Thinkers Timeline

Ravi Shankar was an Indian musician. He played the sitar, a long-necked string instrument from northern India. He is the most famous Indian classical musician of the 20th century. He was born in 1920 in the city of Varanasi (also called Banaras), in northern India. He came from a Bengali Brahmin family. His father was a lawyer and scholar who left the family when Ravi was young. His older brother Uday Shankar was a famous dancer who toured the world with an Indian dance company. As a boy, Ravi joined his brother's troupe. He travelled across Europe and America as a young dancer and musician. He met many Western artists in this period. At 18, he made a serious decision. He left his brother's company and went to study music seriously with a great teacher named Allauddin Khan in central India. He spent seven years in Khan's home, training intensively in the strict Indian classical tradition. This kind of long apprenticeship was traditional. The teacher was almost a parent. Ravi later married Khan's daughter, Annapurna Devi, who was also a brilliant musician. From the 1950s onwards, his career grew rapidly. He performed across India, then in Europe and America. In the 1960s he became famous in the West, partly because of his friendship with George Harrison of the Beatles. He continued performing into his nineties. He had a complex personal life, with several partners and four children, including the musicians Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones. He died in San Diego in 2012, aged 92.