Ravi Shankar

Oliver Craske

The world's leading sitar player and elder statesman of Indian culture, Ravi Shankar spent his teenage years as a dancer in the glamorous world of 1930s Paris and New York. After studying in India with classical Hindustani music master Allauddin Khan, Ravi's early career culminated in a successful tour of Soviet Russia in 1954 with the huge, prestigious first cultural delegation sent by Jawaharlal Nehru.

The Autobiography of Ravi Shankar

Raga Mala

A Times, Spectator, TLS and BBC Music Magazine Book of the Year Over eight decades, Ravi Shankar was India's greatest cultural ambassador who took Indian classical music to the world's leading concert halls and festivals, charting the map for those who followed. Renowned for his association with The Beatles - teaching George Harrison sitar - Shankar turning the Sixties generation on to Indian music, astonishing the crowds at Woodstock, Monterey Pop and the Concert for Bangladesh with his virtuosity. He radically reshaped jazz and Western classical music as well as writing film scores, including Pather Panchali and Gandhi, and transformed awareness of Indian culture in the process. Indian Sun is the first biography of Ravi Shankar. Benefitting from unprecedented access to family archives, Oliver Craske paints a vivid picture of a captivating, restless workaholic, who lived a passionate and extraordinary life - from his childhood in his brother's dance troupe, through intensive study of the sitar, to his revival of the national music scene; and from the 1950s, a pioneering international career that ultimately made his name synonymous with India.

Oliver Craske

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