Outside India, Shankar Fascinated Generations of Fans

Donal F. Holway/The New York TimesRavi Shankar, center, played during the Concert for Bangladesh in Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1971.

Ravi Shankar's career was followed closely in the pages of The New York Times for  more than 50 years. The classical Indian musician, who died on Tuesday at age 92, spent much of his adult life outside India, earning generations of fans in the United States and Europe, where he inspired musicians, sparked movements and won adulation.

“For nearly three decades, ever since his first tour of the United States and Europe in the 1956-57 season, Ravi Shankar has served as India's unofficial ambassador for music,” Donal Henahan wrote in September 1985, in a review of the New York Philharmonic's “Salute to the Festival of India.”

Mr. Shankar, with the assistance of a drummer (the tabla player Alla Rakha) and two droning stringed instruments, gave us a sample of the Grand Tradition. Leading off with what he described as an evening raga whose intent is to promote a mood of peace and purity, he played almost without pause for some 40 minutes, ending with a display of almost giddy virtuosity, in the form called the gat, that found him and Mr. Rakha trading breathtaking rhythmic riffs in ways that a jazz enthusiast could easily enjoy on his own, possibly misguided, terms.

Coverage of Mr. Shankar's performances didn't start out quite so positively. A  December 1956 review of a concert at the 92nd Street Young Men and Young Women's Hebrew Association in Manhattan begins, “Music is certainly not a universal language.”  (And the headline misidentifies the musician as “Rani Shankar.”) The author at first “felt like a very obtuse Westerner” who could never hope to “understand the subtleties of Hindu music,” but by the end of the performance was more appreciative â€" as was the audience, which “burst into cheers” at one point.

Mr. Shankar's involvement with the Beatles, and the Beatles' brief embrace of the spirituality he avowed, made him a subject of fascination in the West.

“Ravi Shankar has a flowing ebony mane, fine aquiline features and a smile that is the warmer and more luminous for the serious, almost melancholy, expression that seems habitual to him,” Charles Reid wrote in an extensive May 1967 profile of the musician and his influence, which examines everything from his dance-troupe past to the toll the sitar had taken on Mr. Shankar's “lumpily deformed” index finger.

Mr. Reid wrote that “the sense of mission is strong upon Shankar.  He burns to give Indian music to the world at large.  For the West especially he sees it as a respiritualizing force.” 

Of special interest was his loving relationship with “George Beatles,” as Mr. Shankar called George Harrison, a relationship whose origins were not so much mystical as  orchestrated by the music industry:

Using the instrument as he ordinarily uses the guitar, Harrison introduced an elementary sitar passage into “Norwegian Wood,” a Beatles number which came out in December, 1965. This put the sitar on the “pop” map overnight. Publicity men began to dream of a meeting be tween Harrison and Shankar, who was due in London shortly.

No matter how it began, their relationship blossomed into one of deep affection.  After having met “lots of Big People” as a Beatle, Mr. Harrison told Mr. Reid, “Ravi â€" Ravigi, as I call him - was the first person I met whom I really have a lot of respect for, the only one I could really believe in.”

By 1967, the popularity of Mr. Shankar's music had become intertwined with the hippie movement in the United States, somewhat to Mr. Shankar's chagrin. In an  article published in October of that year, Elenore Lester wrote that there was “no place for curiosity seekers or psychedelic voyagers” in a music course Mr. Shankar was teaching at the City College of New York. “A bit more than tuning-in and turning-on is required,” she wrote.

“I am hurt by the associa tion of drugs with our music,” she quotes Mr. Shankar as saying. “Our music is very pure. It is religion, the quickest way to reach God.”

In August 1976, Mr. Shankar marked the 20th anniversary of his first tour of the United States with a dusk-to-dawn performance at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and again the question of his music being corrupted by American influences came up.

Some complain that Indian music in America isn't the “pure thing” from India, Mr. Shankar told Robert Palmer. “Well,” he said, “this is going to be something like they do in India, and we will find out how many people can stand it.”  (Read the full article.)