'The Godfather of World Music' Ravi Shankar Exhibit at South Asia Institute

by Suzanne Hanney

Ravi Shankar was depicted in Playboy Magazine’s All-Star band in 1968, seated on a carpet, his 4-foot-long sitar balanced at a 45-degree angle on his lap. Alongside him on this musical fantasy team were The Beatles; vocalists Frank Sinatra and Petula Clark; pianist Dave Brubeck; drummer Buddy Rich; Herb Alpert, Al Hirt, Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong on the trumpet. Shankar made the cut in 1969 and 1970 too.

Shankar is the bridge between Eastern and Western music, according to “Ravi Shankar: Ragamala to Rockstar,” an exhibition of photography, video, films, poster art and ephemera through March 5 at Chicago’s South Asia Institute.

George Harrison called Shankar “the godfather of world music,” and his association with The Beatles catapulted him even more into the rockstar superstar stratosphere, said Brian Keigher, exhibit cocurator.

“He definitely was a changemaker, the right person at the right time,” said Grammy-nominated sitarist Gaurav Mazumdar, exhibit co-curator. The reason was Shankar’s childhood exposure to the West as a dancer and musician in his brother Uday Shankar’s troupe.

Born in 1920 in the northern India city of Varanasi, Shankar moved to Paris in 1930. He went to school there and traveled around Europe, the U.S. and Asia with the troupe. He spoke fluent French and English and understood Western audiences and musicians. He knew that the standard three-hour sitar raga wouldn’t work for them, that it had to be packaged differently, Mazumdar said.

In 1938, Shankar returned to India to study with master sitarist Baba Ustad Allauddin Khan. From 1949 into the mid-1950s, he was the director of music at All India Radio. He traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and the U.S. twice in the 1960s.

Educated, articulate and handsome, as shown in exhibit portraits by photographers Francesco Scavullo and Yousuf Karsh, Shankar could explain Indian music on popular ’60s television programs like the Smothers Brothers, (pictured in the exhibit), or on the Dick Cavett and Mike Douglas talk shows. The exposure brought Indian music to millions of people in an era before cable TV, when there were only three television stations nationwide, Keigher said.

Shankar was right person for the role because he handled it beautifully, Mazumdar said. “He could have been swayed away with the hippie movement and the drugs. He did none of that. He preached, ‘No drugs, let this music take you on a high.’ He stayed true to his tradition and to his music and his guru to the very end.”

Harrison first noticed the sitar in April 1965 during filming of “Help!,” which had a sequence with Indian musicians in an Indian restaurant in London. He began playing several months later, after David Crosby of The Byrds, who was on a United Kingdom tour, gave him a Shankar album. Harrison turned to the sitar when John Lennon’s song “Norwegian Wood,” needed a little something more.

What sound would the sitar contribute?

With a range of 3½ octaves, the sitar has four melodic strings that provide the overriding notes, whether low, medium or high, Mazumdar said. According to Wikipedia and Brittanica.com, fingering the melodic strings will activate up to 13 “sympathetic strings” that can be tuned to the same notes, an octave higher or lower, to create what some have called a “halo of sound.” Similar to Scottish bagpipes, drone strings add a background tone. According to Mazumdar, the base of the sitar, which is a dried, pumpkin-like gourd, gives resonance that wood would not.

In August 1966, Harrison went to India to study with Shankar for six weeks. He returned, more accomplished on the instrument, to write “Within You Without You” on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in 1967.

According to Mazumdar, who studied with Shankar from 1987 until the maestro's death in 2012, Harrison only understood why he was born after he met Shankar. “George was very deep person, conscious of, ‘What am I contributing, what am I leaving behind?’”

Shankar was generous with his music, giving it to anyone who wanted to learn it, said Mazumdar, who lived and studied in Shankar’s home for a time. More important than Shankar’s five Grammys was his music, “which had a meditative quality about it, a healing effect on people.”

A serious musician with a calm aura, Shankar was nevertheless lighthearted and playful in many ways, Keigher said. “He gave you all his attention when he talked to you.”

The exhibit's concert posters and albums from 1967 onward convey an optimistic and outgoing world view that seems like a distant memory now. Shankar premiered his concerto for the sitar with Andre Previn of the London Symphony Orchestra and won a Grammy for a duet album, “West Meets East,” with violinist Yehudi Menuhin. He was a hit at the Monterey Pop Music Festival in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969.

“It seemed totally natural and appropriate that this eastern spiritual music should be played at this festival celebrating the coming of the Aquarian Age, the beginning of a new time where East meets West… in terms of spirituality, which is the essence of this type of music vs. the assertive energetic connection of the Western ways of being,” said photographer Elliott Landy in exhibit material about Shankar at Woodstock.

Shankar was the only rock musician of the period to play Monterrey, Woodstock, and the two Concerts for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden in 1971, which Harrison helped organize at his behest. Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Leon Russell and Billy Preston played for free in this benefit for East Asian refugees of civil war, flooding and famine. It was a model for Live Aid.

Keigher met Shankar in the early ’90s and has since acted as an archivist for his family. Shankar first played Chicago’s Symphony Center at 13 with his brother’s troupe and could recall the cold winter walk from the Congress Plaza Hotel and later, Studs Terkel. He last played Symphony Center in 2010 with his daughter, Anoushka.

“Ragamala to Rockstar” began as a centennial retrospective of Shankar LPs at Symphony Center, but was delayed because of the pandemic, Keigher said.

Keigher started the annual Ragamala classical Indian music celebration as part of the World Music Festival for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, for which he also programmed Millennium Park and Chicago Cultural Center events. He is artistic director for the World Music Institute in New York and co-founder and co-curator of the Boston University Global Music Festival. Keigher asked Mazumdar to co-curate "Ragamala to Rockstar" with him and Mazumdar made the introduction to the South Asia Institute.

The South Asia Institute is important to Chicago because its focus is multidisciplinary arts from the region, Keigher said. Besides the collection developed by physicians Afzal and Shireen Ahmad over 50 years, the institute will offer a residential studio and art space.

South Asians are often misinterpreted – exoticized or demonized – the result of not communicating enough. That’s why the South Asia Institute is important to Chicago -- and why “Ragamala to Rockstar” fits their mission, Shireen Ahmad said.

“Ravi Shankar was bridge-building just like we are trying to do, but he was doing it decades ago.”

Exhibit programming includes: January 29, 4 p.m., screening of concert film, “Tenth Decade: Live in Escondido” February 19, 4 p.m., conversation with Oliver Craske, who wrote “Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar,” his first full biography, and who edited the new book on The Beatles, “Get Back.” February 26, 4 p.m., screening of concert film, “Ravi and Anoushka Shankar Live in Bangalore.” The South Asia Institute is at 1925 S. Michigan Ave., (312)929-3911. www.saichicago.org.