On Ravi Shankar's trail in Calcutta

Guest post by Oliver Craske

A little over a year ago, at a dinner organized by the Indian embassy in Spain, in honor of the 100th birth anniversary of legendary sitar player, Ravi Shankar, I sat at a table next to Oliver Craske, who had recently published a biography of the maestro, titled Indian Sun.

We only spoke for a short while. Because of the hubbub, conversation was difficult. It was harder for him, being soft spoken, than for me, since I am loud at the best of times. But I was struck by his gentle erudition and also the fact that he was married to a Bengali. It betrayed good taste!

In this week’s post, Craske talks about the cosmopolitan Ravi Shankar’s complicated relationship with his “home” state of Bengal. And in doing so, he gives us a taste of the rich cultural and intellectual life of Calcutta, Bengal’s capital. The city was also the capital of the British Raj until 1912 and has birthed an extraordinary number of artists ranging from the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, to the Oscar-winning cinema legend, Satyajit Ray, all of whom play cameos in Craske’s piece.

I hope you enjoy it. Please do leave a comment if you do, and share it widely. Becoming a paid subscriber of the Global Jigsaw is always highly recommended :-)

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In January I plan to return to Kolkata. My wife and I live in London, and over the past two decades I have tended to visit India at least every other year. This time nearly four years will have elapsed between trips, thanks to Covid outbreaks and lockdowns. It’s been too long. But in the meantime, I’ve been busy: my biography of Ravi Shankar, the sitarist and composer, was published.

Kolkata holds a particular fascination for me. It’s where my parents-in-law both moved after being uprooted by the partition of India in 1947, and where they met. It’s where my wife briefly lived as a small girl before migrating to the UK, and where she later returned for her childhood visits. These days it’s still the hub city for most of her relatives, even if they are increasingly dispersed around India or abroad. They give me the warmest of welcomes and spoil me with delicious Bengali fare in unfeasible portions. And I always feel that seeing my wife in Kolkata casts a clarifying light on her, on what has formed her.

I’m also intrigued by Ravi Shankar’s relationship with Kolkata and Bengal. That he valued his Bengali identity is seen most obviously in the Concert for Bangladesh . This was the fundraising concert he organized along with former Beatles guitarist George Harrison, that did so much to draw global attention to Bangladesh’s freedom struggle in 1971.

I’m sure that when I first met Ravi Shankar nearly 28 years ago it helped us to connect that I had a Bengali partner; in fact, one named after a raga, Shohini. Indeed, like Shohini, he was a prabasi Bengali (one living outside the motherland), for he was born and grew up in Varanasi (formerly known as Benaras).

But although he lived in several different cities across the decades, and many significant events of his earlier life happened in Kolkata, he never settled there. It became a place to work and to play, but not to live. There was a complexity to his relationship with Kolkata and Bengal, and it was to do with him being that prabasi, half-in, half-out.

From the start that relationship played out in the public eye. He first visited Calcutta, as it was then spelled, in May 1933, just after his thirteenth birthday. He was appearing at the New Empire Theatre as a dancer and musician in his brother Uday’s dance troupe, which had become an international sensation. There was such a fervour that a mob of people who had been unable to get tickets smashed windows at the promoter’s shop.

Rabindranath Tagore, the titan of Bengali culture, attended one of the troupe’s shows in the city and then invited them all to Shantiniketan, where the young Ravi was blessed by the great poet, hands on head, with the words ‘Be great like your father and your brother.’ An auspicious beginning.

On that trip to Shantiniketan, and again during a visit to his father’s ancestral town of Kalia in East Bengal, Shankar had his first encounter with rural Bengal. Years later he fondly recalled ‘the early morning light dancing in the waterlogged paddy field, green with young rice, and the yellowy-green light in the banana leaves’.

Later, in 1944, it was on Upper Chitpur Road that his most historic sitar was made, to his customised design, by Kanai Lal. After his career took off, he recorded about a dozen Bengali film soundtracks in the city, including the filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, and numerous albums at HMV India’s recording studios out in Dum Dum, in the east of the city.

After Pather Panchali was released, Ray actually encouraged Shankar to move to the city. There was much to be said for the idea. He was already in huge demand there, and for a long time Kolkata was North India’s greatest center of instrumental music, where artists’ earnings were at their highest.

 In the 1950s it was still India’s biggest city, and, as the one most shaped by its colonial history, it was a vibrant hybrid of Bengali and European culture. Ravi Shankar loved its passion for the arts. He loved the food too, especially the traditional Bengali dishes such as the vegetable curry, shukto, that his mother had raised him on.

