INDIAN SUN

THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF RAVI SHANKAR

OLIVER CRASKE

Faber, 672pp, £20

As Ammar Kalia pointed out in the

Guardian, this epic ‘first authorised biography is the product of 25 years’ research and interviews’. And ‘what a life he lived’, said the Daily Mail’s Richard Pendlebury: ‘Shankar was brought up in straitened circumstances by his mother and only introduced to his father aged eight. By then he had suffered [repeated] rape at the hands of a man he described as “an uncle”.’

In the Times Richard Morrison wrote, ‘You learn about the six years he spent as a young man living like a monk in the house of his guru. He practised 12 hours a day until he was infused with the 72 parent scales of Indian classical music and 250 ragas. As he explained to George Harrison, there are no shortcuts to greatness on the sitar.

‘His private life also became a quest – that involved sexual relationships with hundreds of women... In three months in 1978, while still in a close relationship with