Pandit Ravi Shankar
At present, this article is (temporarily) only about Pandit Ravi Shankar and the Grammies. It is only a fragment of the ultimate article which, it is hoped, readers will expand it to after Indpaedia is thrown open to all readers.
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Amita Nair, Ravikanth3 [1]<>Amann Khuranaa ‘‘The Times of India’’
Grammy awards
1967: Sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar became the first Indian to receive a Grammy. This was for his contribution to West Meets East with violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Category: Best Chamber Music Performance
1972: Pandit Ravi Shankar got his second Grammy for The Concert for Bangladesh featuring him, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, Eric Clapton and Klaus Voormann. The Concert for Bangladesh was also named Album of the Year.
2002: Pandit Ravi Shankar got his third Grammy for his album Full Circle - Carnegie Hall 2000 in the Best World Music Album category.
Biography
Pandit Ravi Shankar: He is one of those rare names who have made India proud internationally. Known as one of the best exponents of the sitar in the 20th century, Pt. Ravi Shankar has been honoured with four Grammy Awards including one Lifetime Achievement Grammy (posthumous). A 1967 performance at Monterey Film Festival named ‘West Meets East’ brought Shankar a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance. The album of a charity concert called ‘Concert for Bangladesh’ happened in August 1971. This won the ace musician his second Grammy. His third Grammy came in 2000 for his album ‘Full Circle: Carnegie Hall 2000’. The Lifetime achievement Grammy came only a few days after he passed away due to some heart ailment.
Sukanya
India Today.in , India’s arias “India Today” 5/5/2017
When Pandit Ravi Shankar passed away in December 2010, writers and musicians the world over struggled to convey just how great a contribution he had made. His friend and collaborator, the avant garde composer Philip Glass, put it succinctly: "It may be hard to imagine that one person through the force of his talent, energy and musical personality could have almost single-handedly altered the course of contemporary music in its broadest sense. But that is actually and simply what happened."
Ravi Shankar was a tireless innovator, constantly pushing the boundaries of his art and experimenting with form. Besides Philip Glass, his music enriched and was enriched by other artistes, most famously in the West, the likes of George Harrison, Yehudi Menuhin, and John Coltrane. In his eighties, at a time when most people would be resting on their (in his case, considerable) laurels, Ravi Shankar set sail on a new adventure. He began work on an opera, based on a story from the Mahabharata, of Chyavana, a great sage who meditated so long and so unmovingly that forest ants built their hill around him until he was completely engulfed. Out walking in the forest one day, a beautiful princess, Sukanya, came upon the anthill. Mistaking the sage's eyes for glow-worms buried in the mound, she pierced them with thorns. Blinded, Chyavana emerged from his austerities and demanded Sukanya's hand in marriage. She agreed and they lived together happily.
Perhaps Shankar was drawn to this story, with its theme of love between an older man and a younger woman, because his wife, whose name is also Sukanya, was considerably younger than he. Perhaps he wanted this as his 'swan song'-an operatic offering to his beloved wife. He began work on it in the mid-1990s, but large parts still lay incomplete when he passed away. Sukanya Shankar says that he had told her he was confident that their daughter Anoushka would complete his work if he didn't manage to. "I think he would be very happy to know that his works are in safe hands," she says.
Anoushka Shankar seems to have inherited not only her father's musical DNA but his lively disregard for rigid convention as well. In an echo of Philip Glass's words about her father, fellow musician Nitin Sawhney once wrote that "no one embodies the spirit of innovation and experimentation more evidently than Anoushka". Working with Ravi Shankar's extensive notes and sketches, she and conductor David Murphy finished working on the score-for a full philharmonic orchestra plus classical Indian instruments-but they needed someone to write the words, someone who would see beyond the tokenism of 'fusion music' to the deeper meeting of East and West that Ravi Shankar spent his life exploring. Amit Chaudhuri, whose many novels include Afternoon Raag, and a singer and musician himself (who released an album actually called This is Not Fusion) seemed like the natural choice.
"In fusion music, you tend to throw in a bit of this and a bit of that, and call it 'fusion'," says Chaudhuri. "Ravi Shankar's music contains, rather, a rich sense of one tradition opening itself in a very deep and personal way to another tradition."
How are we to listen to this new musical form? Hearing a raag sung by a soprano is an initially discomforting experience. Not quite one thing, nor the other, it's the musical equivalent of one's taste buds trying to make sense of a completely unexpected flavour. However, 46 years have passed since Shankar's classic comment to the premature applause at the Concert for Bangladesh: "Thank you. If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you'll enjoy the playing more." Western audiences these days are used to the sounds of sitar and tabla, whether Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha, sung in Sanskrit, or Nitin Sawhney's Asian-British trip hop. It's not just to do with increasing sophistication; it's just that hybrid forms are the norm, these days.
Chaudhuri's libretto is also something of a hybrid. "I knew I wouldn't be able to tell the story 'straight', as an Indian fairytale or a parable in English verse," he explains. Instead, he took inspiration from a variety of sources-including W.H. Auden and Shakespeare's Two Noble Kinsmen, a play whose authorship is itself disputed.
Sukanya is a story from the Mahabharata, so of course there must be shape-shifting, mistaken identity and magical metamorphoses. Two young princes, appalled that the beauteous Sukanya is wedded to the aged sage, invite him to enter a magical river. He does, and all three of them emerge from the rejuvenating waters, handsome and delicious: a tempting identity parade for Sukanya to pick from. In Chaudhuri's version, the young princes' view is presented-a censorious view of an old man's "inappropriate desire" for the young woman. Yet, to go back to Shakespeare, isn't that just like love? "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds." Or as Chaudhuri puts it in his moving obituary of Shankar in 2012, "desire and love on the one hand and music on the other were not entirely separate categories of experience for Shankar... Love, like music, entailed its own kind of demands and pain; and music, like love, was evidently a cause for constant rejuvenation."
The Mahabharata is an ancient text, endlessly re-birthed in new forms. Ravi Shankar's opera is just the latest in a long line of such reincarnations. Whether it manages to break the social snobbery associated with classical music and appeal to a wider audience remains to be seen.
-Anita Roy
