Pandit Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar was born in Varanasi in 1920 and spent his early life as a dancer in his brother Uday Shankar's famous dance troupe, which toured Europe in the 1930s. At eighteen, he gave up dance to devote himself entirely to music, becoming a disciple of Ustad Allauddin Khan — the greatest Indian musician of the early twentieth century, a man of virtually universal musical mastery who had absorbed influences from Dhrupad, Khayal, and multiple instrumental traditions.

Under Allauddin Khan's demanding tutelage at Maihar (a small town in Madhya Pradesh), Ravi Shankar spent seven years in intensive study. He later married Allauddin Khan's daughter, Annapurna Devi, herself one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century.

Through the 1950s and 60s, Ravi Shankar became India's premier cultural ambassador — not through compromise of classical standards but through the force of his artistry and personality. His collaborations with George Harrison introduced Indian music to a global rock audience; his recording with Yehudi Menuhin demonstrated its compatibility with Western classical traditions; his performances at Monterey and Woodstock made him a figure of the counterculture while remaining a completely serious classical musician.

He received the Bharat Ratna in 1999. He died in San Diego in 2012.

Ravi Shankar's contribution to Indian classical music operates on two levels: the purely musical and the cultural-historical.

Musically, he was a complete master in the tradition of Allauddin Khan — technically extraordinary, emotionally profound, and capable of performing across the full classical repertoire at the highest level. His recordings of ragas like Bhairav, Todi, Bhimpalasi, and Yaman are among the finest in the tradition. He also composed extensively — for sitar concerto with orchestra, for film, for various cross-cultural collaborative projects — in ways that extended the reach of Indian classical music without compromising its essential character.

Culturally and historically, his contribution is unrepeatable: he is the person who made Indian classical music a global phenomenon. Before Ravi Shankar, Indian classical music was almost entirely unknown outside India. After him, the sitar, the raga, and the concept of Indian classical music had a worldwide audience — an audience that has sustained the tradition's global cultural presence ever since.