In the early Sixties he did in fact rent a flat on Gariahat Road in the city’s south. But it only had one bedroom, he kept it for just a few years.  His main home remained elsewhere. Ravi Shankar was always dashing in and out and about.

For many Bengalis, this distance only increased his appeal. They prized him as one of their own but also noticed how different he seemed. He had all the talent and the dedication, but to these he added style, professionalism, charisma. He blew in from outside on a breeze of glamour.

As the Kolkatan sitar-player Partha Bose told me, “For the average Bengali, he represents the global Bengali and makes all Bengalis very proud, even if they don’t all listen to classical music. Here is someone who gives us a cultural identity in the world. Satyajit Ray and Ravi Shankar, these two – Bengalis consider them their prize possessions.”

However, other Bengalis I’ve spoken to express reservations. They have a sense that he was too careerist; they still tut about the controversies in his private life. He understood this himself. He knew that some Bengalis resented that his attention was never wholly on them – an experience not uncommon for the diaspora returning to the source.

The historian Ramachandra Guha, who is a big fan, has observed that, unlike Satyayjit Ray, Ravi Shankar did not become an icon of the elite bhadralok, the educated, cultured class of the Bengalis. “The undervaluation of Ravi Shankar in his native heath,” he argued, “is a consequence of his being too cosmopolitan, that is, not Bengali enough. From the beginning, he has chosen to be a citizen of India, and later, of the world.” 

This is seen most obviously in his own name. He was born Robindra Shankar, but when he first started playing on All India Radio in 1940, he gave his identity a linguistic tweak, adopting the Hindi name Ravi (short for Ravindra). It had the same meaning as the Bengali equivalent Robi (Robindra) – ‘the sun’ – but it turned him into a pan-Indian figure rather than a Bengali.

The shift made sense as Indian independence edged closer, and music embraced the nationwide format of broadcast radio for the first time. But, to some, his assuming the bigger identity implied a rejection of the narrower one.

Similarly, he preferred to live in Mumbai, Delhi, or Varanasi. But the sentimental role that Kolkata played in shaping him is evident from one episode in 1976. At a time when heart troubles were giving him intimations of mortality, Shankar arrived in the city sporting whiskers and spent a day touring incognito around landmarks that had meant a lot to him in earlier times, as if he feared never seeing them again.

This doesn't surprise me. As a biographer, I believe that one crucial way of understanding your subject is to visit places that were important to them. So, during my research on the maestro, as well as while carrying out scores of interviews, rummaging in dusty archives, listening to recordings and even taking Hindustani vocal lessons, I followed his trail around India.

In Kolkata, this led from that apartment block on Gariahat Road to Elgin Road, to Ballygunge Park Road, and to the addresses of other homes, hotels, studios or concert halls he had frequented. I wallowed too, bleary-eyed, in the all-night sessions of Indian classical music at Dover Lane Music Conference that continue today, as if defying the modern tyranny of busier lives and shorter attention spans.

And yet, as I trod in his footsteps, I realized that the places of greatest significance to Ravi Shankar tended to be outposts of Bengal outside Bengal: his birthplace in the Bengalitola district of Varanasi, which is in the state of Uttar Pradesh; his mother’s village in nearby Nasrathpur, also in UP, where her Bengali grandfather had owned such a large tract of land that locals had dubbed it ‘Bangla’; and Maihar, in the state of Madhya Pradesh.

In Maihar, I spent an unforgettably evocative night alone in the former home of Ravi Shankar’s guru, Allauddin Khan. Notably, Khan was another prabasi Bengali.

A thousand places may have formed Ravi Shankar, but some mattered more than others, and in these I felt closer to the source. And so, when we return to Kolkata this time, amidst the family visits, and in parallel with my wife’s own explorations of a place formative to her, I will try to make time to catch a film at the New Empire, perhaps, or to visit that house where Ravi Shankar rehearsed as a child dancer – to pick up his trail once more.

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Oliver Craske is an author, freelance editor and consultant.He has edited non-fiction books on music, art, photography, sport or heritage subjects, and is a former editorial director at Scala. Craske has had a longstanding interest in Indian music, which has included learning Indian vocal music.

Oliver Craske

He is the author of two books. Ravi Shankar’s biography, Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar which was published in 2020 by Faber & Faber (Hachette Books in the USA). The other, Rock Faces (Rotovision), is a survey of leading music photographers.

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Ciao for this week. A big hug to all from me.

Pallavi