Ambassadors of the raga: Indian classical music in the West

The story of Indian classical music in the West has many beginnings, and one of them is a boy of ten arriving in Paris. In 1930 Ravi Shankar left India to join his elder brother, the dancer Uday Shankar, whose company was presenting Indian performing arts to European audiences. The boy toured with the company. Five years later a teacher from Maihar joined the troupe for a year, and the boy's life turned towards the sitar.

In the first article of this series, I promised to follow the people who carried this art onto a world stage. The third article named Ravi Shankar and Vilayat Khan as the two schools of the modern sitar. This sixth article tells the story they belong to. It runs from a dance company in Paris to a concert in New York and a Quaker hall in London. Then come three big stages in America and a recital at the United Nations. It ends with the teachers who stayed, and the students who carry the music today.

A dance company in Paris

Uday Shankar's company

Banglapedia, the national encyclopaedia of Bangladesh, records that the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova engaged Uday Shankar to create two dance items with Hindu themes. With the cooperation of Alice Bonner, he then established a company of dance and music in Paris.

From 1930 to 1942, Banglapedia records, his troupe gave 889 performances across Europe. In 1939 he opened the Shankar India Cultural Centre at Almora, in the Himalayan foothills, with Allauddin Khan as its music teacher. The centre closed after four years for lack of funds. By then a European public had seen Indian dance and heard Indian music, in their own theatres, for more than a decade.

A boy and his teacher

The Japan Art Association, which gave Ravi Shankar its Praemium Imperiale for music in 1997, sets out his early years. At ten, in 1930, he moved to Paris and joined his brother in introducing Indian performing culture to the West. In 1935 Allauddin Khan of Maihar joined the troupe for a year. Our page on the Maihar gharana tells the story of that school.

The Japan Art Association marks that year as the start of Allauddin Khan's influence on him. The same teacher trained his own son, Ali Akbar Khan, from the age of three, as the Ali Akbar College of Music records. So Ali Akbar Khan learned from his father at home. Ravi Shankar met the same teacher on tour.

New York and London

A sarod in New York

Ali Akbar Khan gave his first public performance in 1936, at Allahabad. Two decades later the violinist Yehudi Menuhin brought him west. The Ali Akbar College of Music records that it was at Menuhin's request that Ali Akbar Khan left India in 1955 to visit Europe and the United States.

In New York he gave a concert at the Museum of Modern Art. He also played on Alistair Cooke's television programme Omnibus, which the college describes as the first television performance of Indian music. Menuhin asked him to record for Angel Records, and the result was the LP Music of India: Morning and Evening Ragas. In Menuhin's words, as the college quotes them, Ali Akbar Khan was "an absolute genius".

The sarod

The instrument itself was new to most Western listeners. The Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin classifies the sarod as a plucked, fretless, skin-bellied lute, and the ethnomusicologist Adrian McNeil traces its immediate precursor to the Afghan rabab. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a sarod made in Varanasi around 1850. Our sarod page describes the instrument as KalaSudha builds and services it today, with the makers who work with us.

A sitar in London

A year later, Ravi Shankar played London. Oliver Craske, who later wrote Ravi Shankar's biography, reviewed Peter Lavezzoli's book The Dawn of Indian Music in the West in 2006. In Craske's account, Shankar's first solo concert in the West took place in London, at the headquarters of the Quaker movement. The review marks its fiftieth anniversary in 2006, which dates the concert to 1956. Shankar's tours as a solo sitarist across Europe, Canada and the United States followed.

Menuhin stayed close. With Ravi Shankar he recorded West Meets East, which won the Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance at the 10th Grammy Awards. The Japan Art Association quotes Menuhin's tribute. "Ravi Shankar has brought me a precious gift and through him I have added a new dimension to my experience of music." Shankar's own instrument, the sitar, is described on our instrument page.

The festival years

Monterey and Woodstock

The Japan Art Association names three stages in his career: the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the Woodstock Festival of 1969 and the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971.

