Ravi Shankar

He got married to his mentor Allauddin Khan's daughter, Annapurna Devi, in 1941. The couple had a son, Shubhendra Shankar, in 1942 and they got separated during the 1940s. He later had an affair with Kamala Shastri, a dancer.

He also had a relationship with Sue Jones, a New York concert producer, with whom he had a daughter, Norah, in 1979.

His second daughter Anoushka was born in 1981 with Sukanya Rajan. The couple got married in 1989.

Born in the city of Varanasi as Robindro Shankar Chowdhury, Pandit Ravi Shankar was the son of Shyam Shankar, a Middle Temple barrister and Sanskrit scholar, and Hemangini Devi. His father was a lawyer in England where he got married for a second time and saw his son only after he turned eight.

He visited Paris at the age of ten with his brother Uday Shankar and his dance group, ‘Compagnie de Danse et Musique Hindou’, and, within a few years, became a member of the group. During his association with this group, he mastered the art of dancing and also started playing several musical instruments with great finesse.

While touring all across Europe and America with his brother through the 1930s, he started imbibing elements of western music which he later incorporated in his fusion compositions.

Around this time, under the tutelage of Allauddin Khan, a prominent musician of that era who joined the group as a soloist, Ravi Shankar started to flourish as a musician. Later, on Khan’s insistence, he abandoned his brother’s group and joined him in Maihar (Madhya Pradesh, India) in 1938.

After moving to Maihar, he steeped himself solely into music and attained a great degree of virtuosity in Indian musical instruments, including sitar and surbahar. Here, he also received extensive training in ragas and Indian classical music styles including dhrupad, dhamar and khyal.

He performed publicly for the first time in 1939 in a Jugalbandi (duet) with Ali Akbar Khan and received great applause from the audience.

By 1944, his training under Allauddin Khan was over and he went to Mumbai seeking employment. Here, he started working at ‘Indian People's Theatre Association’ as a composer of music for ballet.

He also started recording for HMV India and joined the All India Radio as a music director, where he served from 1949 to 1956. Around this time, his composition for Satyajit Ray’s movie, ‘Appu Trilogy’, earned him great International accolades.

Internationally acclaimed violinist, Yehudi Menuhin asked Ravi Shankar to perform Indian classical music in New York City in 1955. However, owing to his personal problems, Pandit Shankar had to decline the offer.

Ali Akbar Khan performed in his stead and received immense applause from all quarters, which influenced Ravi Shankar to resign from AIR in 1956 and go on a musical tour to United Kingdom, Germany and USA.

While in London, he recorded his first LP album ‘Three Ragas’ in 1956 and, a couple of years, he was invited to perform at the tenth anniversary celebrations of the United Nations and UNESCO music festival in Paris.

1961 onwards he toured Europe, USA and Australia and—now known worldwide for his extraordinary musical acumen—was offered several opportunities to compose music for non-Indian films, the first Indian to do so. A year later, he established his Kinnara School of Music in Mumbai.

He was invited to perform at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the year he bagged a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance for West Meets East, in collaboration with Yehudi Menuhin. This year, his Kinnara School of Music went international and its first overseas branch was opened in Los Angeles, California.