Review: Ravi Shankar's Life of Music, Colourful and Torrid
What more could be said about a world celebrity who has been in the headlines most of his tempestuous life and written three autobiographies? Apparently quite a bit, as a no-holds-barred tome of over 600 pages by Oliver Craske – Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar – reveals. Of all Indian musicians, Pandit Ravi Shankar was the least shy about his artistic endeavours or his personal life.
Ravi Shankar’s My Music My Life was first published in late 1960s. A decade later, he gave a serialised ‘as told to’ account of his life, loves and musical journey to Shankarlal Bhattacharya for the Bengali magazine Desh, which resulted in Raag Anuraag. Then came Raga Mala (1997) a limited-edition volume with a foreword by George Harrison. Thus, most of the master’s story had already been documented. However, any life is more than a sum of its self-told parts. A master’s life is a universe; and is best and fully realised only from a distance.
The mediation of an English writer provides such a prism. In his introduction the author recounts that when Richard Attenborough first set out to make Gandhi, he was advised by Nehru not to deify the Mahatma, “He was too great a man for that.” Craske has taken that advice well and consciously curbs his gaze from becoming overly infatuated. Coming eight years after the master’s death and marking the century of his birth, this opus trails the 100-year trajectory of social and cultural developments in India and signposts their impact on and interaction with Europe and America through the frenetic journey of this charismatic Bengali Brahmin.
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Ravi Shankar was the youngest of six children born to Hemangini and Shyam Shankar Chowdhury, the eldest of whom was the dance legend Uday Shankar. By the time of Ravi’s birth, his father had married his English mistress Miss Morrell and left for Europe. He did then not see his youngest son till the boy was around eight years old. Hemangini lived in Benaras with her children on a meagre pension while Shyam roamed the world.
In Craske’s telling:
“There were two sides to Shyam. There was the worldly, clubbable politician and lawyer who networked formidably among Indian princes and British Knights. He travelled frequently and juggled multiple commitments… Then there was the lone spiritual seeker. In his twenties he spent time as a renunciate, practising yoga in the caves of Mount Abu… He wrote a book, The Religion of Universal Brotherhood, and gave lectures on subjects such as ‘Mystic Power and Love’.”
The passages on Ravi’s childhood in Benaras are lyrical:
“Robu was a very sensitive boy. He responded emotionally to the rhythms of the days and seasons and he revelled in the city’s spiritual intensity. If he remembered his earliest years of depravation, he also recalled them with yearning, the sadness mingled with memories of devotional joy.”
One such “miraculous” memory was that of “Ma Anandamayi, a Bengali woman who was believed by her legion of devotees to embody the divine… She radiated such love that Robu believed she really was Parvati”. That was also, traumatically, the time when he was raped repeatedly, the book says. The abuser, as happens most often, was a relative and the torment continued for quite a while. He was unable to tell anybody. He never revealed it to anyone till late into his 70s when he shared it with his second wife, Sukanya.
Ravi Shankar’s life with his elder brother Uday’s dance troupe in pre-World War II Paris is well known. Here Robu learnt French and also started absorbing music director Timir Baran’s scores and imitating them on the sitar and esraj. By March 1931 he was on stage, wielding the sitar under Baran’s baton and also dancing parts in Uday ballets. Now began the parade of pre-War European celebrities – George Enescu, Arturo Toscanini, Feodor Chaliapin, Pablo Casals, Fritz Kreisler, Andre Segovia, Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, Cole Porter… “Everyone made fuss of me because I was small and had such big dark eyes.”
Oliver Craske
Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar
Faber & Faber, 2020
After four years of touring Europe and the US, Uday’s troupe returned to India. Hitler was consolidating power in Germany and despite Alice Bonner’s largesse, keeping a dozen odd dancers and musicians in Europe was proving to be expensive. Robu was 14 now and it was decided that he would learn the sitar from the great ustad Enayat Khan of Gouripur. But that was not to be. Within a week of his arrival in Calcutta he came down with typhoid and was admitted to a hospital for six weeks. At this time, Uday had recruited the sitar player Gokul Nag who encouraged Robu’s “growing interest” in the instrument.