These were rock audiences, a long way from the music conferences of India. George Harrison called Ravi Shankar "the Godfather of World Music", in words the Japan Art Association quotes. A raga keeps its own order on any stage: the alap first, the slow unfolding of the notes, and the tabla only when the composition begins.

One stage in 1971

The Concert for Bangladesh, held at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1971, brought the two students of Allauddin Khan onto one stage. The Ali Akbar College of Music records that Ali Akbar Khan played there with Ravi Shankar, Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty.

Alla Rakha played the tabla. His son, Zakir Hussain, carried the drum into the next generation. The National Endowment for the Arts records that Zakir Hussain made his American debut with Ravi Shankar at the Fillmore East in New York. The next article follows his later work.

The South abroad

A recital for the United Nations

Carnatic music took its own road west. On 23 October 1966, at the celebration of United Nations Day, M. S. Subbulakshmi gave a recital of Indian songs in New York. The United Nations' own photo record describes her as "one of India's most eminent musicians".

Subbulakshmi (1916 to 2004) was a Carnatic vocalist, a singer of the South Indian tradition that Part 2 set beside the Hindustani. You can read more about the Carnatic vocal tradition on our discipline page.

Carnatic music at Wesleyan

The South also sent teachers. The National Endowment for the Arts, which made T. Viswanathan a National Heritage Fellow in 1992, describes his background as "a family of illustrious Karnatic musicians and dancers". He played the kuzhal, a bamboo flute of seven or eight holes. His grandmother was Veena Dhanammal, one of the finest vina players of the century in the NEA's words, and his sister was the Bharatanatyam dancer T. Balasaraswati.

He settled in the United States in 1966 and worked as a performer and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, the California Institute of the Arts and Wesleyan University. His kuzhal belongs with the Carnatic flute.

Teachers and heirs

A college in California

The Ali Akbar College of Music records that Ali Akbar Khan founded the college in 1967, and that the following year it moved to Marin County, California. He had already founded a college of the same name in Calcutta in 1956, and he opened another in Basel, Switzerland, in 1985.

A school abroad carried the guru-shishya bond of the first article into a new country. A teacher sat with students in one room and passed the music on. The Maihar gharana of Allauddin Khan now had a home in California and another in Switzerland.

The road back to India

The next generation of Western musicians went to India to learn, and then brought the music home. Dr Sam Evans, an Australian tabla player, composer and educator in Melbourne, studied for a decade with Anindo Chatterjee in Kolkata and with Zakir Hussain in America. He is the founding director of the Melbourne Tabla School and holds a PhD from Monash University.

For more than twelve years he directed the Monash University World Music Orchestra, work documented in the Oxford Handbook of Music Education. He also set up a pathway for students to study the tabla at secondary and university level in Australia.

What these journeys opened

Listeners

The journeys in this article share one pattern. A musician travelled, a listener in the West heard something new, and a recording or a school kept the sound after the tour ended. Menuhin's request brought the LP Music of India: Morning and Evening Ragas. Ali Akbar Khan's tour led to a college. T. Viswanathan's move led to a teaching career at Wesleyan.

KalaSudha works the same pattern today. We sign established, full-time Indian classical artists and act as their promoter: we present them in our concerts, release their work worldwide and promote them on our channels. When an artist travels to perform with us, we prepare the visa paperwork. As a label, we record in the studio and live in concert. You can hear recordings by the artists we work with on our page about where to listen to Indian classical music.

London today

London, where Ravi Shankar gave that Quaker-hall concert, is home to KalaSudha and to several of the artists we present. Satwinder Pal Singh, a London-based sarangi player from Moga, in Punjab, learned from his father, Shaminder Pal Singh, a Top Grade artist of All India Radio. In 2012 he studied with Sabri Khan in Delhi, and he also trained under Ram Narayan and Harsh Narayan. He plays the saranda, the israj, the dilruba and the taus.

His sarangi is heard on soundtracks including the Netflix series CAT, and he has performed in India, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. KalaSudha presents concerts in the UK, Europe and India. KalaSudha's concert series in London takes place in the city of that 1956 debut.

In the final article, I will ask what this music sounds like now: on new instruments, and in classrooms that span continents.