In an age before globalisation became a buzzword, Panditji lived up to the ideal of vasudhaiva kutumbakam. The world was his family.
That Pandit Ravi Shankar was among the greatest musicians in the world in the past 100 years is unquestionable. His talent was recognised decades ago, by people who know far more about music than the average person: folks like the Beatles, for example.
George Harrison wrote that “the first person who ever impressed me in my life was Ravi Shankar, and he was the only person who didn’t try to impress me.” There is, however, an aspect of Panditji’s life that is less remarked upon — about him being an embodiment of a certain idea of India.
Ravi Shankar’s full name was Rabindro Shankar Chowdhury. He was a Bengali Hindu from Varanasi. His initiation into the world of dance and music came when he was barely 10 years old. At that time, his older brother Uday Shankar, who led a celebrated dance troupe, took the young Ravi under his wings as they went touring to Paris, then the undisputed art capital of the world. In those days, it was a long journey, by ship to Italy and then overland across Europe.
Ravi Shankar grew up breathing in the best of the world’s cultures. In his autobiography, Raag Mala, he recalls meeting Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller in Paris, and hearing Pablo Casals, Paderewski and Stravinsky.
Shortly after their return to India, the Uday Shankar dance troupe found themselves invited on a world tour. On this tour they were joined by a great musician who also happened to be from Bengal: Ustad Allauddin Khan, who became Ravi Shankar’s guru. Ravi Shankar grew up under his tutelage, and called him Baba, which means father in Bengali. He later married Khan’s daughter Annapurna Devi.
Both the Ustad and his disciple, Panditji, are identified by their great talent, not by their ethnicities. They are known as great Indian musicians, not as Bengalis. They may have been Hindu or Muslim, but that was no barrier to their becoming family.
The dark sides of encounters between peoples and cultures in the history of the Indian subcontinent have come to occupy a great deal of prominence in political discourses of late. However, it is undeniable that there was also beauty and harmony, and Pandit Ravi Shankar’s life was a reminder of this. In an age before globalisation became a buzzword, Panditji lived up to the ideal of “vasudhaiva kutumbakam”. The world was his family. There are, alas, few such Indians left in this world.
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