Ravi Shankar first heard Ustad Allauddin Khan at the All Bengal Music Conference of 1935. The ustad’s sarod concert moved Robu immensely and Uday soon roped him in as music director of his troupe. Robu, by now a full member, was both dancing and playing the sitar and esraj. Among the new dancers that joined the troupe at this time were Zohra Mumtaz (later Sehgal) and her sister Uzra. Zohra had trained in modern dance under Mary Wigman in Germany and later became a huge success in Indian theatre. Robu promptly had his early love affair with Uzra, who was later to emigrate to Pakistan after Partition.
More tours of Burma and South East Asia followed and they were planning to carry on to the US when came the news of their absent father’s murder in London. The case was never solved but it was suspected that he had been killed by the henchmen of some disgruntled prince against whom Shyam had fought a case at the Privy Council. Ravi Shankar had mixed feelings about the father he never really got to know. “Counting up all the occasional days in different countries, Robu had spent no more than about a month with his father in total.”
Nevertheless, Craske elucidates, he was to grow up resembling Shyam in many ways. “There was the dualistic personality, both highly professional and at the same time unworldly. There was the ferocious drive for self-improvement, the restless need for constant motion… Sadly the one trait that Shyam definitely passed on by direct example to Robu was that of being an absent father.”
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At 18, Ravi Shankar broke away from his brother’s shadow. To Uday’s disappointment, he decided he must study Hindustani music systematically with Allauddin Khan. He landed up in Maiihar, the tiny hamlet in central India where Baba Allauddin Khan lived, seeking discipleship and systematic training. He had already been playing the sitar on stage for several years by then and must have picked up quite a bit by hearing and association with other professional musicians including Timir Baran, Vishnudas Shirali, Gokul Nag and Allauddin Khan himself.
Oliver Craske. Copyright: Charlotte Knee Photography
Craske recounts the time Shankar spent in Maihar in detail, but for students of Indian music it would have been more worthwhile to learn what exactly he learnt from the ustad – like names of ragas, passages of actual baaj (playing techniques), traditional compositions of Dhrupad or Khayal, gats of sitar or sarod and who they were composed by, etc. In contrast, Shankar’s forays into the realms of Western orchestral music and – for want of a better word – fusion is gone into with much ado. And yes, the Beatles are there as also his deep relationship with George Harrison. Monterey, Woodstock and Concert for Bangladesh are also described, also his collaborations with the likes of John Coltrane, Philip Glass, Yehudi Menuhin and Zubin Mehta.
The major thrust of the book is in its eye-popping revelations of Shankar’s loves and sexual escapades. Situations and names are mentioned in great detail. Women flocked to him like bees to a bloom and Shankar’s long-time partner Kamala Chakravarty counted over 140 girlfriends with whom he had had amorous relationships. His story with his first wife Annapurna Devi, his guru’s daughter, is documented in all its complex, unhappy detail. And there is, too, his turbulent relationship with his tragic son, Shubho.
Then there is the disarmingly frank telling of his simultaneous dual love affairs with music producer Sue Jones in the US and Sukanya Rajan in London with whom he fathered Norah Jones (b.1979) and Anoushka (b.1981) respectively. Ultimately, he married Sukanya in 1989 though she had made no such demand. This led to Jones cutting him from her life and keeping Norah from meeting him for the next eight years till she became an adult and sought him out. Sue Jones is the only person who refused Craske an interview.
This biography is an authorised account but it is an unfettered recounting. Posterity should be thankful to Sukanya and Anoushka Shankar for having made this possible. Craske deserves praise for having done a remarkable job indeed.
S. Kalidas has been an active commentator and participant on the Indian arts scene for well over four decades. Besides English, Kalidas can read, write and speak in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil.
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