Ravi Shankar Taught Sitar to Beatles Guitarist George Harrison

Have you heard about Sitar?

Sitar is an Indian-origin musical instrument. It is a plucked stringed instrument.

Sitar is mainly played in the Indian Hindustani classical style, although Sitar is frequently used in film music and modern musicals.

Sitar contains four major strings and many metal curved frets upon which the strings are pressed with a finger o of one hand (say the left hand), and the corresponding string is plucked by fingers of the other hand (the right hand).

• There are many sympathetic strings below the major strings. The sympathetic strings are tuned as per a particular Raga.

• The main body of a Sitar is made up of seasoned teak wood and calabash gourds for the resonating chambers.

In the modern age, people sometimes attach a microphone to the Sitar producing loud sounds similar to the electric guitars.

Pandit Ravi Shankar popularized Sitar in the world music arena.

Pandit Ravi Shankar, a legendary musician, composer, and teacher of Sitar, introduced Sitar to the world.

• Pandit Ravi Shankar was born in a Hindu family in Bengal, India. He learned dancing and was a performing dancer in his elder brother Uday Shankar's dance group.

• Ravi-ji learned to play Sitar from the great musician Alauddin Khan in the 1940s. He composed music for several movies, including "Pather Panchali" and two other films of the Apu Trilogy, directed by famous filmmaker Satyajit Ray. He was also an artist at All India Radio (Akaash Vani) during 1949 - 1956.

Then Ravi Shankar started touring Europe and the Americas, and other countries of the world. Ravi-ji brought Sitar to the global music scene through his visits, performances, and collaborations with western classical musicians, including violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Beatles guitarist George Harrison learned Sitar from Ravi Shankar.

There is a historic film recorded in 1968 showing Pandit Ravi Shankar teaching Beatles guitarist George Harrison on the bank of the river Ganga (Ganges) in Hrishikesh, India.

• The referred personal documentary film portraying Ravi-ji teaching George must have been recorded using color films that were not cheap in the 1960s. In the 1960s, many commercial movies in India used to be shot using black and white films!

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Postscript

I was fortunate to attend several of Pandit Ravi Shankar's Sitar recitals in the 1980s and early 1990s in Kolkata, Mumbai, and Pune.

• During 1996 - 2007, we lived in Dehradun, a town in the Himalayan valley of northern India. We used to visit Hrishikesh almost every month. Dehradun to Hrishikesh is only about 90 minute journey by road.

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Mar 28, 2023