Ravi Shankar

At the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan got on stage, and started tuning their instruments. When they’d finished, the audience started applauding, thinking that was the performance. Shankar said: “If you like our tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more.”

Shankar was never comfortable playing for hippies, as he hated their drug use:

“during certain periods, especially during the 1960s, Indian music incorrectly became synonymous with the use of drugs to alter one’s state of mind. This enraged me. In fact I would express this sentiment at the beginning of each of my concerts”

He also disliked playing at Woodstock for this reason. At the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, Shankar was upset to see Jimi Hendrix burn his guitar. This was sacrilege to Shankar, who follows “the traditional teaching that sound is God”, and music is a form of worship.

Robindra Shankar was born on April 7, 1920, in Benares, a city on the banks of the Ganges. Aged ten, he moved to Paris to join his brother’s dance group. As Life Magazine put it:

He dressed then in Bond Street suits and, he says, ‘was thoroughly spoiled’. Then he met Allaubdin Khan, a master sitarist, who challenged him to become his disciple. Shankar shaved off his hair, gave away his suits, and travelled to a tiny Indian village to study with the guru. For seven and a half years he practiced 12 hours a day until his fingers were torn and bloody from the wire strings. He became a virtuoso and eventually married the guru’s daughter.

Life also quotes him as saying ‘one lifetime is not enough to learn to play’, and claims that Shankar spent two years learning to hold the sitar properly.

Shankar hit fame in 1966 when he spent six weeks teaching George Harrison. Harrison had hoped to have lessons in secret, so checked into a hotel in Bombay under a false name, and grew a moustache. Still he was recognised, and a crowd gathered outside the hotel. He and Shankar retreated to a houseboat in Kashmir, where Harrison learned the basics of the sitar. News of Harrison’s lessons, and his decision to include sitar on some Beatles songs, brought Indian music to popular attention, and made Shannkar a star.

In 1971, he used this fame to raise funds for Bangladeshi refugees, co-organising the Concert for Bangladesh with George Harrison. 

Shankar was Oscar nominated for his soundtrack to Gandhi in 1982, has won three Grammys, was given an honoury CBE in 2001, and served for six years in the Indian upper house of parliament. Now aged 91, he is still performing.

What to hear: Three Ragas, The Sounds of India, In London and his Philip Glass collaboration, Passages

Why: In terms of technical ability, Shankar may well be the best musician in the world.