The following extract has been excerpted with permission from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar(Faber & Faber, 2020) by Oliver Craske which released in India on July 29.
Late on Saturday 6 October 1956, Ravi descended the aircraft steps at London Airport after an interminable journey from Bombay. In his hand, wrapped in a double-layer bag of quilted silk and waterproof fabric, was his Kanai Lal sitar. It was too delicate and important to trust to the hold. When travelling by plane or train he liked to book an extra seat for the instrument under the name of ‘Mr Sitar’.
Normally the most resilient of travellers, Ravi arrived in a bad mood. The propeller-driven Lockheed Constellation had made stopovers in Cairo, Athens, Rome and Geneva, before reaching Paris after twenty-six hours, where he had to change planes for London. There had been delays in Paris, and poor service throughout the flight. He vowed never to travel TWA again. And he held no great affection for his destination – his memories of pre-war London were of a grimy, foggy, cold and depressing city in which Indians did not feel safe.
But this time the British capital lifted his spirits. He admired the cosmopolitan restaurants and the modernist architecture that had sprung up post-war. He noted the much improved air quality. ‘London is good and peaceful!’ he wrote home. ‘Really I give the first prize to this city for all the good points which a big city should have – and with a special ref to the wonderful system and discipline here!’ Thereafter, he often said that – weather apart – London was his favourite city in the world.
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Travelling with him was Chatur Lal. His young protégé would never quite attain the highest grade of tabla-players (tragically, he died young), but he was a real asset in popularising Indian music abroad. His natural exuberance was so infectious that, according to one critic, he looked ‘as though he might roll into a ball and bounce up to the ceiling any moment’. The same writer noted Ravi’s ‘elegant, refined beauty’; he and Chatur Lal made a handsome, effervescent duo. The prim, dependable Nodu Mullick, a brilliant craftsman who joined the tour to provide the tanpura drone and maintain Ravi’s sitar, followed four weeks later, once he had received his visa.
Oliver Craske
Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar
Faber & Faber, 2020
At Ravi’s debut recital, on 12 October at Friends House, the Quaker centre on Euston Road, he was introduced by his friend Yehudi Menuhin. But it was the audience at the second concert, five days later at the same venue, that gave the first inkling of the impact Ravi was making. Among those present was Krishna Menon, Nehru’s sharp-elbowed global spokesman, who was at that moment busy trying to defuse the Suez crisis. He had recently founded the India Arts Society, which was promoting this first pair of concerts. Several members of Britain’s classical music elite turned out, including Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, whom Ravi had met in Delhi the previous winter. It was Pears who introduced him from the stage this time. Also attending were Imogen Holst, now an artistic director at Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival, and George Lascelles, the 7th Earl of Harewood, along with his first wife, the pianist Marion Stein.
Of these, Lord Harewood was to prove the most important for Ravi’s early solo career in Britain. He was a first cousin of the Queen, and from a young age had demonstrated an ear for music uncommon in the British royal family. ‘It’s very odd about George and music,’ the Duke of Windsor once remarked of him. ‘His parents were quite normal.’ As a prisoner of war in Colditz, he had passed his time studying Grove’s Dictionary of Music, reaching as far as the letter T. In 1956 he was working as a senior administrator at the Royal Opera House, while also serving as president of the Aldeburgh Festival. He and Marion were close to Britten, who had invited them that evening at Friends House for their first taste of Indian music, which soon became ‘little short of a passion’, as Harewood put it. Ravi made friends with the Harewoods and became a regular visitor to their London home in Orme Square, where he gave private recitals. So, after his first pair of concerts in the UK, he already had the support of three of the most significant figures in British classical music: Yehudi Menuhin, Benjamin Britten and Lord Harewood.
One of the reasons Ravi was gaining followers was his understanding of how he should tailor his recitals to appeal to this new audience. His youthful experiences on stage had impressed on him the importance of showmanship and stagecraft. As he later said, ‘I realise the reason for success is not just art, but it is presentation – the look, the atmosphere you create, and the vibration you create – that is equally responsible for making a successful artist.’ In Britain, just as he had done in India, he aimed to establish a reverent atmosphere. Attention was paid to lighting, the musicians’ entrances and exits, their clothes, the carpet they sat on, the backdrop, the burning of incense. In larger venues (although not in private homes) he required that the musicians perform on a raised platform. He insisted on there being no eating, drinking or smoking while he was playing.
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In these initial tours abroad, he found it was much easier to foster concert decorum in his audiences than it had been in India, given the stronger tradition of formal concerts in the West. What these Europeans did need, however, was to be familiarised with Indian music and its customs. Confusion could arise, for instance, if Ravi shook his head while Chatur Lal was playing, or vice versa. Audiences often took this for a mark of reproach, when it in fact signified delight. Chatur Lal’s occasional use of a small hammer to strike the drumskin mid-recital was sometimes misconstrued, too; this is how a tabla-player adjusts the tuning, but one early reviewer even praised the syncopations created by his skillful use of the hammer. Soon, Ravi decided to avoid such misunderstandings by giving a short talk before each concert, explaining some fundamentals of Indian music and its performance rituals, demonstrating the instruments and introducing each chosen raga and tala. He was always conscious of the need to keep his remarks clear and concise. He asked his audience to relax, and to listen to him with their hearts rather than their heads.
In India Ravi’s recitals sometimes lasted for over five hours, but he knew that this would not work in Europe, so he aimed for the duration of a conventional Western classical concert, between two and two and a half hours. This set the pattern for most of his international career. In condensing his programme he drew on sixteen years’ experience of playing radio broadcasts in India, which typically lasted for under an hour. He also found that new audiences met with less of a cultural barrier when it came to appreciating the exhilarating drumming than they did with the sound of the sitar, so – as he had been doing in India – he gave the tabla a greater prominence than had traditionally been the case. There came a moment in most concerts when he put his sitar down and simply demonstrated the rhythmic cycle on his fingers while Chatur Lal played a solo.
On 7 November Ravi arrived at London’s Abbey Road Studios to record his first album. This was only the second time that Indian classical music had been recorded specifically for the LP format anywhere in the world – and it was almost six years before the Beatles famously set foot in the building.
Oliver Craske is a writer and editor from London. He worked with Ravi Shankar on his autobiography (Raga Mala, 1997).