RAVI SHANKAR: BEHIND THE MUSIC
A no-holds-barred account of Pandit Ravi Shankar’s incredible career and tumultuous private life
This is a meticulously researched biography— detailed, judicious, engaging and illuminating. Not since Marie Seton’s Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray (1971), has anything comparable been attempted for a major contemporary Indian cultural figure. Oliver Craske has worked hard for many years and trawled the public records of Ravi Shankar, who died in 2012, across many continents and in India. His project had the unqualified support of Shankar’s second wife Sukanya and his daughter Anoushka who opened the family archives and encouraged a no-holds-barred account. Shankar’s trailblazing public career and his tumultuous private life fit into a pattern. As biographical accounts of Arturo Toscanini and Leonard Bernstein—comparable figures from EuroAmerican cultures—show, creative freedom and sexual drive often stood in for each other, generating the restless persona that was the modern artist.
Craske is particularly good on two counts—the connections between Shankar’s public career and India’s emergence as an independent nation are convincingly made. Shankar’s American sojourns are also recounted in detail, for here the archival record is strong, thanks to the patronage networks, funding agencies, Hollywood contacts and mercurial patrons,
New York elites, jazz musicians, impresarios, record producers. Yehudi Menuhin is a significant figure—a devoted admirer who fell in love with Hindustani music and also yoga.
Early in his career, Shankar resigned from a stable All India Radio job and took the risk of striking out in the US and set a precedent for generations of Indian artists.
The initial forays were mixed, but he made life-long friends, cut his first L.P. and had an affair with the photographer Marilyn
Silverstone (many other lovers followed). Craske unearths an interesting nugget—Shankar’s initial trip was underwritten by the CIA, covertly influencing culture in the Cold War era, though the musician himself had no idea about the source of funds. The prestige of success in the US added to his fame in India.
Delhi, Calcutta and especially Bombay remained crucial for opportunities in India. The Indian People’s Theatre Association in the 1940s and the film industry helped hone his talents as a composer of popular melodies and develop the potential of an Indian orchestra. In the 1950s, the cultural sphere expanded dramatically but took a conservative Hindu turn. In his Bengali autobiography, Shankar briefly mentioned the tussle with Muslim musicians. To Shankar’s credit, he never plugged into this communitarian discourse, but being a Brahmin must have helped his career.
Shankar’s break-up with his talented wife Annapurna and her withdrawal from public life have long been grist to rumour mills. Here, too, Craske is careful and judicious, though one episode in this tussle, verging on low comedy, was Shankar’s attempt to prove Annapurna’s infidelity! She, in turn, had the police raid his flat while he was abroad. His relationship with father-in-law and teacher Allauddin Khan, too, deteriorated. The failed marriage was used endlessly by rivals to showcase his bad faith, but there were other attempts to sully his reputation. The famous incident where Vilayat Khan ‘defeated’ Shankar in a joint concert is recounted with equanimity here and is certainly more convincing than the sensational one in a recent biography of Khan. Shankar’s spectacular success meant other musicians, critics, even ex-students, bitterly resented his fame. The last such episode was a gratuitous remark by a friend, vocalist Pt Jasraj, on Shankar receiving the Bharat Ratna in 1999. Shankar publicly forgave him.
Craske is accessible and patient with explanations about Shankar’s music, though details about his impact on pop and the avant garde scene in the US may tire Indian readers. The focus is overwhelmingly on ensemble and collaborative efforts—Shankar’s stellar contribution to the sonic, aesthetic and stylistic system within Hindustani music could have been addressed in a more connected way. Shankar and talented contemporary instrumentalists did certainly reverse the superior status of vocalism in Hindustani music—no mean achievement. His Maihar style also gave life to traditional dhrupad which had faded as a vocal genre. The sound of Shankar’s sitar—especially the deep growl of the bass string—generated a new subjectivity and his superb compositional skills added a unique temporal dimension. According to music critic S. Kalidas, he had justly inherited a legendary status similar to Tansen’s.
The book makes strong connections between Ravi Shankar’s career and the emergence of an independent India
—Sunil Sethi
When she died at the ripe old age of 90 in 2009, Gayatri Devi, the Rajmata of Jaipur, the city to which she had come as an awestruck bride 70 years earlier came to a standstill. Amid showers of rose petals, cries of “Maharani ki jai!”, a 40-gun salute and the panoply of a state funeral, thousands of mourners thronged the Pink City. Newspapers around the world ran fulsome tributes. Neither Rajput-born nor fluent in Hindi, an audacious rule-breaker, why did she triumph in a kingdom that had barely changed since medieval times?
Hers is the image—as style-maker, royal jetsetter and most glamorous of MPs flung into jail by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency—that captures the precarious transition from India’s princely Jazz Age to the upheavals of modern democracy. A hand-tinted portrait adorns the cover of John Zubrzycki’s book, The House of Jaipur, but inside is a sobering 20th century saga more twisted than the secret passageways behind Hawa Mahal’s lacy façade.
In her bestselling 1977 memoir A Princess Remembers, the Rajmata told a rose-tinted tale of the teenage passion that propelled her from Cooch Behar’s royal household to Rambagh Palace as the third wife of the handsome polo-playing Maharaja of Jaipur. (Already a father of four, his two previous wives were sequestered in Rambagh’s purdah wing.)
Together, Jai and Ayesha (as their friends knew them) turned Jaipur into a modernising project: appointing reformist administrators, starting girls’ schools, negotiating political settlements and, presciently, converting their palaces into grand hotels. As party people, their social cachet was considerable. It irritated officialdom no end that the Queen and Prince Philip, the Mountbattens and Jackie Kennedy (and later Imran Khan and Mick Jagger) bore down on Jaipur for their company. In 1966, they were the only Indians invited to Truman Capote’s iconic Black and White Ball. Ignoring the dress code, Ayesha arrived in a gold sari and blaze of emeralds.
Yet they remained anachronisms of their age. Asked how she dealt with her husband’s senior wives and adulteries, the Rajmata said, “I think it’s much easier to get on with your husband’s other wife who has an official status than his mistress who is usurping you.”
By removing layers of “airbrushed inconvenient truths” from her sanitised memoir, Zubrzycki’s assiduouslyresearched, gripping account is of a troubled family wrecked by alcoholism, avarice and labyrinthine litigation among brothers and heirs. Ayesha’s father and two adored brothers perished from drink. So did Jai’s only daughter and his neglected purdah wives. Most tragically, their only biological son Jagat, divorced from his wife, a Thai princess, and estranged from his children, died in London after a reckless binge in 1997.
Claims of primogeniture by Jai’s eldest son Bhawani Singh led to a landslide of lawsuits. Though the Rajmata anonymously left some of her best Cartier pieces to the British Museum, her grandchildren enforced their rights of inheritance to her property.
The fight in the courts failed to dim the razzmatazz of Jaipur’s old court. Bhawani died in 2011, leaving a new rajmata in City Palace. His daughter Diya Kumari is now a BJP MP. And his grandson, 22-year-old Padmanabh Singh, is the new maharaja. He plays polo in England, waltzes Reese Witherspoon’s daughter at debutante balls in Paris, and walks the runway for Dolce & Gabbana in Milan. Brand Jaipur, a creation of Ayesha and Jai’s, marches on.