KOLKATA: Ravi Shankar was an established name in Indian music - on stage, screen and public broadcasting - when he began collaborating with peers in Western classical music. It began in 1952 when Yehudi Menuhin came to raise money for famine relief. Nehru invited the socially conscious violinist to a reception where Ravi Shankar, then popularising through Jhankar Music Circle - set up by the Shrirams in New Delhi - and composing for AIR, played for him.
Although Ravi Shankar had travelled extensively with Uday Shankar dance troupe, he had not played independently nor been to the US. Taken aback by the technical brilliance and improvisational aspect of Indian music, Menuhin started telling the Europeans about it. He invited Panditji for demonstration concerts and recorded them for posterity. That started a series which changed the face of classical music, in the East and West, giving birth to a genre we know as World Music.
"Violinist Menuhin and flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, two of his early and lifelong collaborators, wrought a monumental change in the basis and range of global art music," Philip Glass later wrote. The American composer "had the great fortune" to work as Panditji's assistant in Paris of 1960s, when he was scoring for Conrad Rook's Chappaqua. "I found he had a practical knowledge of Western instruments. And though I was in charge of transcribing his music into Western notation for the French Chamber Orchestra, the actual orchestration was completed by Ravi himself," he wrote in the foreword to the maestro's autobiography, My Music My Life.
Ravi Shankar's encounters with Western Music proved to be a two-way street. While he gained from the discipline of notating, he joyfully shared the breadth and depth of his tradition with those outside it. And, in the process, he gave Indian musical tradition what it lacked: a theoretical understanding of ideas and concepts of its history that our gurus - being practitioners raised strictly within the oral tradition of gharanas - never needed.
Ravi Shankar's impact was more than musical - it was cultural, even spiritual. "Even before 1952, Western elite were aware of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. In the 1960s, with the Beatles, the influence percolated to popular level," writes Peter Lavezzoli in Bhairavi: The Global Impact of Indian Music. It is hard to overstate the significance of George Harrison composing songs based on khayal, bhajan, Carnatic songs, playing sitar or travelling to Haridwar. If people also readily took to yoga, it was perhaps because they were seeking alternatives to Judeo-Christian philosophy.
"To the Indian quality of serenity, Ravi Shankar brought an exalted personal expression of union with the infinite," Yehudi Menuhin once said to TOI. "Few modern composers in the West achieve this although we revere it in Bach, Beethoven or Mozart." Ravi Shankar filled the void when he crafted a synthesis of eastern and western expressions - of immediacy and spontaneity with intuitive and eternal truth.
If this penchant for improvisation proved a gain for rock and jazz, it also opened Indian music to new concepts and took it to new heights.
Stringing East andnd West with music
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