ‘spiritualised’ music. He shared a
special and an affectionate relationship with George Harrison or “George
Beatles”, as he called him.
‘Norwegian Wood’ – a Beatles number – had a passage with George playing very
elementary sitar. This song
“put the sitar on the “pop” map overnight.” By the summer of 1967, the sitar
was ‘in.’ The Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Byrds and other rock groups
followed suit . The first formal collaboration between Pandit Ji and George
Harrison, however, was in 1971, at the Concert for Bangladesh, where he
performed together with Allah Rakha and the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan,
joining Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton in New York’s Madison Square Garden to
raise money for refugees from what was then East Pakistan. He had earlier
performed at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 and at
Woodstock in 1969.
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